Time Horizons of World Systems Analysis

Discussion

Christopher Chase-Dunn:

"Time Horizons So what does the comparative and evolutionary world-systems perspective tell us about continuities and transformations of systemic logic? And what can be said about the financial meltdown of 2008 and the contemporary world revolution from the long-run perspective? Are recent developments just another bout of financial expansion and collapse and hegemonic decline? Or do they constitute or portend a deep structural crisis in the capitalist mode of accumulation? What do recent events signify about the evolution of capitalism and its possible transformation into a different mode of accumulation?

50,000 Years

From the perspective of the last 50,000 years the big news is demographic and ecological. After slowly expanding, with cyclical ups and downs in particular regions, for millennia the human population went into a steep upward surge in the last two centuries. Humans have been degrading the environment locally and regionally since they began the intensive use of natural resources. But in the last 200 years of industrial production ecological degradation by means of resource depletion and pollution has become global in scope, with global warming as the biggest consequence. A demographic transition to an equilibrium population size began in the industrialized core countries in the nineteenth century and has spread unevenly to the non-core in the twentieth century. Public health measures have lowered the mortality rate and the education and employment of women outside of the home is lowering the fertility rate. But the total number of humans is likely to keep increasing for several more decades. In the year 2000 there were about six billion humans on Earth. But the time the population stops climbing it will be 8, 10 or 12 billion. This population big bang was made possible by industrialization and the vastly expanded use of non-renewable fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are captured ancient sunlight that took millions of years to accrete as plants and forests grew, died and were compressed into oil and coal. The arrival of peak oil production is near and energy prices are likely to rise again after a long fall. The financial meltdown of 2008 was related to these long-run changes in the sense that it was brought about partly by sectors of the global elite trying to protect their privileges and wealth by seeking greater control over natural resources and by over-expanding the financial sector. But non-elites are also implicated. The housing expansion, suburbanization, and larger houses with fewer people in them have been important mechanisms, especially in the United States, for incorporating some of the nonelites into the hegemonic globalization project of corporate capitalism. The culture of consumerism has become strongly ensconced both for those who actually have expanded consumption and as a strong aspiration for those who hope to increase their consumption to the levels of the core.

5,000 Years

The main significance of the 5,000-year time horizon is to point us to the rise and decline of modes of accumulation. The story here is that small-scale human polities were integrated primarily by normative structures institutionalized as kinship relations – the so-called kinship-based modes of accumulation. The family was the economy and the polity, and the family was organized as a moral order of obligations that allowed social labor to be mobilized and coordinated, and that regulated distribution. Kin-based accumulation was based on shared languages and meaning systems, consensus-building through oral communication, and institutionalized reciprocity in sharing and exchange.

As kin-based polities got larger they increasingly fought with one another and those polities that developed institutionalized inequalities had group selection advantages over those that did not. Kinship itself became hierarchical within chiefdoms, taking the form of ranked lineages or conical clans. Social movements utilizing religious discourses were important forces of social change within these small-scale polities. Kin-based societies often responded to population pressures on resources by ‘hiving-off’ – a subgroup would emigrate, usually after formulating grievances in terms of violations of the moral order or disagreements regarding spiritual knowledge. But migrations were mainly responses to local resource stress caused by population growth and competition for natural resources. When new unoccupied, or only lightly occupied but resource-rich, lands were reachable the humans moved in to them, eventually populating all the continents except Antarctica. Once the land was filled up a situation of ‘circumscription’ emerged in which the costs of migration were higher because unoccupied or lightly occupied land was no longer available. This raised the level of conflict within and between polities raising the mortality rate and serving as a demographic regulator (Fletcher et al. 2011). In these circumstances technological and organizational innovations were stimulated and successful new strategies were strongly selected for by inter-polity competition, leading to the emergence of complexity, hierarchy and a new logic of social reproduction based on institutionalized coercion.

Around five thousand years ago the first early states and cities emerged in Mesopotamia over the tops of the kin-based institutions. This was the beginning of the tributary mode of accumulation in which state power (legitimate coercion) became the main organizer of the economy, the mobilizer of labor and the accumulator of wealth and power. Similar innovations occurred largely independently in Egypt, the Yellow (Huang-Ho) river valley, the Indus river valley, and later in Mesoamerica and the Andes. These developments are a strong case of the phenomenon of parallel evolution in which similar forces cause the emergence of similar innovations in social structure. The tributary mode of production evolved as states and empires became larger and as the techniques of imperialism, facilitating the exploitation of distant resources, were improved. This was mainly the work of semiperipheral marcher states (Alvarez et al. 2011). Aspects of the tributary mode (taxation, tribute-gathering, accumulation by dispossession) are still with us, but they have been largely subsumed and made subservient to the logic of capitalist accumulation based on profit-making.

Crises and social movements were often involved in the wars and conquests that brought about social change and the evolution of the tributary mode. The tributary mode became the predominant logic of social reproduction in the Mesopotamian world-system in the early Bronze Age (around 3000 BCE). The East Asian regional world-system was still predominantly tributary in the nineteenth century CE. That is nearly a 5,000-year run. The kin-based mode lasted even longer. All human groups were organized around different versions of the kin-based modes in the Paleolithic, and indeed since human culture had fi rst emerged with language. If we date the beginning of the end of the kin-based modes at the coming to predominance of the tributary mode in Mesopotamia (3000 BCE) this first qualitative change in the basic logic of social reproduction took more than 100,000 years."

500 Years

This brings us to the capitalist mode, here defi ned as based on the accumulation of profi ts returning to commodity production rather than taxation or tribute. As we have already said, early forms of capitalism emerged in the Bronze Age in the form of small semiperipheral states that specialized in trade and the production of commodities. Dilmun, in the Persian Gulf, was a sovereign state that specialized in the carrying trade between Mesopotamia and the Indus civilization during the middle Bronze Age (about 2500 BCE). It was not until the fi fteenth century CE that capitalist accumulation became predominant in a regional world-system (Europe and its colonies). Capitalism was born in the semiperipheral capitalist city-states, but in Europe it moved to the core with the rise of the Dutch hegemony. The forereachers that further evolved capitalism (the modern hegemons) were former semiperipheral polities that rose to hegemony. Economic crises and world revolutions were important elements in the emergence and evolution of capitalism and global governance institutions.42Globalistics and Globalization Studies Thus, in comparison with the earlier modes, capitalism is yet young. It has been around since the middle Bronze Age (2500 BCE), but it took about four millennia to become the predominate developmental logic in a world-system. On the other hand, many have observed that social change in general has speeded up. The rise of tribute-taking based on institutionalized coercion took more than 100,000 years. The rise of capitalism took four millennia from its emergence in the Bronze Age to its becoming the predominant mode of social reproduction in Europe. Capitalism itself speeds up social change because it revolutionizes technology so quickly that other institutions are brought along, and people have become adjusted to more rapid reconfi gurations of culture and institutions. So it is plausible that the contradictions of capitalism may lead it to reach its limits much faster than the kin-based and tributary modes did."

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