Autocracy, Democracy and EcoSocialism in the Geosphere
Caravanserai
Autocracy, Democracy and EcoSocialism in the Geosphere
Christopher Chase-Dunn
April 1, 2026
Thanks to Editors Devparna Roy and Dan Pasciuti for inviting me to kick off a new JWSR events commentary series – the Caravanserai. The most common definition of caravanserai is “an inn where travelers stay”, but an alternative meaning is “a group traveling together” --a caravan. I prefer the second because my comments are intended for those scholars and activists who are journeying together on a wide road to study and analyze world-systems and to alter the future of the contemporary global system in a more progressive direction. The event that I want to foreground happened on January 1, 2025, when democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as the Mayor of New York City.
It is hard to step back from current events in the middle of a chaotic time of troubles (polycrises) like the one we are in. But, as Fernand Braudel said: “Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies…” True, but some of the fireflies symbolize the deep-structural forces that push or pull us toward possible future paths. Changes in the forms of national regimes have been tracked by organizations that study shifts in the extent to which state power is responsive or unresponsive to the will of citizens. The current best of these is the Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem) that was founded in 2014 at the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden). V-Dem publishes an annual Democracy Report that codes types of political regulation into two main categories: democracy (mutual consultation and majority rule) and autocracy (a small elite makes social decisions regardless of the majority). A large panel of experts scores regimes into two levels of democracy, two levels of autocracy, and two “grey zones” of uncertainty, and they study how regimes have changed since 1789 CE using this scheme. The 2025 V-Dem Democracy Report is a fascinating study of the trends of countries and averages of regions and of the world as a whole.
Immanuel Wallerstein’s Modern World-System. Volume 4, focused on what he termed the “geoculture”, a set of interacting semiconsensual political stances composed of a Global Right, Centrist Liberalism, and a Global Left, as these evolved from the French Revolution to 1914. The Global Right has defended the privileges of power and wealth and supported the hierarchical institutions that stand behind these inequalities. The Global Left has challenged inequalities and tried to move the institutional structures toward a more egalitarian, just and sustainable world society. Centrist Liberalism, led by progressive elites, has charted a path that was a compromise between the contemporary Right and the contemporary Left. Wallerstein’s geoculture is an elaboration of what international relations theorists call evolving “world orders.” World orders have mainly been shaped by the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers and a series of “World Revolutions”—multidecadal periods in which rebellions across the system have clustered in time. The big question now is whether the liberal world order that was constituted by the rise of the United States to global preeminence can survive the decline of the U.S. and the rise of challengers for greater shares of global power, most of which have autocratic regimes.
Figure 1: Population Weighted Averaged World Level of Electoral Democracy 1900-2024 (Source: V-Dem Country-Year Dataset v15" Varieties of Democracy Project.
Electoral democracy as defined by V-Dem is not utopia. It is polyarchy in which elite groups compete with one another for support in relatively fair electoral contests. This is far better than autocracy because polyarchal regimes usually defend free speech and a free press, whereas autocracies use force to suppress dissent and monopolize mass communications. Not utopia, but better than autocracy. Electoral democracy is an opportunity to keep moving the needle in a progressive direction.
The population-weighted scores of are averaged to produce the World Economic Democracy scores in Figure. These show a general upward trend since 1900 CE with three waves of democratization and three periods in which democracies declined. Autocracies increased relative to the number of democracies from 1921 to 1944; from 1960 to 1975 and again since 2012. Figure 1 shows that the democratic backslide since 2012 has returned to the lower level of 1985. The V-Dem 2025 Report focused on this most recent democratic backslide. But the two earlier backslides were followed by returns of the upward trend toward electoral democracy. The overall trend was interrupted twice by downturns in which autocratic regimes gained ground, but that were turned back toward electoral democracy after 23 years and 15 years. The 1921-1944 democratic backslide was part of the World Revolution of 1917 in which reactionary movements attacked the Left supported by powerful landowners and capitalists and established fascist and autocratic regimes in Germany, Italy and other European and Latin American countries and in Japan.
The good news is that the long-term upward trend toward more electoral democracy has already recovered twice in the 20th century and so that may be likely to also happen in the 21st century, except that now the U.S. is one of the countries that is trending toward autocracy, whereas in the earlier recoveries the United States was a strong backer of the return of the trend toward liberalism.
The Trump/MAGA effort to subvert elections and media in the U.S. is generating a potentially powerful resistance that that poses a big challenge to the U.S. Democratic Party, the only institution that can prevent the prolongation of the autocratic takeover in the U.S.
The election of Zohran Mamdani in New York is a signal that the decades-long trend in which the Democratic Party has moved to the right could come to an end. Progressive pragmatism and laying of the tracks for an ecosocialist political regime in the U.S. and in world society is a possible outcome of the current time of troubles. In the U.S. this would involve expanding support for organized labor, defending the rights of immigrants, minorities, women and LGBT individuals and building the institutions that MAGA has tried to demolish back better, and strong U.S. support for progressive movements and regimes abroad to move in the direction of publicly regulated market ecosocialism and democratic socialist internationalism. These this could happen if the resistance to a neofascist takeover in the U.S. can persuade the military and the police to support the constitution when the Trumpists make their “Reichstag” move, and if the resistance strongly supports progressive electoral campaigns at all levels in the mid-term elections of 2026 and the presidential election in 2028.
