Trillbilly Worker's Party - YEAR ZERO 1: The Thousand Year Stare (w/ special guest Sean KB)

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

Introducing Year Zero, a new miniseries on political economy hosted by Tarence. In this first episode we speak with Sean KB (@as_a_worker on twitter)from the Antifada podcast (@the_antifada) about what he terms The Thousand Year Stare: the specific feeling one unlocks by reading Giovanni Arrighi's "The Long Twentieth Century." We'll be using the book to discuss the chaotic times in which we live, but don't worry: you don't have to have read it to follow along in the conversation. You just have to be willing to face the past, present, and future with a perfected thousand year stare... Please support the Antifada here: https://www.patreon.com/theantifada

Thank you for watching! Welcome to Year Zero, the new Trillbillies miniseries where we take a deeper dive into what all the kids these days are calling political economy in an attempt to make sense of these times we live in. There's many times we live in them all. And more importantly, we're doing this to sort of get a better sense of how capitalism really works. I thought the best place to start such a series would be with a book that really changed how I view the world, referring of course to Giovanni Arrighi's The Long 20th Century, Money, Power, and the Origins of our times. You don't have to have read the book to keep up with the conversation. As the title probably indicates, we will be using our times,

all of them, to talk about the book, and we'll be using the book to talk about our times. And in the process, we'll be summing up the main arguments for you, though I still encourage you to go read it for yourself. Before we get to the interview, I want to thank everyone over at the Patreon for making little bonus episodes and miniseries like this and Sunday Service possible. And if you'd like to go over there and make a pledge, that's patreon.com slash trailbillyworkersparty. Now let's get to the conversation with Sean KB from the Antifada podcast and learn about how to view the world through the world historical lens known as the thousand year stare.

Well, welcome to the ultimate crossover pod experience. Although we've already been on antifada but honestly if i really had to like pick a sort of you know how cities have like sister cities sure if there was like a sister podcast to the trailbillies it would i think it would definitely be antifada um that's a very sweet thing for you to say thank you i appreciate you breaking you breaking the normal format and going deep, deep, deep with me into one of the most interesting and compelling texts that exist right now in terms of understanding this predicament that we're in. Yeah. So definitely. So the text that we are sort of going to be dissecting today is Giovanni Arrighi's The Long 20th Century. And in this book, he's essentially telling like a specific narrative, I think, about the long durée of capitalism, as David Harvey would call it,

the sort of historical evolution of capitalism, going all the way back until really the sort of 13th, 14th centuries. And really, he's looking at these sort of cycles of accumulation, as he calls them. But even more broadly than that, he's sort of examining patterns he's doing it in this very matter-of-fact dialectical way he writes kind of like Marx in the sense that he'll say something and then go back over it again and say it again a few pages later and add a little bit sort of you know like a dialectical process and then add a little bit more like when I first started reading it I was like there's no way I'm going to be able to hang with this. But then once you actually get in the groove, you're like,

this is actually very easy to understand. He's got to cut this tone. Like I think I remarked to you, it's kind of like an alien sort of dropping down from space and just trying to like... He's got this kind of Archimedes vision. He's like above us at some point in space looking down at the rest of humanity. That's exactly right.

How did... I was going to say, how did you get into this book? Well, I heard that... I think I mentioned this to you. I think you introduced it to me through your History as a Weapon series. Oh, cool.

Happy to be that guy. It's not everybody that listens to those episodes and says to themselves, wow, I need to read a 400-page book about just that. So cheers on that. Well, you know, like where I live, I don't come into contact a lot with a lot of other leftists, you know.

And so in many ways, maybe this is a good thing and maybe it's a bad thing. But I'm usually very late to the party in terms of like what everybody is reading and what are the main texts and stuff. And so I kind of have to rely on other podcasts and Twitter to see what the left is reading. Well, you say you're out in the periphery, as it were, in your presumably log cabin. A friend told me you live in a log cabin. As you can see, yes. A-frame log cabin. That sounds so beautiful right now as I'm quarantined in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in a shitty loft right now.

Just like people on top of me, people below me. Log cabin sounds great. But, you know, you're a bit out on the periphery. But we here in New York City are fortunate. Well, I don't know if it's fortunate. We're at the center of global capital, obviously, right? It's this sort of financial city, this obviously like big media city, a lot of companies based here. But we also are, thankfully, I think, at the center, for better or for worse, of like the left writ large in New York City.

So like the way that I happened to get a hold on Giovanni Righi for the first time was, I think, a very rare and thankful thing, which is that I audited a class in 2008 because Righi was still alive then. About 2008 with a guy by the name of David Harvey, who was teaching at the City University of New York Graduate Center, as he is prone to do. And so I sat at the feet of the master, and I, you know, got to study Marxian political economy with him. And in the course of that, he turned us on to one chapter, I forget which one it was, one chapter from the long 20th century. And, you know, I internalized that. And then I said to myself, like you did, it's like, what is this book? I have to read it. It sounds like it has amazing explanatory power. up and this isn't maybe the easiest text but it was like a pot boiler for me you know i just sat down and read it in like four days just like taking notes and everything like that and then i think since then it's um i didn't even realize until i picked it up again to do this with you and i'm very glad that i did how much of his analysis i've just managed to internalize over

the all those years how it's just part of the way that I view, you know, the world and world history and the structures of the economy and politics, geopolitics going on in the world. And I think that, yeah, ultimately, it provides a very, very compelling explanation for a lot of very, very complex phenomena that we are seeing right now in the world. phenomena that we are seeing right now in the world. Yeah, and especially the fact that we are, you know, sitting in our respective places, Bushwick apartment, log cabin,

while society essentially sort of, I don't want to say society is melting down. That doesn't really seem to be the case. It seems to be like what is happening is there are profound structural changes happening like it and it seems like all of the political tendencies that exist right now in america because that's really the only sort of analysis i can give i mean i can read about what's going on in the rest of the world sure but you know this is the country i've i've not even left this country ever so it's it's like I only know it for what it is.

