Nowtopian

Just finished reading Giovanni Arrighi’s two-part essay in last year’s New Left Reviews called “Hegemony Unravelling”. I like Arrighi’s essay, especially at this weirdly insular moment in U.S. history, where an inarticulate fool like Bush makes a speech that focuses SO much attention and discussion among the chattering classes. (I couldn’t even bring myself to join the demo in downtown SF to “drown out” the Bush regime… more cannon fodder duty, no thanks!) Arrighi’s essays argue for a long view of world capitalism, building on the work of David Harvey, Ferdinand Braudel, and his own collaboration with Beverly Silver (I briefly reviewed her important book, Forces of Labor, in Processed World 2.005).

When the ebb and flow of scandal and appointment and war news grips political imagination, it’s terribly difficult to get an overview, to appreciate our moment in history, to think beyond the personal and political dramas that will soon be utterly forgotten as the trivia they are. In “Hegemony Unravelling” it is argued that there have been distinct periods of capitalist development in which specific constellations of government and business institutions “fixed spatially” regimes of profitability. He identifies various periods starting with the city-states of Venice and Genoa and the latter’s relationship with Portugal and Spain, through Amsterdam and the Dutch control of world markets (all of these are transitional city-states depending more on control of instruments of finance than actual territorial domination), and then the British empire’s rise and displacement of the Dutch financiers. In the 20th century, the U.S. ‘wins’ WWI and WWII and finally takes over the central role in managing and designing world accumulation from England, only to founder on its overreach at the current moment. Arrighi is arguing that we are at the terminal point of the U.S. empire, and shows how the period from the signal crisis of U.S. hegemony (the Vietnam war and the ’60s) was overcome by a belle epoque (the 1980s and 1990s ‘prosperity’) similar to ones enjoyed by previous hegemons between their signal crises and terminal crises.

The Neo-conservative attempt to use the military to extend U.S. power and control for another 50 years, destroying in the process the international mechanisms painstakingly created by FDR, Truman and the rest of the U.S. rulers since WWII, is already clearly an abject failure. While they’re bombing the middle east back to premodern conditions, and subverting any popular movements they can (from Haiti and Venezuela to Bolivia, west Africa, etc.), the Chinese are gaining enormous financial leverage over the U.S. government. This doesn’t predict a specific endpoint, or describe how the U.S. hegemony will actually come completely undone, but it underscores the deeper historical processes we’re living through. These processes are far more important historically than the breathless fear and hysteria that accompanies every twist and turn of Washingtonian politics.

And then there is food.

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