Nothing New Under the Sun
Sep 16th, 2009 by Donagh
From the Postscript to the Second Edition of The Long Twentieth Century (March 21, 2009) by Giovanni Arrighi
“According to Braudel, ‘financial expansions,’ are symptoms of maturity of a particular phase of capitalist development. In discussing the withdrawal of the Dutch from commerce around 1740 to become ‘the bankers of Europe’, Braudel suggests that this withdrawal is a recurrent world-systemic tendency. The same tendency had already been in evidence in fifteenth century Italy, and again around 1560, when the leading groups of the Genoese business diaspora gradually withdrew from commerce to exercise for about seventy years a rule over European finances ‘that was so discreet and sophisticated that historians for a long time failed to notice it’. After the Dutch, the English replicated the tendency during and after the Great Depression of 1873–96, when the end of ‘the fantastic venture of the industrial revolution’ created an overabundance of money capital. After the equally ‘fantastic venture’ of so-called Fordism-Keynesianism, US capital since the 1970s has followed a similar trajectory. We can easily recognize in this latest ‘rebirth’ of finance capital yet another instance of that recurrent reversal to ‘eclecticism’ which in the past has been associated with the maturity of a major capitalist development. ‘[Every] capitalist development of this order seems, by reaching the stage of financial expansion, to have in some sense announced its maturity: it [is] a sign of autumn’ (Braudel 1984: 157, 164, 242-3, 246).
Closely related to this contention, is Marx’s observation that the credit system has been a key instrument, both nationally and internationally, of the transfer of surplus capital from declining to rising centers of capitalist trade and production. Since Marx’s core argument in Capital abstracts from the role of states in processes of capital accumulation, national debts and the alienation of the assets and future revenues of states are dealt with under the rubric of ‘primitive accumulation,’ that is, “an accumulation not the result of the capitalist mode of production, but its starting point” (Marx 1959: 713, 754-5). This conceptualization prevented Marx from appreciating, as Weber did, the continuing significance of national debts in a capitalist system embedded in states continually competing with one another for mobile capital. Nevertheless, Marx did acknowledge the continuing significance of national debts, not as an expression of interstate competition, but as means of an ‘invisible’ inter-capitalist cooperation that ‘started’ capital accumulation over and over again across the space-time of world capitalism from its inception through his own days:
With the national debt arose an international credit system, which often conceals one of the sources of primitive accumulation in this or that people. Thus the villainies of the Venetian thieving system formed one of the secret bases of the capital-wealth of Holland to whom Venice in her decadence lent large sums of money. So was it with Holland and England. By the beginning of the 18th century…. Holland had ceased to be the nation preponderant in commerce and industry. One of its main lines of business, therefore, [became] the lending out of enormous amounts of capital, especially to its great rival England. [And the] same thing is going on to-day between England and the United States. (Marx 1959: 755-6)
Marx never developed the theoretical implications of this historical observation. In spite of the considerable space dedicated to ‘money-dealing capital’ in the third volume of Capital, he never rescued national debts and the alienation of the state from their confinement to the mechanisms of an accumulation that is “not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its starting point.” And yet, in his own historical observation, what appears as a ‘starting point’ in one center (Holland, England, the United States) is at the same time the ‘end point’ of long periods of capital accumulation in previously established centers (Venice, Holland, England). To use Braudel’s imagery, each and every financial expansion is simultaneously the ‘Autumn’ of a capitalist development of world-historical significance that has reached its limits in one place and the ‘Spring’ of a development of even greater significance that is beginning in another place.
As previously mentioned, a similar tendency has been in evidence over the last 15 years. However, as I noted in The Long Twentieth Century quoting Joel Kotkin and Yoriko Kishimoto (1988: 123), “in a stunning reversal of Marx’s dictum, the United States is not following the pattern of other capital-exporting empires (Venice, Holland, Great Britain), but now is attracting a new wave of overseas investment.” As China displaced Japan in leading the East Asian economic expansion in the 1990s and 2000s, the reversal became less marked, because US corporations have invested in China to a far greater extent than they ever did in Japan. It remains nonetheless true that the flows of capital from the rising (East Asian) to the declining (US) centers of capital accumulation continue to exceed the flows going in the opposite direction.”
Image is of an Admirael van der Eijck from the 1637 catalog of P.Cos., sold for 1045 florins on February 5, 1637.
Hi Donagh–
That’s very interesting. I’m dying to read Arrighi’s book when I can afford to get hold of it.
Sylvia Federici makes a similar point in the intro to Caliban and the Witch, here
http://counago-and-spaves.blogspot.com/2008/10/readings-5.html
She argues that
“A return of the most violent aspects of primitive accumulation has accompanied every phase of capitalist globalization, including the present one, demonstrating that the continuous expulsion of farmers from the land, war and plunder on a world scale, and the degradation of women are necessary conditions for the existence of capitalism in all times.”
Whether the “phases of capitalist development” and their accompanying crises signify a progression toward immanentizing the eschaton or are just the result of the exhaustion of a particular market and accompanying technologies of exploitation, however, is another matter.
It is very interesting, and I had to resist the temptation to put in a longer quote, but it gets even more interesting later. I should pick up one of his books myself, but the good thing about the updated postscript is that he provides the main points of The Long Twentieth Century so it saves you the bother of having to read it.
Further on down Arrighi confirms how war, for example, is a necessary prerequisite of the expansion of capital, as it moves from city state (Genoa), to nation state (Holland) to world-states (the US). But, damn it, I’m going to quote from it again.
Sorry, but I think this stuff is essential to understand what is going on at the moment. But going back to your original point, I don’t Arrighi sees it as a progression, or simply a constant cycle of expansion and busts. But it seems that the contradictions of capital are within capital itself and it’s worth noting that this specialization in financial speculation, which we have seen recently, and its collapse is not an anomaly, but is part of a system which suggests that we are on the edge of regime change. No surprise then that Arrighi’s last book is called Adam Smith in Beijing
Immanentizing the eschaton? Is immanentizing a real verb? If so, I like it.
I’m going to use that in my chats about Lisbon and NAMA from now on. I can say, ‘god, I’m so sick and tired of the way that all debates about NAMA/Lisbon tend towards immanentizing the eschaton!’