And it feels like all of the various tendencies are being pulled apart. And it just feels like a very fraught moment. And so I read this book for the first time just a few months ago. I very much read it like you did. Like a sort of potboiler. Like it really, I sped through it and I couldn't put it down. Mostly because, and I was trying to explain this to my friend Tom the other day. I think the reason why is it is honestly a lot like reading the Bible or like Capital.

Same thing in my book, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It has, exactly. It has a, what it does is I think it shows that there are larger sort of structural forces at work that sort of like move beneath everything, sort of like tectonic plates. And like, which is essentially what capital does. And honestly, what the Bible does. I could make a very strange allusion right now to like the laws of motion of capital and like the eschaton in Christian philosophy.

But we won't go there. We won't go there. That's for another episode. Yes, we'll have you back on later on in the mini series. But for that reason, I think that's why I was reading it so sort of diligently, because, you know, if you are going into this, and this is why I think that a lot of people are sort of returning to religion, a lot of people are returning to capital, they're returning to the original Marx,

you know, because this moment is so confusing. It's impossible to really understand what's going on in many ways, because the world is so complex now. And this is part of what he's explaining in the book. Another thing that he's trying to do is he's trying to sort of plot out what the short-term future is going to look like based on the sort of past patterns that have existed in the historical development of capitalism. patterns that have existed in the historical development of capitalism. And so as you're reading it, you know, it's funny, like when we first started talking about doing this episode, you kind of described that it kind of instills this sort of very

disorienting, although that's not quite the word, it's a very interesting effect that you call the thousand year stare. Yeah. I'm pretty proud of coming up with that myself, yeah. I would love to make a documentary about this book someday. More collaborations. Yes, ways of seeing, and we could call it the thousand-year stare. I love it.

It's quarantine. We have all the time in the world. Let's go for it. Exactly. Did you ever read those? Did you ever watch those? I'm a little bit younger than you, and so when I was first becoming – What's that?

Most people are, but yeah, go on. Well, when I was first becoming politically conscious, there were these movies called Zeitgeist movies in the late 2000s. Do you remember those? I sure do. They kind of – they were very like sort of uh they were very kind of libertarian leaning in many ways um but they also sort of aimed for something similar in the sense that like there were larger global forces at work that you didn't

understand it just turns out that those forces were the jews i mean it's not directly anti-semitic but all that conspiracy shit illuminati secret cabals is structurally anti-semitic but yeah no that is exactly what they that was they were implying it they were not they weren't putting too uh heavy of a hand on it heavily implied it was the jews but yes it was it was a phenomenon back in the 2000s oh it was huge it was huge um and there was a lot of stuff around that time because we were in the wake of a financial crash you know there was a lot of uh i remember this movie called collapse with michael rupert that was very similar i was trying to explain what had just happened and obviously we're probably entering another phase like that where

people are going to be like searching for answers like what the fuck is going on but the difference though between that now and the financial crash is that we are talking about the body of the economy has cancer it's not just a flu or something right we are in some sort of sort of either cancerous terminal decline or unraveling or we may pull out of it who knows who knows what's happening but go ahead no no i was i was going to agree with you on that i think that um zeitgeist was certainly an attempt to try to create like a grand historical analysis to try to understand the world uh through the through the lens of um you know bizarre conspiracy theories and uh like you said a very sort of

libertarian worldview about money the federal reserve and like freedom and all that um and i think that um as you said it was compelling for that reason, because as we go through life, you know, as we go through school, as we we need to make it great again, because such and such to this at this time, when we when they, when we're given an analysis of the economy, that analysis tends to be extremely, extremely shallow. And so this very complex machine, this mode of production, this mode of accumulation, ends up becoming obscured because there's so many data points and nobody seems to be able to pull them together. Politics seems the same way. And so works like this, and I think Marx's Capital is another one, and the Bible is another one, give a sort of a broader view

of the underlining structures at work. And if you're going to understand, say, capitalism, or you're going to understand the nation state, you can't take a 20-, 30-, 40-year view. You have to do what a Rigi does, and you have to take a 700-year view. And what the 1,000-yard stare is about is, you know, just like a like a thousand

yard stare when a soldier comes off the trenches and is shell-shocked and is staring off into space and seemingly like impermeable you know like um at rest with the world if only because it's so shocking all the things that they've seen and the deep understanding of human cruelty and violence that they've seen. When you get the thousand yard stare, after you read a series of books like this, you start to hopefully this is what happened to me, you start to be able to yourself to pull back from the entire mess and to think world historically about this moment. And for me personally, it gives a great sense of ease and calm to me because you start to see

