"All Arrighians Now"

The Los Angeles Review of Books has published a review essay by Joshua Clover, entitled "Autumn of Empire," which considers the relatively recent work of Giovanni Arrighi (Adam Smith in Beijing and the recent edition of The Long Twentieth Century), Robert Brenner (The Economics of Global Turbulence), and Richard Duncan (The Dollar Crisis). I must say, in the company of Arrighi and Brenner, it is difficult to see why Duncan's book is featured in the essay, aside from the way it functions within the rhetorical structure of Clover's essay (or, perhaps, it's there to balance the three books from Verso), but otherwise it's an interesting article that has the merit of dodging a lot of jargon.

Here's the general idea:

Like democracy itself, this official thought [within the predominant strains of economics] presents itself as having subtleties, wings, parties. But the oppositions on offer — NYT vs. WSJ, Krugman vs. Cochrane, saltwater vs. freshwater schools of economics — can’t begin to grasp the fullness of the situation. Whether discovering “green shoots” or hand-wringing over a “jobless recovery,” they think unquestioningly in terms of a return to normalcy, debating only the rate and method: the crisis a mere blink in the long stare of empire.

But the scandalous lesson we learn from heterodox thinkers like Brenner, Duncan, and Arrighi is quite a different one: that the American experience is grand, outsized, but not entirely novel. Industrial growth is bound to undo itself as a profit center, to be replaced by a regime of finance; this regime’s profit mechanism is always the bubble and its total crisis inescapable; and this is how empires end. Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s book on the delusions that accompany bubbles is called, with a wink, This Time It’s Different. Meaning, it never is. We must admit the same about the course of empire, and the current conjuncture. Empires rise and fall.

We live in an epoch in which the great question is how to bid farewell to the U.S.-centered empire, and what the transition to another global arrangement might look like. Whether we know it or not, we are all Arrighians now.

As the title Adam Smith in Beijing conveys, Arrighi paints a picture of a market alternative to capitalism that is too optimistic in its considerations of Adam Smith's work and the Chinese economy (we've talked about David Harvey's take on China here). He doesn't consider extensively (nor does Clover in this article) that alternatives to capitalism that could arise in a place other than the likely site of the next hegemonic power (although to be fair, Arrighi does mention India). This possibility of an alternative is why Latin America and more recently North Africa have received so much Left-leaning critical attention lately.

Tom Reifer's Tribute to Giovanni Arrighi

After writing my previous post, I found Tom Reifer's tribute to Giovanni Arrighi, entitled "Capital's Cartographer," in The New Left Review, November-December 2009. Arrighi, an economist and sociologist, is one of the originators of world-systems analysis, and his book Adam Smith in Beijing (Verso, 2007) is one of the more original contributions to understanding the turbulence of our times. I read the book in June of this year (that month, Arrighi succumbed to cancer), and still, I've been trying to get my head around the ambitious scope of the book.

Arrighi, with his co-author Beverly Silver, over a decade ago, had foreseen that the expansion of global finance

of the last twenty years or so is neither a new stage of world capitalism nor the harbinger of a ‘coming hegemony of global markets’. Rather, it is the clearest sign that we are in the midst of a hegemonic crisis. As such, the expansion can be expected to be a temporary phenomenon that will end more or less catastrophically.

The hegemonic crisis in question is precisely that of the United States, and they warned that the US had unprecedented capacity to turn its power to "exploitative dominion." Iraq, maybe? Afghanistan? But, as Reifer notes,

In Adam Smith in Beijing, Arrighi returned to many of these issues in light of the re-emergence of a Chinese-centred East Asia and America’s reckless gamble to continue its hegemonic reign with the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Rather than heralding a new age of US hegemony, as its advocates hoped, Arrighi emphasized how the ambitions of the Project for the New American Century, whose members staffed key positions in the Bush White House, ironically increased the long-term likelihood that the 21st century will be the age of Asia.

That is as good of a summary of the book as I can think of, especially because it underlines that Arrighi sees hegemony as reinforced by military means, something that is often neglected or minimized by economists and sociologists (this, he argued, included Marx). I would recommend reading Reifer's tribute, if not Arrighi's work, to understand these developments. As Reifer states,

Adam Smith in Beijing, like its predecessors, is a difficult and ambitious book; not because it is poorly written—Giovanni’s prose was exemplary in its lucidity—but because of the density of its analysis and the scope of its ambitions.

Nevertheless, I don't think that should turn non-specialists away from the book. It is probably one of the more influential texts on how I think about global politics today (along with David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism), because economics is not separate from politics. We should reject the idea that economics is something self-contained that must be handled by experts, specifically because these experts work to reinforce their own power. Instead, do two things: in criticism, treat economics like anything else, that is, a system of social relationships; and in practice, not be afraid to call for heavy reform and regulation to make the system more stable and equitable.

However, while acknowledging that economics is not our expertise, we should still aim to inform ourselves and think critically about its relationship to global politics or world-systems. This is the importance of works by thinkers such as Giovanni Arrighi. The next step, that I have been thinking about off-and-on lately, is incorporating this kind of sociology/anthropology/economics approach into recent takes on hegemony (Laclau) and ideology (Zizek). My thesis is that the "Lacanian" turn, while it contributes to understanding how desire works in subjective identification, does not address the structural force played by violence and economics.