SUMMARY
What are the controversies here? Wagar makes one main point and several subsidiary ones. The mainpoint is that a world party will /should be the principal organizational vehicle for the long-run victory of democratic socialism in a global commonwealth. The subsidiary points are (1) thatthe array of (multi-) cultures will / should give way to (or at least not preclude) agreement on the basic values of the Western Enlightenment; (2) that currently existing anti-systemic movements may be opposed to this or that aspect of contemporary social organization but are not really very anti-systemic, because they do not challenge the world-economy or the interstate system; (3) t hat the world will most probably pass through a prolonged and chaotic time of troubles (possibly including such horrors as environmental catastrophe, widespread nuclear war, or global North - South war) before the integrated, peaceful, egal itarian Utopia arrives; and (4) that world-system theory implies something like the world party as its complementary praxis. The implication is that world-system adepts should unburden themselves of illusory hopes in today's motley semi-relevant movements and set about the task of party formation. To me, not much of this makes sense, representing rather an awkward global analogy with what voluntarist Marxist political doctrine was taken to mean at the national level.