yourself and your circumstances, indeed the circumstances of the United States and the world right now from a hopefully kind of more impartial scientific sense. And you're able to look at this moment that we're in. Sure. It's scary. Sure. It's frightening. Sure. We don't look at this moment that we're in. Sure, it's scary. Sure, it's frightening. Sure, we don't know what's going on. But there are things, as you said, under the surface that are at work now, which are ultimately uncontrollable by any individual person. But the reason why it's important for socialists or communists or anarchists

is because it does show that we can grasp what these forces are, right? The long 20th century might not be a perfect work, but it helps give us a kind of key to open this lock of this very, very confusing world system right now that human beings, the working class, has to grapple with and ultimately has to grasp, understand those forces at work, and be the ones to destroy them, to overcome them and transform them. So the thousand-yard stare, I think, hopefully helps some of us to kind of think more systemically about that stuff, and hopefully we can all work systemically to change it.

No, I absolutely agree. It's in the same sense that reading Marx is like putting on the glasses from They Live, in the sense that you're peeling back the layers of mystification all around you. This book gives you the world historical perspective. And that to me, yeah, that's the thousand year stare. You put yourself in the sort of grand stream of history.

And it's very relevant for this moment because we see all around us deep changes are happening and um and i guess we'll get to those in just a minute but um but first let's i don't know let's kind of like just go into a little bit i mean like we should we should start with the title like the long 20th century um so you, Riki took this title and the concept of the long century from the, as I wrote here, another member of the thousand years. Yes. The historian Ferdinand Braudel, who believed that the modern world system originated in Europe in the long 16th century, is what he said. In his formulation,

this was from about 1450 to about 1650. Arrighi was also highly influenced by Braudel's observation that all transitions from one particular phase of capitalist development to the next were signaled by a financial expansion. And I wrote Braudel's quote here. It's probably the best. He says, Every capitalist development seems, by reaching the stage of financial expansion, to have, in some sense, announced its maturity.

It is a sign of autumn. So I think we have these twin ideas here. We have the phases of capitalist development. They play out within specific times and places. So, you know, just look at the world now. You would see East Asia, probably the Eurozone in the United States

as like the sort of centers of production of capitalist production in the world at the moment. Or at least the centers of financial hegemony. So we have these twin ideas, that these phases play out within times and places,

and that they're cyclical. They have a beginning and end phases, that they're built on each other in this sort of dialectical relationship. So I wanted to look at the historical context in which Arrighi was writing this book. And there's a really great interview that Harvey, David Harvey, does with Arrighi. And I think it's in the New Left Review.

We had talked about it a little bit. But he talks about Arrighi's process in writing this and when he wrote it. But he wrote this in the early 1990s. when he wrote it. But he wrote this in the early 1990s. And I think like, you know, a lot of sort of Marxist, leftist historians and political economists of that time, I think he was both fascinated and horrified by the sort of seemingly novel ways in which American capitalism had been functioning throughout the Carter, Reagan and Bush and Clinton clinton years i mean that's the first sentence of the introduction actually he says like something fundamental has changed in the way in which capitalism works since the 1970s um so you know i turn it over to you now you know at the antifada

you guys have you've come back a lot to the pivotal decade of the 1970s as a way of sort of explaining this current moment um sorry i was wondering if you could sort of expand on it a little bit like what was the fundamental change in how capitalism worked and that took place in the 70s but we would call it sort of neoliberalism others would call it financialization but like what was it how had it persisted into the 90s and what is is this financial expansion that Braudel and Arrighi are speaking of? Right, right. That's a really good question. Before we do that, I'd like to just one more piece about method, right? So Arrighi looks at these cycles, but it's important to remember that from the beginning,

from the beginning of, so 1450, right, he sees a sort of invariant single system, world system that changes, right? You have these expansions and you have ultimately super sessions of different powers within this interstate system. But they have these laws of motion, right? The same laws of motion that Marx talked about in capitalism with accumulation. But also he adds into that this dynamic of territorial expansion, right? This dynamic of state power and what that means and how that relates to the rest of it. So these two things like territorial and capitalist power, the economy and politics, are constantly working on one another. And in a very Hegelian type sense, right, they move, the centers of them move from place to place throughout the world.

And in each movement, they start, they supersede, they begin to get larger, they encompass more domains of human life, of world history. Until you get to the point where, as we'll see, the United States is the global capitalist hegemon. It's not some small corner of the world, but the United States has dominated the world for about, what, 70, 80 years at this point. I don't think I'm putting too fine a point on it that much of the political rhetoric in the United States right now revolves around a quote unquote golden age of American capitalism. That was roughly between 1946, 47 to, I don't know, you could say 1973 with the oil shocks. You could say when U.S. goes off the gold standard. Regardless, there's this when Trump says make America great and millions of people rally behind that. The America that they're thinking about is the America from this golden age when they were good paying union industrial jobs, the America from this golden age, when they were good paying union industrial jobs, when a worker in this country, especially a white worker, as we know, could afford their own house and maybe even

have a summer home, have a car, you know, have no problem raising their children. College was essentially free. Old economy Steve could go off and get fired from one factory and get a good job at a warehouse the next day. And so this vision, it was a reality for many people in the United States of a growing, strong economy, of a working class that was strong in the workplace with their unions, prosperity that was growing and somewhat more democratic than it certainly is today is a very compelling vision for us. And in the 1970s, this pivotal decade, Americans and everybody around the world was shocked to find out that that golden age was not permanent. In fact, the salad days were over in many respects. In fact, the salad days were over in many respects. The 1970s was a period of systemic chaos in the United States and elsewhere. You started to see something called stagflation, which was a stagnating economy alongside rapid inflation that Keynesian economists had theorized was never possible.

