Christopher Chase-Dunn

Christopher Chase-Dunn

Christopher Chase-Dunn (born January 10, 1944) is an American sociologist.

Quotes

• Historical capitalism is not a system in which state power is abolished or in which states never interfere with market forces. Rather it is a system in which the most successful competitors use state power to facilitate capitalist accumulation. This does not mean that taxation and tribute are abolished, but rather that they are utilized to support the search for profit-making opportunities in the world market.
  • World State Formation: Historical Processes and Emergent Necessity [1]

• National societies (both their states and their nations) have emerged over the last few centuries to become the strongest socially constructed identities and organizations in the modern world, but they have never been whole systems.
  • "The emergence of predominant capitalism: the long 16th century": Review of Immanuel Wallerstein�s The Modern World-System, Volume 1.� 2011 edition, Berkeley: University of California Press [2]

• Thirty years ago, Giovanni Arrighi, Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein pointed out that revolutionaries rarely attain their demands immediately. Rather what happens is that ‘enlightened conservatives’ implement the demands of the most recent previous world revolution in order to cool out the challenges of a current world revolution. This is the way in which world revolutions produce the evolution of global governance
  • 2013 [3]

• A resistance to formal organization is common among the Left, as we have seen not only in the World Social Forum but also in phenomena like Occupy and the Arab Spring. Activists sought to intentionally avoid the inherent conservatism of institutions, which can often fight to maintain their own self-interest and internal power structure. But the avoidance of organization hamstrings any movement’s ability to achieve its own goals.
  • "Thinking Diagonally," contribution to GTI Forum "Planetize the Movement!," Great Transition Initiative (April 2020) [4]

• ...These are exciting times. Another World Revolution is happening. The Global Right and the Global Left are once again contending with each other and with centrist liberalism. It is different this time around, but imagination and perseverance will be rewarded, as they were in the World Revolution of 1917. As my old friend Andre Gunder Frank often said, a luta continua. (2020)
  • "Thinking Diagonally," contribution to GTI Forum "Planetize the Movement!," Great Transition Initiative (April 2020) [5]