By Franz Schurmann

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Prediction #54 for Tuesday, April 4th, 2000

Three Popular -Ism Words Coming to Spell Revolution: Globalism, Racism and Terrorism

In their 1848 Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels called out: "workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains." They saw the new capitalists

already uniting worldwide to forge those chains. It was only a matter of time, they believed, till the workers of the world united to break the chains.

But during the following 100 years neither capitalists nor workers united globally. Instead both operated within the framework of the newly emerging nation-states. When in 1914 the first "World" (meaning Europe) War broke out what transnational unity there was among both capitalists and workers also broke down.

But around 1950 a process began that by the 1970s led to a truly global economy and by 2000 witnessed global corporate mergers on a stupendous scale. Many corporate behemoths now have cash and assets that dwarf the budgets of virtually all the members of the UN. Increasingly their CEO's and staffs are becoming multinational.

Looking down from Heaven Marx and Engels were chortling with glee. We were wrong in our timing, they said to each other, but right in our logic. It's now only a matter of time until mergers of workers, first on a transnational and then on a global scale, will emerge as a revolutionary countervailing force.

In his day the theoretician Marx saw capitalism sweeping over the world. The laws of history, as his teacher Hegel held, operate through forces and counter-forces. Though many of the latter fail, a counter-force will eventually appear that moves history along on its evolutionary path. The world-spanning force he saw was capitalism. The counter-force that would vanquish but also carry it farther along would be socialism.

In current usage a word having the suffix ­ism denotes an ideology. Ideology can be defined as a set of ideas that have action consequences. Certainly the word capitalism has emerged as a powerful action ideology. That's evident by the incessant pro-capitalism breast-beating in any issue of "Forbes" or "Fortune" magazines.

On the other hand the power the word socialism had in Marx's day has faded. And even the word communism, socialism's dreaded brother, has lost its fangs. Nor is "the working class" anywhere in the world at the center of revolutionary action.

There are, however, other ­ism words that nowadays elicit the strong emotions, positive and negative, that socialism and communism once aroused. The three most widely used ones are globalism, racism and terrorism. And each designates major flows of history now going on.

Globalism is a much more commonly used word worldwide than capitalism. In the 1930's when the Great Depression ravaged the industrial world capitalism was deeply hated. Now globalism has taken its place, as was evident during the WTO meeting in Seattle last November 30. The fear globalism arouses is that huge multinational corporations will rule the world and rob us of our identities. It also is a word that both left and right can freely use.

Racism not only implies race hatred but race war. The socio-political nightmare many people have is that the whole world could become a Bosnia or Rwanda where ethnic groups slaughter each other. A group is only a group if all its members share a common characteristic that non others have. In Bosnia you either are a Muslim, Croat or Serb. And being at the wrong place at the same time could mean death.

Terrorism is the new word replacing revolution. Revolutions are counter-forces. They break mind-sets and substitute new ideas for them. They also kill and vilify people. Currently the revolutionary force mainly implied by the word terrorism is Islamic fundamentalism.

These three ­ism words say a lot about popular understanding of current historical forces and counter-forces. Globalism is a mighty expansion of capitalism over the entire globe. Marx has to be credited with first having had this vision of the future. He also saw capitalism as breaking down all social relations including family. All that would be left would be the solitary proletarian owning nothing but his body to sell for a pittance to a capitalist.

Instead, however, globalist capitalism has brought forth an entire world of consumers mesmerized by the cornucopia of cheap things they can buy through capitalism's millions of gaudy outlets. Capitalism's revolutionary vision is that peace and prosperity for all in the world can be achieved by radical globalization.

Racism implies that race matters. Race's brother is ethnicity, though in Europe the word is still used for ethnicity. Ethnicity does matter. So does religion. All three race, ethnicity and religion give people an identity. More and more people in the world are opting for identity as a source of a belonging they can never get from globalism.

Several violent revolutions have occurred over the last quarter of a century. First came the 1979 Islamic revolution Iran in 1979, then the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan in the late 1990's. Islamic revolutionaries rule the Sudan. The Chechen resistance to the Russians is Islamic as is the Kashmiri resistance.

But revolutions come in non-lethal forms as well. The recent Ugandan mass deaths occurred in a region that has been roiled by Christian, Islamic and traditional religious movements. Religion is spreading throughout Latin America and its branches reach deep into the US. The most significant resistance the Chinese government has recently encountered has not been from nationalist Tibetans or Uigurs but from a religious mass movement, the Fa-lun-gong.

Marx called religion "the opiate of the people." And his followers hailed "scientific socialism" as the ideological wave of the revolutionary future. But he and Engels must be ruminating about what went wrong in their theory.

One thing they might consider is that all the revolutionary religious movements believe in two worlds, not one. The two are the World of the Seen and the World of the Unseen. That is why so many commit "revolutionary suicide," in the words of the late Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton. They opt for a higher plane through death.