You can't have that. Keynesian economists had theorized was never possible. You can't have that. Which meant that even the way that economists and the ruling class understood the world just became frazzled. Everything started to scramble. And they had to come up with solutions to what we see now, ultimately, for what was the tendency of the rate of profit to fall on manufacturing, this tendency that Marx talked about 160 years ago that Adam Smith talked about that John Stuart Mill, you know, the political economist even talked about in the 17th, 18th century. You started to see a slowdown in the productivity and the growth of American industry. lowdown in the productivity and the growth of American industry. And this moment, this decade, called upon the ruling class of the United States and the world to formulate a new method, a new set of policies and institutions moving forward in order to continue accumulating capital, but in a completely different circumstance, which, of course, because the working class is an integral part of capitalist production,

that would mean that has meant about four decades now of absolute immiseration of so many working class people in this country and a complete shift towards a type of capitalism that looks nothing like it did before the 1970s. So something is going on there, right? I think everybody can see the difference. And the people who look back to try to make America great again, they don't understand why America was great, but they want it back. They see that as the good days. Yeah.

Well, and I thought about this a lot while you guys had talked about the movie Blue Collar. And a lot of the sort of struggles of the 1970s are sort of encapsulated in that film. But as I was reading this book, like there are a few passages that I was just sort of floored by. In the sense that what he's describing sounds like, very much like what was going on in the United States in the 1970s, all the way up to this day in many ways. And many people know kind of what we're talking about, like the sort of on-the-ground effects, like we would call it maybe deindustrialization, wage stagnation, you know. And we've seen all of the effects of that, obviously, like the opioid epidemic and et cetera, et cetera. But I kind of wanted to read a little bit from some of these passages

because, like, again, as I was reading it, I was like, this sounds very much like the 1970s. So as I sort of explained it in our original sort of agenda for how we would go through this, you could kind of imagine I'm like your cool history teacher, and we want to take a little time machine road trip in time. Let's use the time machine to go back in time. She needs to go back in time.

If you went back to Florence in the 13, I guess would have been like maybe 1340s to 1370s or 80s, what you would have seen there was very similar to the United States in the 1970s in many ways. They were experiencing a sort of spontaneous deindustrialization. Riggi sort of puts spontaneous in scare quotes. But he talks about how Florence was a manufacturing center. I mean, part of what we're going to be talking about is the northern Italian city-states, and Florence was one of them. It was one of four.

There was Genoa, Milan, Venice, and Florence. And so where this process starts, where this cycle begins, is in the northern Italian city-states. And one of the functions of that was a sort of deindustrialization, as the golden age of that era started to wear off. And he writes about this sort of deindustrialization. about this sort of deindustrialization. And he writes that, however, this drastic curtailment of industrial production in Florence was not the result of any use of threat

or violence on the part of the English rulers or anybody else. Rather, it was the expression of the strictly capitalist logic of action that guided Florence business enterprise. Then, as now, this logic dictated that capital should be invested in trade and production

only as long as returns in these activities were not only positive, but higher than whatever rate justified the exposure of capital to the risks and troubles inseparable from its employment in trade and production. And secondly, compensated its owners for the returns that capital could have earned in financial deals. could have earned in financial deals. And then, as now, the intensification of competitive pressures throughout the trading system tended to raise this rate and thereby provoked a major reallocation of capital from the purchase, processing, and sale of commodities to more flexible forms of investment. That is, primarily to the financing of domestic and foreign public debts.

There you go. to the financing of domestic and foreign public debts. There you go. Yes. So what we have is a shift from production and commodity trading to moneymaking and lending, financial expansion. So is that the financial expansion we are sort of looking at in the 70s and 80s and 90s? Is that what Arigi is describing?

And that's the kind of galaxy brain shit that you read in this book and you're like holy shit this happened 700 years ago what the fuck it makes us really compelling i think true case that like we are we we've just been living through all these gigantic cycles through history and like you're in one now but you're just like a florentine you know artisan back in the fucking 14th century. What the fuck? Yes, exactly. Incredible.

Well, and the thing is, is you would not be surprised to learn that it's actually happened a few more times. Yeah. And I guess we can talk about the cycles here in a second. But I want to just talk a little bit more about these sort of financial expansions. Another one happened in the sort of Edwardian period in England. And in the sort of Periwig, they call this the Periwig period of Dutch history in the sort of 1600s. And it's the same thing. We're talking about very much the same thing. Surplus capital moves out of trade and production and into enterprises of money management, money lending, and flexible financial investment. And so, I don't know.

