World Capitalist System and Revolutions: Towards a Truly Global Understanding of Revolutions

• In Event: 40403 - Emergent Horizons in the Capitalist World-System in Crisis

Abstract

With the advent of the fourth generation of theories, the literature on revolutions have produced significant theoretical developments. Among these, there has been a conscious call for globalizing our frameworks in understanding the causes, unfolding, and consequences of revolutions. Despite these developments, the definition of our subject matter itself remains largely at a national level. This stems from the fact that the conceptualization of revolutions is still undertheorized as scholars of revolution have chosen to offer new definitions to be more encompassing towards new forms of political mobilization without grounding these definitions in explicit theoretical frameworks. In this paper, I argue that what we understand to be a revolution should also be conceptualized in a global perspective and based on the historical realities of our global human civilization. This argument relies upon a combination of several traditions that are connected to each other politically and intellectually: the Marxist method of dialectical materialism, Marxist theories of capitalism and imperialism, and the world-system analysis. These traditions demonstrate that the reality we live in is a world capitalist system that is dominated by the American Empire and its subservient allies and centers around the extraction of imperialist rent from the Global South countries into a few Global North countries through financial and military means. I argue that the conceptualization of revolutions should be based on this reality. If social revolutions are about a desire to fundamentally reorganize social relations, and if we acknowledge that revolutions are truly global events, then the desire to fundamentally reorganize social relations should be targeting not just local but global relations. As the hegemonic global relations of our time entail the American-led imperialist capitalist system, then social revolutions should be conceptualized as a mass mobilization aiming to fundamentally disrupt this order rather than targeting a national government.

Author

• Huseyin Rasit, Ritsumeikan University