gpe5

Monday, 21 February 2005

original here

Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century is quite similar to Frank’s in terms of the project he has undertaken. He is mostly drawing on the historical and economic analyses of others rather than doing his own primary research. In doing so, however, he has a very different end. Whereas Frank was more interested in showing the utility of a certain method of historical inquiry, Arrighi is making a more concrete argument about the function of finance capital and the cycles of its expansion in capitalist development. He is not very reflective about the methodology he uses, but in the terms Frank uses, he is employing a world system’s approach, but it is much more informed by a vertical analysis of the similarities and differences between different capitalist formations at different times rather than a horizontal analysis of similar events happening at the same time. The latter is important to him—as shown in his analysis of the Italian city-states—but his not using it primarily is, in some ways, a testament to the limits of its usefulness, or at least the limits that one should place on Frank’s unequivocal belief in its total explanatory power.

On the other hand, the differences in how the two define their objects clearly delineate the moments when each method might be more or less correct. The Kondratieff cycles on which Frank bases/constitutes his arguments about the 17^th century silver crisis—and the benefits of his mode of analysis—are discarded by Arrighi early on because, as he says, “there is no agreement in the literature on what long-term fluctuations in prices—whether of the logistic or Kondratieff kind—indicate. They are certainly not reliable indicators of the contractions and expansions of whatever is specifically capitalist in the modern world system”(7). This, it seems, is also important in Arrighi’s focus on Europe and the “capitalist world system” as opposed to the holistic world system that Frank advocates (and follows Abu Lughod and others in illuminating.) Namely, that he is focusing on the development of a mode of production—something which Frank categorically dismisses. Arrighi addresses this as well, and sets up most of his argument to come, by acknowledging the variety of ways that people have considered the cycles of development of the world economy, but making the distinction between simple exchange, manufacture, wage-labor or commerce and “capitalism:”

As in Marx’s general formula of capital (MCM’), [. . . .] an agency is capitalist in virtue of the fact that its money is endowed with the “power of breeding” (Marx’s expression) systematically and persistently, regardless of the nature of the particular commodities or activities that are incidentally the medium at any given time.(8)

It is largely with this in mind that Arrighi bases his “systemic cycle of accumulation.” It is, in effect, a projection of this process of accumulation across the “long century” (or in this case multiple long centuries) of its development. His argument is that the hegemon of a given regime of accumulation of the capitalist world system has two phases in its growth: the first is a material expansion (MC) and the second is a financial expansion (CM’). He says that there have been four systemic cycles of accumulation since capitalism began in the modern world system and each has been led by one state (or city-state): Genoa then Holland then Britain then the US. An important component of this argument is largely that the second phase always signals the demise of the current system. The upshot of his argument is, ultimately, that the US’s time is up and someone is about to take its torch. Arrighi points to developments in US Japanese relations as indicators of the likely successor, but he also suggests that cultural factors may limit the ability to have the process reach completion i.e. racism keeps the US from allowing Japan to take the leading role.

The prevalence of states in this lineup should also indicate his understanding of capitalism as having a special relationship with the state. This is another place where he sees a distinction between his own work and that of Frank and Abu-Lughod. There are a variety of other analytical distinctions that Arrighi makes to make his argument, but one of the more useful is the difference between a territorialist versus a capitalist state (33). The difference becomes quite important when he begins a discussion of the different logics of each of the states leading their cycles of accumulation.

In outlining the development of each of these phases he is much more useful—in my mind—than Frank. He focuses not only on justifying events as rational based on a neo-classical understanding, but also on the different social, economic, and even cultural configurations that rule within each state of the cycle and the way that these relate to other states. His perspective does make it difficult to see the connections throughout the world system, but it makes it much easier to understand the way conjunctures have developed from below as well as from above. The first chapter, which begins with an IR conception of Hegemony pace Cox and Gill, was quite different than the three that followed. I found the latter interesting, but will need to review them to come up with any concrete understanding of the concepts I could take away. If nothing else, they provide an interesting history of the development of finance. I will return to this some below.

For now, I will say that the sections I found most stimulating were the discussion he had about hegemony. I was a bit disappointed that he separated this out from the discussion of finance because I think the cannot really be separated. To look at the world financial markets today, there is nothing economically rational about anyone holding US currency in reserve, nothing sensible about OPEC nations selling solely in dollars, little that could make the foreign extension of credit to the US understandable in purely economic terms. It seems that it can only be explained in the dialectical understanding of hegemony that he attributes to Cox and others.

I also think more synthesis between these sections would be useful because many of the social, cultural, and even political factors that he attributes to the rise of each hegemon within their cycle of accumulation would be more interesting mapped onto their financial expansion.