What do you think, Sean? Should we talk about the cycles in their sort of historical form, or should we talk about the nation-state, the interstate system? What do you think is the good starting point for this? I think it makes sense to start with just the basics, the rudiments of Marxist theory, which you can get right in the beginning, right in Volume 1 of Capital,

although, of course, it's expanded upon through Volumes 2 and three and the grunrisse which is the circuit of capital the circuit of capital is a schematized uh algebraic um circuit uh that marx uses to break down what he calls the laws of motion of capital which is to say like the most essential central way that capital functions, how it expands and accumulates itself, which on a larger scale, if you multiply that across the entire capitalist world, is the basic building block of capitalist production. So do you want to start with MCM Prime? Let's start with MCM Prime. All right, folks. Buying in order to sell yeah i'm not gonna beat this to death because i could probably talk about this for ages but that's why you can just tune into line goes down someday where we're doing this uh it's really

i don't know fun reading of all of marx's work but anyways um so m stands for money. C stands for commodities. M prime stands for money plus a surplus, right? Money plus more. So anytime a capitalist decides to enter production, they have a pool of money that they put into motion. And they do this by buying commodities. And in the case of capitalist production, this means that they're buying two different things in the production process, which is labor power and means of production, right? So wage workers, on the one hand,

he's buying them for a certain amount of time to do work for him. And on the other hand, buying the tools, the machines that those people need to work and ultimately create value, which is what brings the capitalist more money when he is able to realize that value by selling it on the market. that even the process of production that the capitalists engage in, even they're confused about it. It works behind the backs of the producers, as it were, right? Right. It seems as though, and Marx calls this the money fetish, it seems as though MCM prime for a capitalist,

if they're not getting a sufficient rate of return, if you have what was Brudel called a mature economy, if you have what Marx would have called the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, it seems like the capitalists, the individual capitalists and then capital writ large, it would be a lot easier for them to simply cut out the middleman of the production, buying those commodities and simply make more money. Right. If I'm going to if profit rates used to be 10 percent, but now they're all the way down to five percent, my capital is liquid. When it turns into that money, my money can go anywhere. Right. It could go back into production or it could go into lending money to somebody else at interest.

It could go back into production in my sphere of production or somewhere else, or I could use it to consolidate my capital by buying up other capitals and simply expanding the massive values that I'm producing. So a capitalist has these choices. And the way it works out across the capitalist economy is that, again, when the rates of profit are falling, something called the money fetish kicks in where capitalists decide why go through that mess of production why even hire workers maybe they're too ornery you know maybe my means of production are breaking down i don't want to replace them why not simply go m to m prime and turn money into money because it is the the fundamental law of motion of capital that value

is created through that production process going through it. But on a larger scale, capitalists don't see that or they don't care about that. And so this process of financialization tends to happen as a Regie talks about, as Marx talks about, when the rate of production on productive capital is falling as it did in the United States in the 1970s or in Florence back in the 14th century. And capitalists have this liquid capital. They could do whatever they want with it. So why not do the easy thing and start lending it, consolidating, financializing it? Right.

And then what does that do to the workers involved in that process that makes them basically surplus population? It makes them redundant, more or less. That's right, that's right. As we're all experiencing right now. As we're all experiencing right now. So I think that, you know, what you, it's a very, very interesting and compelling argument

that these cycles, as they go over three, four times, express the same dynamic because it's the same dynamic system, right? And as we'll see, a lot of chaos is produced as it was in the 70s. Every time a economy reaches its maturity and capital either starts to turn solely into its money form and ultimately degrade the productive capacity because money is not being put in to expand it, or they take that money because they don't have to invest it at home, and they start to push out abroad with it, start doing foreign direct investment,

or simply lending to monarchs or banks or whatever the case may be. Right. And which, you know, again, reading this has proven several times in history to actually give rise to contradictions in the world system that lead to the hegemonic force's own downfall when that sort of financial expansion occurs yes you're right they push out where it's sort of like the dutch did with the british they started investing more in british industry and in this in the process sort of laid the own the groundwork for their own sort of construction. Exactly. And this is the dynamic that he points to why the center of global capitalist hegemony moves around the world. Why it goes from the northern Italian city-states over to the Netherlands, to the UK and to the United States. That is the mechanism of change for that.

Netherlands to the UK and to the United States. That is the mechanism of change for that. As one power is declining and turns towards financialization, another one comes to pick that up and start the cycle all over again, right? Start it anew. Right, right. And so, yeah, so if we didn't make it explicit enough, what Origi does is he takes MCM prime, he takes that basic formula of the circuit, and sort of expands it out to a world historical process. And so what he's saying is that the way that these cycles play

out is that you have an initial material expansion that will take place over the course of X amount of time, and then you'll have a signal crisis. And if it's easy to understand it, just think of the early 1970s as our signal crisis. After which time you've switched to the financial expansion.

And it's really interesting to watch. I wish we could, this wasn't just podcasting, we could do a visual. I've got the amazing chart right in front of me that just like takes 700 years of history and puts it in a very nice schematic. Maybe we can link to it. Exactly. But yes, you've got material expansion to signal crisis.

And then financial expansion to dun-dun-dun terminal crisis. Woo, let's go. Send the alarms off. I know he means terminal in the case of, like, it's terminated, it's over, but doesn't that sound so metal and dire? Like, Terminal Crisis. Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. Yep.

