W. Warren Wagar. A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FUTURE, 2nd ed. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992. xi + 324 pp. ISBN 0-226-
86902-4, $14.95 (paper).
Reviewed by
Terry Boswell, Department of Sociology, Emory University, Atlanta,
Georgia, USA
Utopian visions of possible new world orders proliferate
every 50 to 60 years with the long stagnation of the Kondraetieff
economic cycle, according to the research of Edgar Kiser and Kriss
A. Drass (�Changes in the Core of the World-System and the
Production of Utopian Literature in Great Britain and the United
Staets, 1883-1975,� AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, 1987). They
found that the publication of utopian novels as a percentage of
all novels published clusters in the downturn phase of the
Kondraetieff wave, peaking during the period when economic
conditions turn for the better after a long crisis. Hegemonic
decline amplifies the cultural response to the economy. Kiser and
Drass use the publication of utopian novels as something of a
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temperature gauge of the prevailing cultural weather. The
relationship between ideological and economic conditions is
turbulent at best. But over the long term, the cultural
atmosphere surrounding economic conditions shifts with the
seasonal pattern of economic stagnation and expansion, and
hegemonic stability and decline. One such novel of particular
importance for conceiving the future of the world-
system is W. Warren Wagar's A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FUTURE.
Wagar, a historian at SUNY Binghamton and colleague of
Immanuel Wallerstein, has written a utopian vision from a
deliberately world-systemic point of view. As a novel, it reads
rather like a historian's extrapolation based on an explicit
theory. It is full of long treatises on changing world
conditions, with only occasional epistolary interludes to add
human characters to what is otherwise all plot. While it lacks
the literary quality of the H. G. Wells it attempts to emulate, it
is nevertheless readable and enjoyable simply as the written
imagination of a learned and intelligent author. Viewing a
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utopian novel simply as a novel misses the whole point.
Utopian novels pose new answers to the ideological question
of "what is possible?" (Kiser and Drass). Along with answers to
"what exists?" and "what is good?," conceiving "what is possible?"
forms the basis for any world view. Goran Therborn's classic work
on ideology (THE POWER OF IDEOLOGY AND THE IDEOLOGY OF POWER,
1980) explains that defining "what is possible" is the last
defense of the status quo. While one may empirically demonstrate
that exploitation exists and even that it is unfair, for instance,
one cannot prove empirically that a better alternative is possible
when that system does not yet exist. Conceiving "what is
possible" is an act of extrapolation from what exists. When the
world economy has unmistakenly failed to grow at appeasing rates
for nearly a generation, people become convinced that the existing
forms of organization must be discarded and experiment with new
ones to put in their place. Utopian visions, at that time, have a
new resonance. They take advantage of the pliable economic
conditions to stretch our conception of the possible.
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Wagar's novel comes at what is, hopefully, the tail of a long
stagnation, and at the middle of America's descent from hegemony.
As a utopian vision of possible futures, a vision based on world-
system theory, Wagar offers scenarios that begin to offer what we
must have in order for the theory to offer more than analysis of
what exists. Since the end of the Soviet Union in 1990, socialist
visions of the future appear to many to be trapped by futility.
Despite the long-ago recognition by most Western leftists that the
Soviet model was undemocratic and oppressive, its utter collapse
brought a surprising recognition that the entire system had long
been unreformable. Democratization by Gorbachevs or Trotskys or
other would-be true democratic socialists could not reverse the
failings of the command economy (Terry Boswell and Ralph Peters,
�State Socialism and the Industrial Divide in the World-Economy:
A Comparative Essay on the Rebellions in Poland and China,�
CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY, 1990). This recognition is what leaves
Marxists in a crisis of purpose, not the trumpeting of Soviet
oppression or even of its failures, which were recognizable from
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applying Marxist theory. This is not to say that Wagar offers a
viable alternative model or that his vision is even a prediction
of what will happen (the first edition still even had a Soviet
Union). The purpose of a utopian novel is not to predict the
future but to offer what Wagar calls an "array of
possibilities" (p. x). His particular array is not highly
probable as an extrapolation. But it does offer a vision of a
world socialism that is not constrained by the now suddenly-
obvious impossibilities of extending a "reformed" Soviet model.
Wagar's vision is feasible within known parameters of the world-
system and while an unlikely event to occur by accident, something
like it could be made to happen by concerted action. It thus
extends the possibility that concerted action would be worthwhile.
Wagar actually offers two utopias and one dystopia. Each
follows from and requires the previous one to create the
conditions for its subsumption. The novel is organized into three
"books": �Earth Inc.,� �Red Earth,� and �House of Earth,� which
chronicle the history of the world form 1995 to 2100. Wagar (p.
