[P2P-F] Fwd: A World Political Party: The Time Has Come (GTN Discussion)

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Great Transition Network <gtnetwork at greattransition.org>
Date: Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 5:43 AM
Subject: A World Political Party: The Time Has Come (GTN Discussion)
To: <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>



>From Heikki Patomäki <heikki.patomaki at gmail.com>

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The Time for a World Political Party is now: A Response to Critics

Heikki Patomäki

In the future, we will see many world political parties (WPPs). The idea of
a WPP is generic. While our capacity to envisage our common existence from
a planetary perspective and to organize politics accordingly is valuable in
itself, I am advocating a particular vision for the form such a party could
take. This ambiguity has triggered a number of critical comments, so let me
be clear: what I propose is that we establish a democratic socialist world
party. At the same time, however, I believe that in a pluralistic and
non-Eurocentric world, there will be other simultaneous and substantive
ideals around which future politics revolve.

What could a democratic socialist world party do under the current
institutional and political-economic conditions? As Karl Marx famously
said, actors “make their own history, but they do not make it as they
please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under
circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
Certainly, there have been better world-historical moments for global
democratic ideas, such as the end of the two world wars and the 1990s. If
anything, the world is now disintegrating, in part as a result of the rise
of nationalist populism. This rise has been strongly fueled by the 2008–9
crisis and its consequences, but its deeper causes are related to the
process of neoliberalization that started back in the 1970s. Moreover, in
spite of many campaigns, it remains the case that there is still no world
parliament (or government). Even if the idea of a United Nations
Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA) was realized immediately, it would
probably give greater voice to members of national parliaments, rather than
creating space for anything resembling global political parties proper. No
global elections are yet in sight.

It is reasonable, at least tentatively, to see the current situation in
terms of Karl Polanyi’s double movement, although clearly, history does not
simply repeat itself. There is no pendulum of history. Moreover, we cannot
go back to what Axel Honneth calls the intellectual fictions of the age of
the Industrial Revolution, namely that historical progress is necessary and
that it will be carried forward by a particular class with fixed interests.
[1] While the working-class movement in England and elsewhere emerged from
a variety of real socioeconomic conditions, it was actively nurtured by
socialists who believed in its world-historical role. The socioeconomic
conditions are different in the twenty-first century. For instance,
industrial workers form a declining share of the labor force across
advanced industrial countries.

Changing realities require new ideas. The idea of transformative global
agency is purported to make a wide rational appeal across different social
classes: “This is what is reasonable for us to do!” As Richard Falk puts
it, “The very adversity of circumstances and the severity of global risks
is giving rise to a radical populist consciousness.” In addition to these
risks, and the acute sense of injustices and asymmetries of power, there
must also be a positive direction. David Christian expresses the positive
part of the idea eloquently: the challenge is to construct “a new and
inspiring vision of where we humans are today, a vision that can inspire
optimism and ambition about the planetary task of building a sustainable
future.” Indeed, this is the main aim of my call for a WPP.

The making of a collective agency is a process of active and reflexive
engagement among the world’s people. The nineteenth-century socialists,
believing in their world-historical role, established trade unions, various
associations and societies, and labor and socialist parties. The making of
a working class shaped the development of industrial capitalism, and also,
together with the twentieth-century catastrophes, led to the establishment
of dictatorial and often violent single-party socialist regimes across the
world. We need to learn from these historical experiences, both the
negative and positive lessons they have to offer. We must avoid again being
mired in the intellectual fictions of the age of the Industrial Revolution
and must acknowledge the diversity of elements that fed into the process of
forming the nineteenth-century working class. The majority of these
associations, unions, and parties were struggling to democratize society,
and often succeeded.