Well, again, Origi, as the sort of just alien he is, just really hit the nail on the head there with the description. Yeah. Um, but yeah, I don't know. So, uh,

let's go, you know, when we can unpack the cycles a little bit as we sort of maybe go through them, but maybe, maybe now we can sort of start with the sort of beginnings of the interstate system and nation States and how that is, um,

related to this? Maybe that would be a good place to go? No, that's great because similar to the way that capital accumulates and operates, it's very mystified, very obscured for all of us. And it seems almost like trans-historical. Like you see these asshole economists, propagandists at like the Stanford Institute or whatever, trying to say that like cavemen were

like little mini capitalists with their like you know i don't know fucking rock shavings and like axes and shit like that but like if we see that there's a beginning of capitalist development in the 14th century we can start to examine it as a very specific time in history and also understand the world after that because it would follow if it wasn't always around then it wouldn't always be around after that and we could do the same thing with the state the modern state because historians tend to do the same thing at least the vulgar ones is they try to pretend that like ancient sumeria was a government a nation state just like the united states is and it's completely untrue different operations different institutions different understandings of how what the state is what it does what it represents so

yeah let's get into the territorial logic okay all right so again we will enter the time machine the most apparently a new ticker is what a time machine sounds like exactly the chiron um so yeah if we were to go back to the sort of 13th and 14th centuries um we would encounter a world that is divided up into a variety of different sort of political, juridical arrangements. We would maybe see some kingdoms, I think, right? We'd see some kingdoms, yeah. We'd see some kingdoms, right. We'd see some empires.

Oh, baby, we'd see some empires, I tells you. And we would see some city uh some city city states baby the the and that and that's kind of where you know well now i guess before we're going any further what we would not see is a global hegemonic power we would not see that right we would see a a world system beginning to form. And if you really want to learn more about this, I finished reading a book by Janet Abu-Lakoud. She was incredible. Yeah.

Yeah. Before European hegemony. Yeah. That's the book. What you had at this point was like the beginnings, as you said, of a system but it wasn't unified it was disjointed you had all these kingdoms and empires and city-states in different parts of the world beginning to trade on a more global scale but yeah there was no mechanism and we'll see right in the territorialist logic there was no mechanism for like rome to conquer the entire world because you can't you can't do that using the territorial logic there's just not enough like the time and space differentials are too much you can't you could not have one empire

that encompassed everything right exactly roman soldiers like marching on a road to china or something like that in order to conquer them learn like go back and forth and send messages and administration it just doesn't make any sense it It would never work. Right. By the way, there is a movie where John Cusack plays a Roman general who stumbles across a Chinese garrison and the general there is played by Jackie Chan and they have to fight it out. I can't remember the name of the movie. That sounds so fucking lit.

I love that alternate history. Maybe we can do another episode just on that John Cusack movie. And Jackie Chan. I'm sorry, I shouldn't erase Jackie Chan either. Don't erase Jackie Chan. But you're right. You would see a trade system

that was global at least throughout Europe and Asia and North Africa. And you had these in Janet Abu LLaghad. How do you say her last name? Is that how you say it?

Your guess is as good as mine. I've only read it. I've never heard it said. Well, she does a really good job of explaining the trade routes that existed at this time because they were very extensive. And so at that time,

if you were one of these entities, you had basically two sort of options available to you. To expanding your system of rule to gather more surplus. As you were saying, probably the most well-known at that time was this sort of territorialist logic. You expand geographically. You bring more subjects in, and you squeeze more surplus out of them in doing so. Through taxes and tribute, importantly. Exactly. It's a sort of tributary system, right.

But you also had another option. It was not the road most frequently taken at that time, but the Italian city-states started basically pioneering this. This was the capitalist logic. basically, I don't want to, maybe monopolizing isn't the right word, but maybe it is, I don't know, essentially gaining control over certain trade routes and being able to essentially extract surplus from those trade routes and from the commodities you bring back from other places. Right. And so, and I mentioned this to you while reading this, like, you know, the thing that you always hear about where and how capitalism started is you always hear about enclosure in England. And it did. I mean, that was a big part of it. But another sort of major step in this sort of transition from a sort of feudal economy to capitalism was just literally trade. It was going and fetching commodities from other far parts of the world and then bringing them to Europe. And the way that you, real quick, the way that you square that circle is, you know, why are the enclosures important? The

enclosures are important for their primitive accumulation, right? To kick the peasants off the land and take it over. But they're also important because for the first time, the merchants, you know, started to control this land, this productive, these productive forces, or landlords, you know, lords who were capitalistically inclined, went in and took the commons. And it was this logic of moneymaking that were actually that was became embedded for the first time in the production of things so it's not simply like you're grabbing like different parts of the trade network that you're you're buying cheap and selling deer as adam smith would say all over the place you start to actually take the logic of improvement the logic of sale for exchange, not just sale for use.

And that begins to enter after the enclosures movement as a new way of creating value, like a new way, a capitalist way of producing value that uses those enclosed territories in a capitalistic way through these merchant classes in order to make capital. Right, exactly. merchant classes in order to make capital. Right. Exactly. And so, you know, you have these early Italian city-states who are, essentially, they're gaining surplus from these trading activities. And they are, I guess you could say, reinvesting it back into that process. Now, this is kind of something that, you know, maybe we should explain here, or I'm not entirely sure how we want to get into it. But our first cycle of accumulation actually starts with the Genoese. It doesn't start with Venice or any of the other Italian city-states.

