Giovanni Arrighi's _Long 20th Century_

Wed, 28 Jun 1995 11:08:45 -0400
chris chase-dunn (chriscd@jhu.edu)

Carl Dassbach wonders if Giovanni Arrighi's book, _The Long Twentieth
Century_ (Verso 1994), employs a world-systems perspective
and asks "what does it mean to adopt a 'w-s' perpective." I do not find any
ambiguity here. Arrighi says he is theorizing about the modern world-system
and I accept his word for it. True there is not much about the
core/periphery hierarchy in the book, though it does enter importantly in to
the model because core capitalists and states are competing for access to
peripheral raw materials and surplus and resistance from the periphery plays
a role in the turbulent periods that cause accumulation regimes to fail and
new ones to emerge. What key elements of the world-systems perspective are
absent that would make Carl ask this question?

Carl questions the use of the term "evolution" and contends that Immanuel
Wallerstein holds that the "the system does not 'evolve' - it expands and
deepens but the basic structures function in the same manner." Well I have
also been a big proponent of this continuity thesis. Chapters 3 and 4 of
my _Global Formation_ argue that the various "stages of capitalism"
approaches are
wrong and that the basic model of world-system cycles and trends has
operated unchanged for 500 years as the system expanded and deepened. But I
wrote that
before reading about Arrighi's systemic cycles of accumulation.
Arrighi's model gets the continuities and the changes right. His
specification of
accumulation regimes does not wipe out the validity of the basic cycles and
trends model. But it adds to it those qualitative organizational changes
that have allowed capitalism to adapt to its own contradictions. The
question that now needs to be addressed is what, if any, changes did the
different accumulation regimes make in the basic cycles and trends model?

I now realize that the basic model was formulated with the British hegemony
in the foreground and that is why there is so much emphasis on production.
The "stages of hegemony" sequence formulated by Immanuel Wallerstein posits
phases of consumption goods, capital goods and finance capital. This
sequence is strongly suggested by the British hegemony (e.g. Hobsbawm's
_Industry and Empire_) and then the model is
adapted for the Dutch hegemony. So, reacting to all the historians and
Marxists who say the Dutch hegemony was merchant capitalism, Wallerstein
looks for (and finds) the sectors that were the basis of original Dutch
successes -- the herring fisheries, boat-building, etc.
Arrighi, starting
from the Genoese accumulation regime and using Braudel's conceptualization
of capitalism, does not use the British hegemony to construct his model of
a systemic cycle of accumulation. Thus he is better able to see what was
unique about the British hegemony.

In response to my criticism that Arrighi ignores shorter cycles, especially
the Kondratieff wave, Carl says that these are not
relevant to the processes Arrighi is studying. On p. 7 Arrighi contends that
Kondratieff cycles are theoretically irrelevant to theories of capitalism
because Joshua Goldstein's work on K-waves does not use the term capitalism.
Yet there is a long and deep discussion of K-waves from a Marxist
perspective. Perhaps best-known is Ernest Mandel's _Long Waves of Capitalist
Development_ (Cambridge UP 1980). The examination of the relationship between
K-waves (and shorter business cycles) and systemic cycles of accumulation is
necessary for understanding
the past, but also for understanding the present and the future.
Also, cycles of war
intensity and severity and debt cycles need to be brought in to Arrighi's
model and investigated empirically.

Is anyone else out there?

chris
Prof. Chris Chase-Dunn
Department of Sociology
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD. 21218 USA
tel 410 516 7633 fax 410 516 7590 email chriscd@jhu.edu