Transversalism and Transformative Praxes: Globalization from Below

• Published in: Cadmus (Trieste, Italy) Vol. 4; no. 5; pp. 186 - 190
• Main Authors: Gills, Barry K, Hosseini, S A Hamed
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Trieste The Risk Institute 01.12.2021; Risk Institute, Trieste- Geneva
• Subjects: Cosmopolitanism; Earth; Globalization; History; Human relations; Social change; Social order
• ISSN: 2038-5242; 2038-5250

For over five millennia, since the origins of cities, the state, and class society, human social order has continued to evolve through a number of recognisable patterns of social change, including the historical formation of an ever-larger system of mutual interactions, or "World System" (Frank and Gills 1993). The modern phase in the history of the world civilization system is characterized by its foundational dependence on 5Cs: (1) Capital replacing labour as the ultimate source of value; (2) Carbon-fossil fuels or more generally speaking, extractivism; (3) Compulsive economic growth through relentless commodification of socio-ecological relations and a multi-century mass appropriation of the commons, sustained through the constant promotion of consumerist cultures across the world; (4) Coloniality, i.e. the ongoing stratifying power relations and epistemes necessary for maintaining the integrity of intersectional hierarchies; and finally (5) Corruptive politics, energized by the rise of monopoly-finance capital, corporate-state interest-driven advances in surveillance, datafication, bio-, and neuro-technology, and robotic warfare (Hosseini 2020). The system is inherently crisis-prone since the 5Cs require an endless expansion of the planet's capacity. Since we have already passed the earth's biocapacity, and with no present technological solutions on the horizon that can retain this capacity, the same characteristics behind the ascendency of modern civilization are now contributors to its demise. Transversalism aims at consolidating political coalitions and achieving ideational accommodation between social groups on both a class and a non-class basis. [...]it does not imply uniformity or a general theory of social emancipation and the collapse of all differences, autonomies, and local identities.