World Revolutions

Description

Christopher Chase-Dunn:

"Rebellions often clustered together in time, forming what have been called ‘world revolutions’ (Arrighi et al. 1989).

• The Protestant Reformation in Europe was an early instance that played a huge role in the rise of the Dutch hegemony.

• The French Revolution of 1789 was linked in time with the American and Haitian revolts.

• The 1848 rebellion in Europe was both synchronous with the Taiping Rebellion in China and was linked with it by the diffusion of ideas, as it was also linked with the emergent Christian Sects in the United States.

• Nineteen seventeen was the year of the Bolsheviks in Russia, but also the same decade saw the Chinese Nationalist revolt, the Mexican Revolution, the Arab Revolt and the General Strike in Seattle led by the Industrial Workers of the World in the United States.

• Nineteen sixty-eight was a revolt of students in the U.S., Europe, Latin America as well as Red Guards in China.

• Nineteen eighty-nine was mainly in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but important lessons about the value of civil rights beyond justification for capitalist democracy were learned by an emergent global civil society (Kaldor 2003).

• The current world revolution of ‘20xx’ (Chase-Dunn and Niemeyer 2009) will be discussed as a contemporary instance of global struggle.

The big idea here is that the evolution of capitalism and of global governance is importantly a response to resistance and rebellions from below.

This has been true in the past and is likely to continue to be true in the future. Boswell and Chase-Dunn (2000) contend that capitalism and socialism have dialectically interacted with one another in a positive feedback loop similar to a spiral. Labor and socialist movements were obviously a reaction to capitalist industrialization. U.S. hegemony and the post-World War II global institutions were importantly spurred on by the World Revolution of 1917 and the waves of decolonization."

(http://www.sociostudies.org/books/files/globalistics_and_globalization_studies_2/036-055.pdf)