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xiii) modeled his three "books" on the Christian eschatology of
"Armageddon, Millennium, and New Jerusalem." The dystopia must
come first. It is an extrapolation from existing transnational
corporate capitalism to include a corporate world polity, the GTC
(Global Trade Consortium). The GTC functions as world hegemon,
enforcing a corporate world order through economic boycott rather
than military dominance. Initially the GTC is an enlightened
despot, maintaining world peace and ushering in a renewed global
prosperity at the small price of undemocratic rule, uniform
cultural commodification, growing inequality, environmental
degradation, and individual subservience. But global capitalist
expansion leads inevitably to overproduction and recession. Wagar
plays out the next century with dates from the one now ending.
Global recession in 2032 lasts until world war breaks out in the
2040s. But in this scenario, the world war is a nuclear
holocaust.
From the ashes of the war, the states in the Southern
Hemisphere (which are now the core) coalesce to form a new world
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polity based on the principles of the World Party. The World
Party is the most interesting and perhaps most important part of
the book, which we will return to shortly. This new world state
seems to be a democratic version of the GTC, which as a global
democracy is driven to redress the problems of inequality and
environmental degradation while also managing to restore peace and
prosperity.
It succeeds a bit too easily, but Wagar does remind us that
even in a democratic socialist utopia, resistance will occur
against the tyranny of the majority. This resistance takes the
form of the Small Party, an anarchist congregation seeking
individual and cultural autonomy through community self-
sufficiency. In the final and most entertaining "book," a
victorious Small Party simply dissolves the world government. The
final utopia is a world of self-governing communities small enough
to practice direct democracy and enabled by fantastic technology
to be both self-sufficient and fully prosperous. Any hierarchy is
rejected, or falls away, and the material determination of the
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spirit is finally reversed.
The World Party
While the particular scenarios that Wagar presents are built
upon an increasing number of "what ifs," the World Party is based
on a set of principles that are applicable in a wide array of
scenarios. Those principles deserve discussion, regardless of the
merits of the scenarios. The Party principles, as I interpret
them from various points in the text, are as follows:
1. A World Socialist Commonwealth, including a world state
with a military monopoly and public ownership of the
megacorporations.
2. Global Democracy with direct elections by department for
all offices, global and local.
3. Legal and programmatic provision for equal opportunity,
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including a worldwide assault on racism and sexism; and state
provision of basic needs, including education, health care, child
care, and retirement.
4. Incomes based on need, with no more than a 3:1 ratio among
individuals for those employed (half share for those unwilling to
work) and no more than 2:1 across departments.
5. "Declaration of Human Sovereignty," in which the world
state abolishes national sovereignty and eschews national or
ethnic identities.
6. "Integral humanism," a philosophical order of public
affairs based on rationality, including a secular state and
official tolerance for individual beliefs (i.e., no legal
enforcement of religious, national, ethnic, or other traditions),
and a disdain for commodity fetishism.
7. A global plan for ecological restoration, renewable
sources of supply, and population control.
8. A critique of world capitalism as the source of world wars
and as oppressive and illegal as a world order (although petty
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bourgeois capital and markets can operate within departments).
9. A critique of Stalinist style state socialism as
oppressie and illegal, with guarantees for democracy and
individual liberty.
10. A vanguard party strategy for mundialization, including
revolutio, elections, coops, and even conquest of laggards until
all states join the world commonwealth.
The World Party is modeled on the German Green Party, with a
heavy dose of the original Second International and the added
twist of being based on world-system rather than Marxist or
Keynesian theory. It carries a "New Left" imprint of being
socialist and democratic, anti-capitalist and anti-totalitarian,
class and individually based. As Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K.
Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein (�1968: The Great Rehearsal,� in
Boswell, ed., REVOLUTION IN THE WORLD-SYSTEM, 1987) point out,
since the world revolution of 1968, such "New Left" conceptions
have redefined progressive politics.
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There are many points that deserve critique, rejection, or
revision. We can start with those offered by Wagar himself, by
enunciating the principles of the Small Party. It carries an
imprint from the other major offspring of 1968 revolution, the
"New Age" conceptions that redefined identity and spirituality.
To many, "New Age" means hippie wannabes wearing crystals,
sleeping under pyramids, and listening to whales sing. It is
that, but it is also an umbrella term for a wide variety of
lifestyle issues that share a concern for personal autonomy and
self-awareness. The most prominent are feminist (and ethnic)
conceptions of identity, which, for instance, overlap but still
contrast with leftist definitions of feminism as equality in the
workplace.
