The cultural and economic legacies of East Asian history, however peculiar they might be, are not entirely unique in their kind. As the global flows of capital continue shifting in the search for new production locales, we can expect more miraculous economic renaissances. India and Turkey already remind us that the past economic geography of Asia was never limited to China. A whole different sector of possibilities seems now emerging from the leftist turn in Latin America where Brazil is laying the tracks. Whatever the ideological rhetoric and tactics of the civic, socialist, nationalist, or indigenous popular movements, in effect they are disestablishing the traditional Latin American politics of oligarchic and military factionalism predicated on foreign dependence. The highly contentious and uneven process spanning the whole continent is now forging, for all its contradictions, genuinely national states. When the leaders of social movements reach state power, they can prevail only by curbing the local powers of provincial notables along with their paramilitary forces, including the drug cartels. One way of doing this is through the imposition of democratic civilian supervision over the armies and police. Another and related way for the consolidation of new democracies is through integrating their citizenry in the centrally sponsored institutions providing for the defense of human rights, social welfare, land tenure, and jobs. Perhaps this is not socialism. It is rather a new and decidedly better variety of capitalism. In the twenty-first century Latin America could at last catch up with social democratic and corporatist state transformations resembling earlier Western patterns, thus also laying foundations for a new wave of industrial development.
A lasting recession in the West, Japan, and the former Soviet bloc, unless things get truly disastrous, might yet boost the industrial ascendance of the former Third World zone. In the past the peripheral and semiperipheral countries often benefited from turmoil in the core because such crisis helped to lower the costs of importing advanced technologies, loosened political controls over world markets, and opened profitable niches to producers with lower labor costs. It is not incidental that the earlier wave of the import-substitution industrializations along the perimeter of the European continent and in Latin America took off in the 1930s–1940s; the export-oriented industrialization of East Asia after the 1970s was fed by outsourcing from the deindustrializing core, and the export markets and drain of resources from the former Soviet republics ought to play a role in the economic expansion of China and especially Turkey.
All five of us consider the narrowing of global inequality gaps a desirable and realistic prospect. In Wallerstein’s words, this would minimize pain in the shorter run and maximize the potential for a better world transformation in the medium to longer run. Michael Mann finds here a major source of continued market vitality or even the foundations for a more egalitarian and prosperous world capitalist order modeled on the post-1945 social democratic recovery in Europe. This looks like a good prospect, but can it be compatible with the political economy of capitalism as measured by the rationale of private profit? Neither Wallerstein nor Collins considers the “rise of the rest” as contradicting their hypotheses regarding the future demise of capitalism. To the contrary, the proliferation of new capitalist players in the world markets or the mobile and globally competing educated middle classes would aggravate the dilemmas of capitalism.
So far we remain in the mode of extrapolating the near-past into the near-future. What about major structural shifts, either within high-tech capitalism, in the global world-system, or in the ecology of the planet?
SYSTEMIC LIMITS VERSUS ENDLESS INTENSIFICATION
Michael Mann advances an optimistic view of the survival of capitalism, but a rather pessimistic view of environmental crisis. The “rise of the rest” opens virtually limitless new frontiers for capitalism, at least in the foreseeable future. World demographics, and therefore much of the world politics and economy now profoundly affected by the massive growth in the poorer countries and the resulting global migrations into towns, will eventually stabilize. Mann is skeptical of the existence of pansystemic structures and cycles. Instead, he suggests a kaleidoscopic recombination of the four non-congruent and distinctly shaped networks of social power: ideological, economic, military, and political. Leaving his prognosis underdetermined as a matter of principle, Mann refrains from making specific predictions except that capitalism will continue to be resilient, especially if it is steered by more pragmatic liberal-labor politics.
Nevertheless, Mann theorizes from a structured viewpoint elaborating on Max Weber. Wielding his four-dimensional template of power, Mann shows that events become turning points when leading power sources intersect. In the early twentieth century it was the combination of world war with capitalist crisis exacerbated by ideology and politics. In the twenty-first century the combination of rampant capitalist growth with the stalemate of pluralist politics and national self-centeredness points toward ecological crisis. Degrees of contingency exist, but within the structural tendencies laid down by historical development of the four sources of power. It is chiefly because there are multiple causes that unpredictable intersections occur. Here Mann disagrees with Collins and Wallerstein on the importance of crisis in the economic institutions of capitalism. Instead he emphasizes that environmental strains will rise to catastrophe, unless political mobilization prevails to do something about it. Thus Mann’s big contingency is in the intersection of the environmental (economic in the largest sense) and the political spheres.
Craig Calhoun agrees with Mann about the centrality of external, especially environmental threats to capitalism. Like all of us, Calhoun argues that the future is not fully determined and therefore it is open to political action. He argues, though, both that internal system risks are more challenging to capitalism than Mann suggests, and that for capitalism to survive there must be a renewal of social institutions that on the one hand enable and facilitate capitalism and on the other hand compensate for the costs and damages it now externalizes as burdens for society at large. The question then is, in the thinking of Wallerstein and Collins, whether such globally escalating costs could be at all sustained by capitalism. The question is not rhetorical. Social scientists should be watching and measuring the dynamic capacities of capitalism to see whether the costs are being met by the generation of new wealth along with the growth or decline in political mechanisms for spreading benefits across the globally connected social structures.