Global Systemic Chaos and Transitions Already Underway

Geopolitics helps us understand the world in which we live, especially in turbulent times like these, characterized by global instability with its string of changes and permanent oscillations. But when geopolitics addresses the activity of anti-systemic movements, it has its limits. It gives us a reading of the stage on which they act, which is no small thing, but it cannot be the central inspiration of the liberation struggles.

In my view, Immanuel Wallerstein** is the one who has managed to excel in describing precisely the relationship between chaos in the world-system and the revolutionary transformation of movements. In his latest article, titled "It is Painful to Live Amidst Chaos," he points out that the world-system is self-destructing, with the coexistence of 10-12 powers capable of acting independently. We are in the middle of a transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world, a process necessarily chaotic.

During periods of instability and crisis, activity by the [social] movements can more effectively influence the world's redesign. In time, it is a necessarily brief window of opportunity. It is during these storms, rather than in periods of calm, when human activity can alter the course of events. Hence the importance of the current period.

Some of Wallerstein's works published in the collection El Mundo del Siglo XXI [World of the XXI Century], directed by Pablo González Casanova, address the relationship between systemic chaos and transitions to a new world-system (After Liberalism and Unthinking Social Science, Siglo XXI, 1996 and 1998). In Marx and Underdevelopment, published in English three decades ago, in 1985, Wallerstein warns of the need to rethink our metaphor of transition, since from the nineteenth century we have been embroiled in the debate between evolutionary versus revolutionary pathways for coming to power.

I believe that the most controversial point, but also the most convincing, is Wallerstein's assertion that we have believed that a transition is "a phenomenon that can be controlled" (Unthinking Social Science, p. 186). If the transition can only occur as a result of a bifurcation in a system in chaos, as the complexity scientists say, then expecting to direct it is both illusion and carries the risk of re-legitimizing the order that is breaking down if it uses state power.

This does not mean that we cannot do anything; quite the contrary. In the article cited, Wallerstein writes: “We must lose our fear of a transition that takes the appearance of collapse, disintegration, which is disordered. In some ways it can be anarchic, but not necessarily disastrous."

He adds that revolutions can do their best work by promoting the collapse of the system.

This would be an initial way of influencing the transition: by sharpening the collapse, promoting chaos. As the author himself acknowledges, a period of chaos is painful, but it can also be fruitful. Moreover, the transition to a new order is always painful, because we are part of what collapses. Thinking in terms of linear, tranquil transitions is a tribute to the ideology of progress.

Zapatistas' New World

After 1994 we began to become familiar with a second way of influencing the transition, which allowed us to enrich earlier conclusions. This is about the creation, here and now, of a new world; not as a foreshadowing, but as a concrete reality. I refer to the Zapatista experience. I think that both modes of influence (collapse and creation) are complementary.

The Zapatistas have created a new world in the territories where they are settled. It is not "the" world that we imagine in our old metaphor of transition: a nation-State where a totality is constructed symmetrically to the capitalistic [system] that claims to be its negation. But—if I understood something that its supporters taught us during the escuelita [little school]—this world has all the ingredients of the new world: from schools and clinics to autonomous forms of government and of production.

When systemic chaos deepens, this new world created by the Zapatistas will be a 'must' for those from below. Many do not believe that the systemic chaos can deepen. However, we are facing an outlook of interstate and intrastate wars joined with the "fourth world war" now underway of capital against the peoples. These are some of the chaotic situations that we envision. During the same period, they may coincide with developing climate chaos and "health chaos", according to the World Health Organization's forecast of the forthcoming, inevitable expiration of antibiotics.

In history, the great revolutions occurred amid horrific wars and conflicts, as a reaction from below when everything was collapsing. During the Cold War, the hypothesis spread that the contestants would not use nuclear weapons that assured mutual destruction. Today, there are few who would make that bet.

Before us a new metaphor is being born for the possible transition: when the world-system begins to disintegrate generating tsunamis of chaos, the people must defend and rebuild life. By so doing, it is likely that they might adopt the type of constructions created by the Zapatistas. This happened in the long transition from antiquity to feudalism and from feudalism to capitalism. Amid the chaos, people tend to bet on principles of order, as some of today's indigenous communities are doing.

Some of this is already happening. Some PRI families turn to the clinics in the caracoles. Others seek in the committees of good government a fair solution to their conflicts. Never have the peoples moved en masse to the systemic alternatives. One day one family does it, then another, and so on. We are moving into a new world, in the midst of pain and destruction.

*Raúl Zibechi, researcher-activist and journalist, was born (1952) in Montevideo, Uruguay. Active in the youth and resistance movement until 1975, he sought exile in Buenos Aires, Argentina; then subsequently spent ten years in Madrid, Spain, associated with the Communist movement doing literacy work with peasants. Working since 1968 as a journalist and researcher-militant, he has toured almost every country in Latin America, with special emphasis on the Andean region. Familiar with many of the movements in the region, Zibechi helps to provide training and outreach for Argentine, Paraguayan, Bolivian, Peruvian and Colombian peasant farmers and indigenous Mapuche communities. Zibechi's theoretical work is aimed at understanding and defending the organizational processes of these movements.

*Immanuel Wallerstein, American sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems analyst, arguably best known for his development of the general approach in sociology which led to the emergence of his World-System Theory. In 1976, Wallerstein became head of the Fernand Braudel Centre for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilization at Binghamton University, New York. The Centre’s mission is "to engage in the analysis of large-scale social change over long periods of historical time." Wallerstein served as a distinguished professor of sociology at Binghamton until his retirement in 1999.

Translated by Jane Brundage

http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2015/01/23/index.php?section=opinion&article=021a2pol&partner=rss

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