May 30, 2009
in a big country
In both The Long Twentieth Century and Adam Smith in Beijing (the first half of which constitutes a reformulation and clarification of the basic claims of L20C, in light of some rather dull criticisms), Giovanni Arrighi — following Fernand Braudel and the Annales School — indicates that the procession of world-system hegemons isn't merely cyclical but follows an obvious and dual secular trend (with an external limit, namely the globe). Firstly, each hegemon has succeeded in aggregating a larger portion of the known world into its reign. Secondly, from the Italian city-state to the United Provinces to the British nation-state to the US continent-state, each hegemonic power has started from a larger initial position.
The correlation is clear; the causation perhaps less so, and Arrighi does not take this question as a central study. Certain passages, however, offers some insight into the question and underscore its importance; for example, the analysis of the "internalization of protection costs" (which unfolds as the efficient coordination of business and military pursuit in the form of the modern nation). Moreover, the question takes on considerable significance in light of Arrighi's innovative aligning Marx's formulae of reproduction (CMC, MCM') to the possible "logics of power" (TMT, meaning Territory-Money-Territory, and the converse, MTM). What then is the crucial relationship between territory and valorization?
Certain answers present themselves — perhaps too plainly, as in the simple and non-explanatory fact of starting from a broader base, or the somewhat more suggestive case of the greater availability of natural resources. Such accounts, however, provoke too many counterexamples and moreover, do not follow from the terms of analysis that Arrighi himself produces.
Taking the current regime as the most indicative example, the most satisfactory answer should be found in a parallel issue of "internalization": the internalization of heterogeneity in the labor market. The US capacity for flexible modifications and improvements in its productive forces, such that they outstripped every nation on the globe in the century leading up to the empire's peak around 1973, has much to do with natural resources, and with space for populations. But it has also much to do with the variegations within the industrial-agricultural spaces of production; the different kinds of resource available; and the historically peculiar federalism that conditions inter-regional relations and exchanges.
This set of conditions allow for a famously mobile labor force, now heading south for agricultural exploitation, now north for factory industrialism, now west for extractive booms — and this is only the most caricatural picture of labor-pool vectors over the last two centuries, which from some perspectives verges on the chaotic, from others moves with the sharp clarity of a school of tetras in a slow-motion aquarium. Be that as it may, the US economy has long been characterized by its ability to reallocate labor to take advantage of shifting productive centers and newly arisen differentials in the value of labor. Of great significance to us here is that these shifts, which follow regional imbalances, happen within national borders — the friction of the passport, or even the friction of strong confederacy, is absent. In short, the nation is spacious and loosely-aggregated enough to generate regional imbalances in relative value of labor to the production process, but coherent and tightly-aggregated enough to take advantage of these imbalances swiftly and efficiently in an ongoing process of internal labor market arbitrage.
This presents the nation able to pursue such an arrangement a dual advantage: such a situation allows both for the greater development of internal productive forces in advance of international aspirations, and as well providing something like practical training in how to take best advantage of differentials — by the time it is leveraging disparities in national markets, it has for itself already a structure developed toward these ends.
Another way to phrase this situation is that the US gains from starting with its very own core-periphery relation as an early engine of growth, and from this position moves to orient the core-periphery relations of the globe (this might be seen as the global history of the American civil war). Both confront the same internal — that is, logical — limit, which is the tendency toward eventual homogenization of both national and world space. Indeed, it is useful to consider various national and international political interventions not as moving the economic/political sphere toward increasingly organized domination, but rather pursuing the rather distinct goal of maintaining the equilibrium between tight and loose aggregation which will maintain (and even produce) heterogeneity of markets.
This is a version of Andre Gunder Frank's "development of underdevelopment" argument — though his account, per world-system theory and its Annales inheritance, goes toward a description of interlocking international positions. But it is exactly this tradition which then opens up puzzles around the nation-based accounts of hegemony in the Braudel/Arrighi narrative of long centuries. It is toward considering this problematic that these remarks are directed, toward recognizing that the logic of core and periphery operates both within and between states, and thus can help to align the progression by which the nation form and the international order expand in parallel.
Posted by jane at May 30, 2009 05:27 PM | TrackBack