The ironic thing about reading about a sublimating agent like capitalism, as a result of which "all that is solid melts into air," is that the reading remains solid, thick, dense and profoundly unsublime. In reading Das Kapital, the few moments of "OMG! So, lyke, this is how value is created?!?" or "Oooh! the extent to which we fetishize the commodity form is kind of kinky" are far outweighed by "ugh! if he references that damn coat ONE MORE TIME...." All in all, the shit's pretty tedious. Perhaps it gets better as it goes along, but I wouldn't know because I put it down (for now) to pick up Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century.
I should have known from the title this would be a longue durée engagement. I must have fallen asleep at least four times just reading the introduction.
(In my defense, I've been binging on Zizek and marshmallows. His thought is acrobatic, agile, nimble, vertiginous and heady--like an intellectual sugar rush--plus I have the sneaky suspicion he write his speeches in Slovenian and translates them into English extemporaneously, adding an element of danger and theatricality to the process--you're just waiting for him to mess up. All in all, it's like watching a contortionist do his thing while juggling several swords. that are on fire.)
If Zizek is like that, then reading Arrighi is like, well, like listening to a renowned SUNY Binghamton Sociologist lecture on the last day of school before summer vacation. I mean, all the stuff is really good, but you're just waiting for the bell to ring so you can jump out of your seat and be first in line for the ice-cream truck.But at the same time The Long Twentieth Century promises to be an iconoclastic thriller. Not only does he plan to forgo the traditional analysis of the shift from feudalism to capitalism (no one cares about feudalism!) in favor of Braudel's focus on the shift "from scattered to concentrated capitalist power" (11), he agrees with Braudel that capitalism and the market economy are not identical with one another and that the market economy is a wholly different animal from capitalism which is "absolutely dependent for its emergence and expansion on the state power as constituting the antithesis of the market economy" (10).
This is radical because it completely undermines the neoliberal free market ideology touted by institutions such as the IMF and World Bank which argue that economic growth should be the primary goal of peripheral nations even at the expense of state and social development. For Arrighi, this is reordering the proverbial cart and horse. A nation cannot have capitalist economic growth without stable consolidated state mechanisms to in service to it. This is old news (as Noam Chomsky will tell you) for the states that successfully transformed their status from peripheral to semi-peripheral in the last 50 years (see Asian Tigers, BRIC) were the ones that disregarded the neoliberal free-market prescriptions of global financial institutions.
The implications of an argument like Arrighi's for the failed and fledgling states of sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and South America are massive. Rather than blindly following prescriptions from global financial organizations that undermine domestic stability, focus first on building a strong, consolidated state in service of capital (assuming the state wants to assimilate into the world capitalist system) then worry about economic growth. In short, if you build it, they will come.
I'm also excited to read about capitalism's cyclical evolutions from Venice, Genoa and Florence to Holland then Britain and now America.
But what excites me the most is the intellectual intimacy between Arrighi and Wallerstein (on whom I have a huge crush for his ability to synthesize a global systems theory and his fondness for sub-Saharan Africa). Not only does Arrighi reference Wallerstein and his delicious world systems theory, Wallerstein helped shape the book's direction and revise it.
And you said the Clarkson library had no books.
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