It starts with Genoa, which is honestly probably one of the lesser known Italian northern city-states. And the reason that is, is because, and maybe you'd be able to articulate it better than I could, but essentially, like, if you're the Genoese, if you're bankers, if you're financiers in Genoa in the sort of 15th century. You would look around and you would probably try to identify the sort of biggest, I don't know, territorial power in Europe at the time. Because you need territorial, you need the protection afforded to you by territorialist rulers for your trade circuits. And so this is, by doing, by sort of explaining it this way we can identify very on very early on a set of costs associated with accumulation in the early uh you know

capitalist era the main cost would have been protection costs people try to rob your shit they try to pirates everywhere pirates everywhere Pirates everywhere. Pirates everywhere. Yes. And so the main challenge to you is internalizing those protection costs. The Genoese were not able to do this. They were not able to, you know, finance the sort of, you know, pillaging of the Americas, the return of all the silver and resources back to Europe, and set themselves up as the sort of hegemons of what was at

that time starting to become a globalized economy. And so what we've done is we've identified the sort of zone of main capitalist activity in Iberia, you know, in the Spanish Peninsula and in the northern Italian city-states with this sort of fusion of the two. peninsula and in the northern italian city states with this sort of fusion of the two um and so so the so the material expansion of that first cycle is basically powered by you know all of the fucked up things you read and howard's in and etc um i don't know is that a is that a good way to sort of articulate it i don't know i think you've articulated a rege's uh argument correctly i think maybe where i differ somewhat with him is the emphasis placed on not the connection between Genoa and the Iber addresses this but i think it's in my mind

instead of seeing um the spanish and portuguese as like these capitalist powers that genoa is instead being a banker for what genoa essentially the genoa oligarchs because it was run by like you know a series of families of like large merchants right what we think of now is like bezos and gates and all these people um right what they managed to do was by allying with spain and port and portugal they were able to capture this surplus and become essentially the bankers and the financiers of empire, of the Spanish Empire and elsewhere. And through that, it was a process of primitive accumulation. They were capturing a lot of the surplus that was coming from the New World.

And instead of doing what empires had done in the past, always, which is creating a huge hoard of money by building like lovely castles by having people make nice tapestries for you by having a vault full of gold coins that you like swim in and spit up in the air what the genoese uh capitalist class because the early capitalist class started to do was instead plow that back into production so genoa in a sense like capitalism famously doesn't happen in Spain for the reasons we're talking about. They used it on the horde.

They still had a feudal-type mindset about what to do with all these riches coming in from the New World. But in this early inchoate phase of capital accumulation, Genoese merchants start to gain this capitalist framework, this knowledge for themselves, and they start to take that money and put it back into use instead of hoarding it, put it back into construction, into productive activity, and turn a hoard of money into capital, essentially. So this is capital arising for the first time. into capital, essentially.

So this is capital arising for the first time. Yeah, I mean, the other Italian city-states didn't do this on the scale... I mean, maybe Venice did. Maybe they got close. I mean, because I guess when you talk about the northern Italian city-states, Venice is always mentioned as the sort of most powerful. But I guess in some of those other states,

what you're talking about is is sort of renaissance. In many ways, they plowed that money back into, you know, cultural artifacts. Tapestries, vaults full of gold coins you could swim in. Yeah. Arts, statues, lots of beautiful towers that leaned. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

The Genoese went sort of international with it. Or go ahead. Yeah. No. Like the Genoese went sort of international with it or go ahead yeah no yeah like the genoese the genoese went international and capitalist with it i think that venice especially the reason why it doesn't become this is and the reason why they ultimately fail is that they tried to um they had these protection costs as you were saying before but they had like a giant navy they they could not um those protect protection costs especially to try to fight against the ottomans ends up bankrupting them whereas the genoese could externalize those protection costs off to the spanish while the while the um while

venice was essentially like spending all this money trying to prepare for war against the turks right well and i think a reiki and a lot of people, I think, mentioned this, that Venice is kind of like the sort of state capitalist power par excellence, which is where, like contrasted with Genoa, it's basically the sort of cosmopolitan imperial power, I guess. That is going to be one dialectic we are going to be exploring i guess between between cosmopolitan imperial and corporate national i suppose yeah um so essentially like

so yeah so so we have this expansion that takes place and then this sort of uh you know shift to a financialization of that um driven by the surplus extracted from the americas um in the process though what this does is it empowers spain to become more of an imperial power in europe and um one of the oppressed peoples that they had their boot to were the Dutch. The famously oppressed Dutch. The famously oppressed Dutch. Now, the house of Nassau was

an orange, I should say, were fighting hard against the Habsburgs. Those big chin motherfuckers were trying to keep their stranglehold on what becomes the United Provinces of Holland. Right. Well, and so in this process of fighting for their independence against the Spanish, the Dutch basically start building up their own sort of zones of trade and, more importantly, their own navy, their own ships. of trade and, more importantly, their own navy, their own ships, that they then use to sort of impose, as Arrigi calls it, a sort of inverted fiscal squeeze on the Spanish. They basically managed to just bleed them dry through piracy and other seafaring activities,

more or less. And so, in the process, they are able to create a system where they can internalize their own protection costs. And so you start to see the beginnings of the cycles transition phases, where the agencies and institutions of financial expansion that occur in those periods of financial expansion give rise to a new system that sort of increases in complexity and then ushers one of those actors off the hegemonic stage and another one of them on. And so the Dutch basically take that role.

