Giovanni Arrighi's Systemic Cycles of Accumulation

Discussion

Christopher Chase-Dunn:

"Giovanni Arrighi's (1994) evolutionary account of ‘systemic cycles of accumulation’ has solved some of the problems of Wallerstein's notion that world capitalism started in the long sixteenth century and then only went through repetitive cycles and trends. Arrighi's account is explicitly evolutionary, but rather than positing ‘stages of capitalism’ and looking for each country to go through them (as most of the older Marxists did), he posits somewhat overlapping global cycles of accumulation in which finance capital and state power take on new forms and increasingly penetrate the whole system. This was a big improvement over both Wallerstein's world cycles and trends and the traditional Marxist national stages of capitalism.

Arrighi's (1994, 2006) ‘systemic cycles of accumulation’ are more different from one another than are Wallerstein's cycles of expansion and contraction and upward secular trends. And Arrighi (2006) has made more out of the differences between the current period of the U.S. hegemonic decline and the decades at the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century when British hegemony was declining. The emphasis is less on the beginning and the end of the capitalist world-system and more on the evolution of new institutional forms of capitalist accumulation and the increasing incorporation of modes of control into the logic of capitalism. Arrighi (2006), taking a cue from Andre Gunder Frank (1998), saw the rise of China as portending a new systemic cycle of accumulation in which ‘market society’ will eventually come to replace rapacious finance capital as the leading institutional form in the next phase of world history. Arrighi did not discuss the end of capitalism and the emergence of another basic logic of social reproduction and accumulation. His analysis is more in line with the ‘types of capitalism’ and ‘multiple modernities’ literature, except that he is analyzing the whole system rather than separate national societies. Arrighi sees the development of market society in China as a consequence of the differences between the East Asian and Europe-centered systems before their merger in the 19th century, and also as an outcome of the Chinese Revolution. His discussion of Adam Smith's notions of societal control over finance capital is interesting, but he is vague as to what the forces that can counter-balance the power of finance capital might be. In China it is obviously the Communist Party and the new class of technocratic mandarins. This is somewhat similar in form to Peter Evans's (1979) discussion of the importance of technocrats in Brazilian, Japanese and Korean national development, though Arrighi does not say so.

Arrighi also provides a more explicit analysis of how the current world situation is similar to, and different from, the period of declining British hegemonic power before World War I (see summary in Chase-Dunn and Lawrence 2011: 147–151). Wallerstein's version is more apocalyptic and more millenarian. The old world is ending. The new world is beginning. In the coming systemic bifurcation what people do may be prefigurative and causal of the world to come. Wallerstein agrees with the analysis proposed by the students of the New Left in 1968 (and large numbers of activists in the current global justice movement) that the tactic of taking state power has been shown to be futile because of the disappointing outcomes of the World Revolution of 1917 and the decolonization movements (but see below)."

(http://www.sociostudies.org/books/files/globalistics_and_globalization_studies_2/036-055.pdf)