Similarly, we can see the emergence of global civil society, along with the
possible coalescence of a world political party, as part of a broad process
of global transformation. Citizens across the world are disillusioned by
national politics. In response to the latest rounds of globalization, many
national parties have become post-democratic. Consider the fate of Syriza
in Greece, for instance. What happened was not simply an example of
Michels’s iron law of oligarchy (which posits that oligarchy is the
inevitable fate of all complex organizations). More importantly, the
debacle of the summer of 2015 illustrated the power of creditors over
debtors in the world economy and the lack of equitable rule of law in
worldwide financial relations. During past decades, a large number of
countries in the Global South went through similar experiences, instigating
the emergence of global debt campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s.

Civil society is about associational life and public space. Since Hegel
introduced the term into the modern discourse, several different
conceptions of civil society have emerged, reflecting different ethical and
political aims of public associations. Table 1 summarizes four of
conceptions, each of which expresses particular historical discussions and
developments. Variations 2 through 4 all contain ideas important for
emancipation and increasing social freedom. It is, of course, true that
many contemporary civil society organizations are financially dependent on
the powers that be, and even those that are not, tend to focus on one or
two limited issues. This does not negate the idea that civil society
organizations can do important work and foster ideas of global justice and
democracy. Moreover, in a good society, the freedom of association must
prevail. As Roy Bhaskar puts it, despite the very real weaknesses of civil
society, its social virtues remains “a domain of innovation,
initiative and enterprise necessary to a dynamic, pluralistic socialist
society.” [2]

Table 1: Approaches to civil society (www.tinyurl.com/yym2moqw)

Broadly, a political party is best seen as an instance of public
association. A typical national political party is an association that has
achieved the right to nominate candidates in elections and thereby contest
and claim the political power of the state. A party has to have a wide
program covering multiple complex issues, for its aim is to take part in
making laws and budgetary decisions.

As commenters point out, a world political party could not claim that role
in a world state, simply because no such state exists. But the party itself
would constitute a public sphere, and the existing international regimes,
or systems of regional and global governance, would provide sites for a
public sphere and political actions. The raison d’être of the world party
must lie in furthering transformations and various new institutional forms
in which the planetary public realm can be organized. For this purpose,
consensus opinions among participants will be forged into a program of
change, which can also involve direct or indirect participation in
elections in different countries and organizations. We can distinguish
between three moments of transformative global democratic action:

MOMENT 1: Activities within the confines of established institutions.
MOMENT 2: Advocacy to transform global institutions and create new ones.
MOMENT 3: Participation in the newly formed global institutions.

These three moments form a logical order: activities within existing
institutions can include advocacy of, and legislation for, global
democratic institutions. A grouping of like-minded countries, supported by
global civil society and WPPs, can suffice for establishing a new global
system of governance. These systems can be functional and yet democratic.
Successful attempts at creating institutions of planetary democracy make
participation in them possible. Over time, new institutions will become
established, and the cycle can continue from MOMENT 1 to MOMENT 2 to MOMENT
3. Each step in the process changes the constellation of forces in global
politics and the ways the WPP strategy adapts. There is no end to history;
and not all new institutions will have to be planetary in scope. Global
institutions can, and in many cases should, increase the contextually
overlapping, multi-layered autonomy and social freedom of actors, learning
from experiences in an experimental spirit.

Since the 1990s, I have been involved in developing and advocating several
specific global utopias (or eutopias as I prefer to call them), from a debt
arbitration mechanism and global taxes (including a global greenhouse gas
tax) to a twenty-first-century version of Keynes’s clearing union. I
particularly favor building support for workers’ rights and trade
unionization on a planetary scale, both out of solidarity and to increase
global aggregate demand. Another key idea is to regulate and maintain
aggregate efficient demand on a global scale, which presupposes the
coordinated institutionalization of economic policies between nation-states
and functional international organizations, coordinated for example through
a world parliament. These reforms would be critically important as well for
global peace and security, since root causes of conflicts and
securitization tend to lie in the sphere of political economy. We need to
build a more cooperative and equitable world.

