The human race is now facing another such sequence, and this time it is the entire humanity populating the planet. Our late friend and colleague Giovanni Arrighi used to say that systemic problems call for systemic solutions. In his analytical model, the trajectory of historical capitalism went through several cresting waves of spatial expansions and restructurings.[4] European capitalists had originally secured themselves and their enterprise by acquiring their own national states—with the armies, navies, and the taxation machinery that support them—amid the formative chaos of the sixteenth century. In more analytical terms, capitalism obtained its historical breakthrough in the internalization of protection costs. The next wave brought the deepening of capitalism and its tremendous colonial expansion based on the internalization of production costs, or what is commonly known as the British-led industrial revolution of the 1780s–1840s. But that epoch also ushered in multiple crises flowing from the effects of the business cycle, the institutionalization of revolutionary and reform movements, and the competitive geopolitics of industrial imperialism that in 1914 nearly killed capitalism. The American hegemony of the twentieth century helped to tame these crises by adding another layer of complexity: the internalization of transaction costs. The acute need to stabilize the capitalist system against multiple dangers is what after 1945 determined the elaborate and imposing architecture of modern governments, economic corporations, and international organizations.
Logically then, the epochal accomplishment remaining for the twenty-first century is the internalization of the costs of social and environmental reproduction to be achieved at a truly planetary level. Consider a fact that seems too big to enter the usual policy debates. During the last ten thousand years or so the majority of humankind lived in villages. The invention (rather, the repeated inventions) of village community marked a major reorganization in collective human capabilities. It made possible what archeologists call the Neolithic revolution, and thus agrarian societies. The pattern of village life permitted midsized groups of nonrelatives to organize their common affairs in a robust and comprehensive manner. It took care of everything that mattered for social reproduction: division of labor, the traditional regulation of resources, daily life tensions and conflicts, the transmission of culture and skills, the ideological (or even cosmological) rituals of group solidarity, from the highly mystical to the mundane village dance. In sum, village community organized the functional and emotional aspects of the human life cycle from birth to death. And self-organizing villages served as tributary bases for all the subsequent complex societies, from tribal chiefdoms to city-states and empires.
Capitalism originally emerged into what was still a world of villages. The market and geopolitical dynamism of capitalism soon began undermining village communities because the villagers were needed elsewhere as labor, colonists, and soldiers. On their side, the villagers themselves often found it impossible to stay in their poor and constraining rural locales. The causes of village extinction go by many different names such as modernization, urbanization, industrialization, agrarian overpopulation, the spread of literacy, or imperialism and military revolution. The net effect eventually would be the same everywhere—first in the West, next in Japan, the Soviet bloc, and now all over—draining the countryside of its once numerous inhabitants and moving them into the cities or, even more commonly, into the slums.
The transition from village to town as the main organizing locus of human life appears irreversible. Its implications help explain why the crisis of capitalism is so hard to solve. Something must step in to resume the comprehensive provision of normative order, social regulation, daily security and welfare in the new agglomerations of humanity. Moreover, these tasks must be now performed not only on a vastly larger scale but also better than the villages used to do. Lest we forget, villages provided intimate coziness and shelter that meant, by extension, intrusive supervision and the social caging of individuals. The protective inertia of traditions, the inequalities of age and sex inscribed in the patriarchal households, the denigrating and violently vengeful attitudes toward strangers and outsiders were part and parcel of village life, too.
The modern history of mass migrations, demographic transitions, and the creation of new political communities brought enormous costs and traumas. The overseas emigration of European settlers helped to improve the ratio of demographics to resources at the cost of the displacement, enslavement, and downright extermination of the indigenous peoples in the colonies who lacked guns and immunity to the germs brought by the invaders. The emergence of modern nations often implied the oppression and expulsion of the “non-national” minorities. After 1914 the radical mutation of nationalism into militarist and virulently populist strains of fascism escalated the same historical vectors into the Holocaust. In a different kind of radical escalation, the Soviet collectivization of agriculture sacrificed human lives by the millions for the sake of achieving industrialization and modern life for the children of survivors. Only after 1945 were the former peasants and working classes of the West and Soviet bloc factored into social security and prosperity by their national states. In total, this amounted to several hundred millions of people. But are there now the resources, let alone political will, to factor in several billion people from the global South?
Enthusiasts of globalization hail our moving into a global village. This sanguine claim should be evaluated soberly. Cosmopolitanism is a longstanding project that has had its liberal and socialist versions.[5] But it means something different as a complement to a world of stable states. And there exist other, more conservative projects for directing globalization that derive their energies from imperialist ambitions, nationalisms, anti-immigrant rejections, religious fundamentalism, and their combinations. The very possibility of an arena of global governance and a common human identity may well become the main focus of political contention in the coming decades. The outcome is too early to predict. Systemic crisis at a world scale will sow havoc, panic, and nasty reactions. But it will also elicit collective coping strategies going in the direction of a more democratically accountable, organizationally flexible, and capable global governance. Humanity can still escape a catastrophic backslide in the complexity and extent of its collective organization. Perhaps enough lessons of twentieth-century revolutionary and socially reformist movements have withstood the neoconservative ravages of recent decades. Or it could be something profoundly changing in the complex and contradictory institutional architecture of the modern states themselves. At the very least, here is yet another topic for fruitful investigation by social scientists.
We are reluctant to call the “state,” let alone “global state,” the political structure of a better future. This is in fact the biggest unknown. Let us make just a couple of observations regarding the pattern of politics in a more hopeful future. Most of us doubt that existing international organizations add up to the prototype of such structures. The United Nations, the European Union, the IMF, Davos, G-8, G-20 and other such clubs belong to the epoch of capitalist integration and American hegemony. At present these institutions are weakened or compromised by political manipulation and technocratic aloofness. Some of us, however, see the only solution to environmental crisis in a much stronger network of relations between states—a Super United Nations. Others of us doubt that this political integration can be achieved fast enough, and it is not without its own worries. Still, the post-1945 epoch of relative world peace and prosperity set an important precedent that may prove more lasting than its political institutions.
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Giovanni Arrighi,
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More in Craig Calhoun,