These elections are probably the last chance to subvert a much longer period in which autocracy reigns in the U.S., but progressive movements also should prepare for the eventuality of a longer reactionary crack-down. The long-term movement toward electoral democracy will probably resume as it did after earlier autocratic challenges because democracy, even in its polyarchal form, is a better legitimation for governance than is autocracy. Popular sovereignty is the idea that the purpose of states is to protect and support the interests of the “people.” Much of the struggle is over the definition of which people are to be protected. Waves of globalization and deglobalization in the sense of greater and lesser connectedness produce winners and losers, and right-wing politicians opportunistically mobilize the losers to support oligarchs.
That is where we are. The big question is what to do
about it. Capitalist Realism has produced a global culture in which what Maggie
Thatcher said about no alternatives is a powerful ideological force that shuts
down our ability to think about possible futures. But the notion that our
species could construct an egalitarian ecosocialist world order that would
operate in the interests of all the people of the Earth and protect the
environment is still alive and well. This may take some time, but one advantage
of the world-system perspective is that it encourages us to look beyond the
short-term time horizon and to consider what will happen to our species if we
do nothing and what could happen if we put our shoulders to the wheel of global
history with a collectively rational alternative to the war of all against all.
Professor Christopher Chase-Dunn attended Shasta College in Redding, the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University where he was awarded a PhD in Sociology in 1975. His dissertation reported cross-national comparative research on the effects of dependence on foreign investment. His first academic job was at Johns Hopkins University where he studied systems of cities and helped to develop the world-systems perspective on sociocultural evolution since the Stone Age. In 1995 founded the Journal of World-Systems Research (JWSR) . He moved to the University of California-Riverside in 2000 to found the Institute for Research on World-Systems. His vita is at: https://irows.ucr.edu/cd/ccdvitae.pdf
Links to further reading:
Ciao Chris, I like your compelling emotional appeal, including your glasses. But let me note that it rests on several unexamined assumptions that are worth challenging. Here are a few key points.
ReplyDeleteWhat you get right: The critique of "Capitalist Realism" — the ideological foreclosure of alternatives — is a legitimate and well-documented phenomenon. The call to think in longer historical timescales is also genuinely useful.
Where it struggles: The vision of an "egalitarian ecosocialist world order" operating "in the interests of all the people of the Earth" is stated rather than examined. Who decides those collective interests? History provides sobering warnings about universalist projects that claim to speak for all humanity — they have often served the interests of the few who set the terms. The paragraph completely avoids this issue.
The binary it constructs — either ecosocialism or "the war of all against all" — is, in my humble opinion, also a false dilemma. It forecloses the very plurality of futures. What is more, optimism without a mechanism is closer to wishful thinking than political strategy.
Takeaway: Let me observe that, while I share with you the diagnosis of ideological paralysis, ironically, it reproduces it in reverse, replacing one totalizing vision with another. The more honest challenge is not to assert a singular global alternative, but to cultivate multiple, competing, local experiments in post-neoliberal capitalist living, and let those inform each other. Big emancipatory ideas need institutional humility to avoid becoming the next cage.
As always,
Tommaso
Thanks to Tommaso Durante for noting the plurality of possible futures, the open-endedness of human history and the implausibility of inevitability that was part of earlier historical materialist stage theories. I agree with him completely about that. But those of us who are studying and trying to explain macrosociocultural evolution do not try to say what will happen. We use models of what caused the major transformations in the past to help us guess about the outcomes that are most likely in the short, middle and long range futures. Denouncing universalist projects, totalizing visions and a singular global alternative and replacing those with the cultivation of multiple, competing, local experiments that inform each other is an alternative vision of the human that also contains a number of problematic assumptions that require attention. Having both participated in and studied the World Social Forum process (see below), I know well the pluriverse ideas that are predominant in the global justice movement and am very cognizant of the problems produced by core/periphery hierarchy in realms of political economy, science and political ideas. But political visions of progressive, egalitarian, democratic and sustainable that take account of what has happened with the evolution of global capitalism and the real reasons why earlier socialist experiments were all reintegrated into global capitalism are in short supply. Saying ‘let a hundred flowers bloom’ is not much help with this.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the next “cage”, the real issue is not whether some kind of global hierarchy will reemerge out the chaos and collapses that are on the horizon, but what kind of hierarchy that will be and who will have some say over what it tries to accomplish. If multiple competing local progressive communities emerge , they will need to work out ways for structuring their interactions with one another and will need to provide protection, at least for a while, from those forces that will seek to either destroy or reincorporate them into some evolved form of capitalism or neofeudalism. Ideas about how to organize at the global level are necessary and will need to come from somewhere. Humility is good, but not a good excuse for ignoring the demands of the current situation. In the end it does not matter where useful ideas come from. What matters is what people do with them.
Chase-Dunn, C., Aldecoa, J., Breckenridge-Jackson, I., & Herrera, J. S. 2019 “Anarchism in the Web of Transnational Social Movements” Journal of World-Systems Research, 25(2), 373-394. https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2019.876
Chase-Dunn, C. James Fenelon, Thomas D. Hall, Ian Breckenridge-Jackson, and Joel Herrera 2020 “Global Indigenism and the Web of Transnational Social Movements” Pp 411-440 in Ino Rossi (ed.) Challenges of Globalization and Prospects for an Inter-civilizational World Order Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature Switzerland AG https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows87/irows87.htm
Chase-Dunn, C. and Paul Almeida 2020 Global Struggle and Social Change Movements: From Prehistory to World Revolution in the 21st Century Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.