Re: Arrighi's _Long Twentieth Century_

Mon, 26 Jun 1995 12:46:19 -0400
Carl H.A. Dassbach (dassbach@mtu.edu)

Given CC-Ds observations on GA's LONG 20th C.(L20C), which I take as a
kick-off of WSN's planned discussion of the book, I would like to raise two
questions - one, old and one new.

Old question - Is L20C world-system? Why - or more generally, what does it
mean to adopt a "w-s" perspectives.

New question - What is the role and purpose of historical social science or
historical knowledge in the social sciences? to fulfill some historical
curiosity, to tell a better and more interesting story about vanished social
formations ......

CC-D writes:

This is a new world-systemic version of the "stages
>of capitalism" literature, but in my opinion Arrighi gets
>it right whereas earlier efforts have missed much that is
>important in characterizing the evolution of capitalism.

I have my reservations about the terms "stages" and "evolution" - I would
prefer to see these as "incarnations" instead of "stages" and I am curious
to what CC-D means by "evolution". I have always read IW as maintaining
that the system does not "evolve" - it expands and deepens but the basic
structures function in the same manner. Ergo( for example), there was no
industrial revolution.

>The big point that Arrighi convincingly makes is that
>efficient production is not a sufficient condition for
>successful capitalist accumulation. The right combination
>of political/military power and financial capability is
>the true essence of hegemonic success and these determine
>which regions are capable of moving up the pecking order
>to high value-added production.
>

Agreed - but I think that it is important to apply this "general principle"
- that it is not simply a matter of efficeint production but others factors
such as markets and financial capabilities - to explaining the success of
other capitalist institutions such as enterprises (In this respect, see
William's ET.AL's recent book on the auto industry, CARS)

> The only criticism I have of Arrighi's model is that
>it ignores and dismisses the important work that has been
>done on shorter cycles such as the Kondratieff wave, the
>war cycle (Joshua Goldstein, _Long Cycles_) and debt
>cycles (Christian Suter, _Debt Cycles in the World
>Economy_). It might be argued that adding these to
>Arrighi's schema would unnecessarily complicate his
>elegant model.

I don't think it is ignored - they just aren't explicitly discussed because
they are not necessary to the point that is being made.

I do have some concerns about the "elegance" of the model. It is
wonderfully elegant but maybe `too' elegant - too neat, too clean, too
authoritative, too encompassing - contingency (which is the essential to the
historical process) `vanishes.' I am not saying that contingency (and
anomaly) are replaced by determinism but they are (somehow)
displaced/subsumed to some higher order logic. In a sense, (and I am not
quite sure how) GA's own observations about "displacing anomalies from the
field of analysis" in the Introduction to the GEOMETRY OF IMPERIALISM may be
relevant here.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Carl H.A. Dassbach E-mail: DASSBACH@MTU.EDU
Dept. of Social Sciences Phone: (906)487-2115
Michigan Technological University Fax: (906)487-2468
Houghton, MI 49931 USA