Given the anarchistic and spiritual character of the Small
Party, its principles are deliberately vague. Perhaps only the
following two principles are necessary and shared: elimination of
the state or other central authority above the community; and
complete autonomy and self-reliance of small communities. Self-
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reliance is premised on utopian technology that provides for
abundant prosperity with little effort. Wagar suggests that most
such communities would be governed by town-hall-style direct
democracy, although religious and other traditional orders may
also proliferate. He assumes that abundance would guarantee a
general equality and eliminate any desire for hierarchy or
conquest. A missing assumption, which we can add, is that the
technology has a diminishing return to scale, and perhaps even to
hierarchy, which would make small egalitarian communities the
optimal form. But this makes the technological form, and thus the
Small Party option, even more fantastical, eviscerating the
critique.
Perhaps the "New Age" critique of "scientific socialism" is
better understood as an alternative set of goals rather than an
alternative organizational form that must be premised on utopian
technology. Let me below offer a series of contrasts, interpreted
from the text, with the Small Party goals listed first: spiritual
vs. rational; early Marx vs. late Marx; spontaneous vs. planned;
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feminine vs. masculine; identity vs. humanity; community vs.
individual; individual vs. family; autonomy vs. centralized; self-
sufficient vs. interdependent; negotiation vs. law; variety vs.
standard; freedom vs. equality; relativist vs. universal; folk vs.
classical; play vs. work; and, anarchy vs. state.
Not all goals contradict and instead are only a different
priority or emphasis. Nevertheless, the contrast is often
striking and many do contradict. Wagar offers a stage theory
wherein rational scientific world socialism produces the abundance
that enables a communal spiritual world. Working class
technocrats turn into communal hippies. A strength of Wagar's
array of possibilities is that they take account of the slow
movement of global time. He lets about 50 years pass, a full
Kondraetieff, before one world order slips into the next. Each
set of social relations that characterize a period is predicated
on the developments that preceded it -- the autonomous community
utopia required the equality and prosperity of a world socialism,
which in turn was built on charred framework of a capitalist world
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polity. But are these stages necessary?
Wagar's stage conception justifies sacrificing spirituality,
spontaneity, femininity, identity, and perhaps even freedom in the
short run in order to achieve the same in the abundant future. I
doubt that by sacrificing these goals one creates the conditions
for their achievement, or even if it might, that many would risk
the sacrifice. These are not investments, where a sacrifice reaps
a greater reward, but are alternatives. Some may even be
complimentary. Yet must we accept either the premise of fantastic
technology or that the achievement of goals must occur in stages?
Is not a synthesis of goals, requiring only foreseeable
technology, a possible option?
I not only think the answer is yes, but also think that the
world party and world socialism is only worthwhile if the answer
is yes. What that synthesis can and should be cannot be answered
here. Or what is the same thing, all or at least most of the
goals should be included. �How can �New Left� and �New Age� be
reconciled or synthesized?� is the first of two questions that
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advocates of a world party and world socialism need to reach an
agreed upon answer. The second is question is, �How do we
begin?�
Historically, attempts to organize international parties
have succeeded only up to the point of exercising real power.
Power is located in states, which have a societal constituency and
a physical border that frequently contradicts global concerns.
The nationalistic division of the Second International over World
War I is the classic example. Yet, ironically, as the national
interests in western Europe coalesced after World War II, the
Second International revived as a common forum for designing and
coordinating (moderately) progressive policies. Could such a
forum exist at the world level?
Certainly global organizations exist and have been
proliferating at a phenomenal rate since World War II. In
analyzing data on the establishment of International Non-
Governmental Organizations (INGOs) since 1875, John Boli (1994)
finds a linear increase interrupted only by war and depression,
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that after World War II increased geometrically (three times as
many in 1990 as 1960). These organizations, along with other
global actors and events, constitute and reflect the world polity
(despite the absence of a world state). Yet international
political parties and labor unions have not been among the
organizations on the rise. Most have been industry and trade
organizations, that is in class terms, organizations of
international capital rather than labor. Capital is laying the
foundation for organizing labor globally, as it previously did
industrially.
If the foundation is there, then the question of how to begin
becomes one of deciding where to start, what part of the
foundation to build upon first. A utopian perspective is ill-
equipped to determine what we should do; it offers only scenarios
of what we could do. Wagar offers an alternative scenario to
traditional party organizing. He has the World Party evolving out
of study groups, salons, and other nonhierarchical interactions.
The most important are discussion networks on the Internet, not
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unlike the World-Systems Network with which most readers of this
journal are familiar.
