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Long Twentieth

Finds long-term patterns in history of capitalism, 1994

Summary

• A recent Marxist historian, student of Immanuel Wallerstein, writes a history of the last seven hundred years of history as only global capitalist development, so that WWI is merely a fight over raw materials and markets in colonies (that is, financiers realize that the best way to make money is to provoke international aggression), and the Civil War was a fight between agricultural and industrial production only.

• The history of capitalism is a history of succeeding Long Centuries, which is a new combination of economic and political formations that expand national power globally: an experience in organizing capital. In each “Long Century,” one nation dominates global trade routes, remaking capital in its own image (a paradigm shift) in reaction to the previous dominant system, each going through a cycle of trade, finance, a “wonderful” moment of apparent regeneration and wealth, and decline. At certain historical moments, the best way to make money is destroying the system it’s based on.

• Spurred on in 1970s by studying the collapse of the dominance of the American dollars in the global market, he finds out that the fall of American dominance has similarities in history: this has happened three times before. Upshot, in Jameson’s words: what happens in contemporary culture “only replicates the bitter experience of the dead” Critical Inquiry 24.1)

The Overlapping Systems

• Genoese (renaissance): loose (Genoese v Florentine v Venetian)
  • Cosmopolitan-imperial (extensive: costs are externalized)
• Dutch (Early Modern): centralized (Dutch v Spanish)
  • Corporate-national (intensive: costs are internalized)
  • Commercialization of waterways and oceans
  • think Dutch East India Company
• British (Victorian): loose (Brits v Germans v French)
  • Cosmopolitan-imperial (extensive: costs are externalized)
  • Takes all the good stuff from the above times: commercial strength, use of armies, territorial expansion: but adds industrial development in England to it
  • Whereas the others were just about finance and trade strength: they care about production
• American: centralized (Germans v Americans)
  • Corporate-national (intensive: costs are internalized)
  • Non-territorialized; use of multinational corporations
• Speculation about a potential Japanese era, which as been discounted

What Each Cycle Looks Like

• Uses Marx’s Capital equation: M-C-M’ (money is used as capital to create surplus money)
  • M: accumulation of money, often violent (seizure), often by trade
  • C: accumulated money invested in agriculture and manufacture
    • Stage two is limited, affecting all areas (production, distribution, consumption): falling rate of profit (investment not yielding increase in profit)
    • This is what Arrighi gets from John Hicks, A Theory of Economic History 1969
    • So you have to move on to stage three
  • M’: finance capital (speculation: search for “the new kinds of profits available in financial transactions themselves and as such” says Jameson 251
    • Productive moment OVER; capital floats free (to use D and G, deterritorialized; Jameson says it’s like butterfly out of chrysalis, no longer “railroad money” or “wheat money”)
      • We see this as “capital flight” (jobs going overseas) and now see it on the stock floor as “disembodied phantasmagoria” (Jameson again): this moment is there in every single long century
    • It’s Braudel’s “stage of autumn;” for Arrighi, it’s the last stage of each capitalist formation
• What Next? It will “die” and be “reborn,” says Jameson, in a higher form

Specifics

• Remember: by “American,” it means not only a form of political power but also an economic formation. Nations fight b/c they have competing forms of global capital (not for recognition, as Kojeve would say).
• Influences: Marx, Smith, Braudel, Hicks (some Tilly, Schumpeter, Weber)
• Capitalism more about finance: the movement of capital: rather than wage labor or production of goods OR about the emergence of a market or entrepreneurship
  • Finance: when profits from goods just aren’t enough, capital separates from goods….but this (taking from Braudel here) is the “sign of autumn” (Braudel’s words)
  • Finance capital isn’t one stage of capitalism, but instead key in ANY Long Century, in any economic formation
  • And of course the interaction of “mobile money capital” and the political systems that govern it: he says that people have ignored the connex between states and capital
    • Capitalism = state + capital
• “Organizational revolution” = the change to a new hegemon
  • But each system carries the seeds of its own destruction: eg Dutch whose acquisition of territory (they didn’t really mean to get it) ended up in warring against other states who wanted power, eg Spanish)
• Future? Well, multinational elements of American stuff will lead to power drain away from America.

Jameson on It, Critical Inquiry 24.1

• “producing a problem we did not know we had, in the very process of crystallizing a solution for it: the problem of finance capital”
  • Ie, we seem to have forgotten that there’s something weird about not focusing on industrial production (how can you have capital w/o production?)
  • Arrighi’s real insight: “this kind of telos need not lay in a straight line” but instead could be more like a “spiral:” “Discontinuous but expansive”
    • Agrees with Mandel: Each crisis leads to “mutation” that allows an expansion of reach: a “wider field” of investment, transformation, and control, but what Arrighi does is add the “historian’s perspective” to the economist perspective
  • Arrighi shows discontinuous capital not only in time (ie not a smooth progression in time) but also in space: think of the nations, he reminds us
    • So that capitalism moving is “spasmodic” in time and “leaping” in space
  • It’s dialectical: winners lose and losers win
    • capitalism full of “false starts and fresh starts”
• Jameson’s Interpretation of Arrighi
  • Arrighi presents capitalism as “epidemic of epidemics,” moving like a virus: it eventually plays out and must move to a new, more favorable environment (leaping from Renaissance Italy to Spain, for example, even while it was funded by Genoa: Jameson says that’s characteristic, where you opponent takes your system and beats you at your own game)
• (says Western Marxism really began in 1917)
  • Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital 1910
  • Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism 1916 (pamphlet)
  • Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 1966
    • Note the frenetic search for newer and newer areas of investment
  • Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism 1975
    • Each crisis leads to “mutation” that allows an expansion of reach: a “wider field” of investment, transformation, and control
    • Thus he accounts for “resiliency” of capitalism, which you can also see in Grundrisse
    • Jameson’s critique of Mandel: “late capitalism” means he still has a telos in mind, seems to imply “uniform historical progression”
      • He says anytime he uses the term late capitalism, it’s an homage to Mandel and not an agreement about such a telos
  • D and G, A Thousand Plateaus, saying capitalism has its own logic, an “axiomatic,” entirely different from precapitalist formations