The rational tendency of world history is toward green global Keynesianism,
which would enable us to achieve democratic control over the mechanisms and
processes of the capitalist world economy. Nonetheless, how well any of the
proposed institutional arrangements will work is contingent. There are also
deeper aims, such as furthering human emancipation and the development of
all on the thin layer of life on our fragile planet, all in the wider
context of cosmic evolution. This generic aim should, in my view,
constitute the key idea of a democratic socialist world party, thereby
encouraging a diversity of emancipatory projects across scales from local
to cosmic, focusing for instance on the idea of commons. It would be
premature to write a detailed program for a WPP before the process leading
to its creation has begun; at this point, we can only outline a broad
direction. And, to reiterate, there will be many WPPs.

Let me conclude this response by outlining three scenarios about the future
role of WPPs in global politics:

A) A world political party—or a number of them—forms in the near future,
proving decisively important in future transformations.
B) Transformations emerge mainly from within the existing structures of
power (global “gorbachevs” rise in response to crises, resonating with
wider societal developments and new ideas); new democratic systems of
global governance precipitate the formation of WPPs that assume important
functions.
C) Current developments lead to a global military and/or ecological
catastrophe; a world party assumes leadership and establishes a democratic
world state (this is the well-known scenario of W. Warren Wagar in his A
Short History of Future); soon, the world party is then challenged by other
world political parties, carrying the project of emancipation further,
perhaps into new and hitherto unimagined directions.

My general anticipation is that WPPs will be in the center stage of future
world politics, regardless of which scenario comes to pass. The current
system is not sustainable economically, politically, militarily, or
ecologically. Of course, I favor Scenario 1. To avoid a catastrophe, or an
elite-led development, the time to establish a democratic world political
party is indeed now!

Reflexively, the democratic socialist world party would recognize a
widespread tendency towards post-democratic forms of governance. These
oligarchic tendencies would have to be countered by cultivating the
republican virtues and courageous participation of its constantly shifting
groups of activist members. This is a necessary but not a sufficient
condition for ensuring democratic responsiveness and learning. A WPP will
be a continuing historical experiment.

Heikki Patomäki

[1] Axel Honneth, The Idea of Socialism: Toward a Renewal (New York: Wiley,
2016).

[2] Roy Dialectic, The Pulse of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 2008), 235.

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Thursday, January 3, 2019

>From Paul Raskin <praskin at tellus.org>

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Dear GTN,

Our 2018 forums have spotlighted key movement streams (with more in the
queue for 2019). We have generated a remarkable compendium of essays and
commentary that stands as a unique resource for understanding the vitality
and diversity of progressive forces now at play. Significantly, the series
affirms the fundamental GT premise that different oppositional paths can
lead to a shared conviction: we must urgently act collectively for global
transformation.*

Yet, the nagging sense persists that the current array of movements remains
too fragmented and weak for the task of systemic change. The political
culture still lacks an overarching global organizing framework for
nurturing synergy, mobilizing the discontented, and spreading new social
visions – not to mention serving ultimately as an instrument for attaining
public power.

What might such a framework look like? The question brings me to our
January discussion. Heikki Patomäki offers an answer in his new essay, “A
World Political Party: The Time Has Come.” Heikki envisions a World
Political Party (WPP) as a transnational association dedicated to
democratic principles and processes that, under an umbrella of shared
principles and aims, spawns a vast network of semiautonomous nodes at all
levels. While noting the high hurdles to establishing a WPP, Heikki points
to the deepening world crisis that compels the attempt and makes success
plausible; indeed, he believes an important precursor has already been
launched.

What do you think? Please read the essay at
www.greattransition.org/publication/world-political-party, and let us know.
Does the idea of a WPP resonate? How would you modify Heikki’s conception?
To those of you pursuing other approaches to fostering movement coherence,
this would be a terrific time to tell us about them.

Since we’re starting late, the discussion will go through Monday, February
4.

Over to you,
Paul

* See the framing paper that kicked off this series at
www.greattransition.org/publication/how-do-we-get-there.

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