They basically step into, you know, I mean, as Rigi puts it, and another one of them on. And so the Dutch basically take that role. They basically step into, you know, I mean, as Rigi puts it, basically they're in the right place at the right time as well because the zone of economic activity switches from, yeah, the Spanish peninsula and the Italian city-states to northern Europe. That's right, yeah. To the Baltic Sea and North Sea trades. So this kind of becomes their material expansion.

And not only that, but they also come up with a few innovations that are going to be very familiar to a lot of people. The Joint Stock Trading Company and the first permanent session stock market. Boom got it those stock markets we

know and love they were a dutch invention so you can blame the dutch for that i guess right yeah like this is probably an important time to note that um on that cool little chart that we have of 700 years of history when one one signal crisis happens for, say, Genoa, that is the beginning of a systemic cycle of accumulation that starts to include the next rising power. So there's an overlap here between these systemic cycles of accumulation between the old power and the rising power, because in a sense, in the financialization period of the Genoese, they're pushing capital out. They're like pushing money out,

trying to invest in things and make money. And who's there to capture it is the next rising power. Not all of it, of course, but enough of it that they can use in a very Gramscian way that Arrighi talks about it. Use it to build hegemony, which isn't pure domination. It's not the Roman Empire, like just, you know, brutally suppressing people and vicious wars and shit like that. Although that's part of it. It's that they're able to craft a series of institutions and order that centers through coercion and also through consent.

centers through coercion and also through consent. Importantly, coercion and consent, other capitalist powers, it centers them around them. They become the center of this. And the hegemony is that expression, right, of them being able to craft the world, of them being able to get other powers in line, because ultimately it benefits the other powers as well, because there's so much capital flowing through them right and they have like the the best form of organization for that particular period of time in that particular place right and so as a result what we get is something that persists in many ways to this day the modern interstate system called the Westphalian system. And so I think this is really where you start to see the nation state rise in sort of importance,

global importance, but also as a sort of vehicle with which to compete for mobile capital against other nation states. Yeah. And this is an important moment to point out the difference of those logics, too, between the capitalist logic and the territorialist, or you can just call it the logic of the state, the modern state after the Tria Westphalia, which is that capital is fluid and it flows through space

as it moves around. There's all these little molecular pieces to it, and it goes here, it goes there. It expands itself through space as it moves around. There's all these little molecular pieces to it. And it goes here, it goes there, it expands itself through space and through time. Whereas nations are bounded in a particular geographic region, right? They're not fluid, they're actually very, very solid. And they survive through a logic of sovereignty, which says that this is our place, these are our laws, this is for our people, that the capitalist logic doesn't. But obviously, the nation state exists at the same time. So it's important to look at this dynamic through time, right, of the interplay between these two forces in the world. Absolutely. Well, and so in this process, as the sort of Dutch rise in power and hegemony and they do all the fucked up things you read about in your history books, like through the joint stock companies and everything.

They again, they give rise to their sort of dynamics of their own downfall. And I think specifically I'm referring to sort of mercantilism and how other state, nation states, began essentially just copying the Dutch. They just looked at what they were doing and was like, well, it's working for them. Maybe it'll work for us. Look at all the tulips they have.

Look at their windmills. We want that. Right. And so probably the best, you know, suitors for that role obviously, as we all know, were the British.

The sun never sets, as folks know. Exactly. Who were basically able to take the expansionary logic of the Dutch and turn it into a settler colonial system. They were essentially able to take the joint stock companies and then use them to colonize other areas and then use that to sort of extract surplus and in so doing take over the atlantic trade more specifically the atlantic slave trade um and so this kind of becomes the sort of again sort of

boost in the gas tank that allows them to you know be propelled into the sort of industrial revolution i guess as we call um go ahead sorry yeah, no, I was just gonna just kind of pull it back to this idea of the interplay between capitalist and territorial power. Because again, you had Genoa, which was able to use Spain to protect itself using a territorial logic, then you have this movement to the Dutch, who if they did anything, they created these little entrepots of trade and surplus extraction through trade all throughout the world, all the way from East Asia to Africa and to the New World. They didn't have a strong territorial logic.

In fact, the Westphalian system was a design partially created by the Dutch that was supposed to protect them from other powerful forces on the continent that wanted to take them over, take their stock exchange, take their banks, and loot them. It's with Britain that these things are synthesized, and Britain is able to use the logic of trade and mercantilism, but also combine it with a territorial empire. And because it's a synthesis of those two things, Great Britain is able to operate in a superseded way on a grander scale than the Dutch ever could.

Right, right. And so, again, you see the motions of the process of synthesizing those agencies of expansion and then they become superseded and replaced with these even larger sort of agencies and entities of expansion. Motherfuckers turned on this podcast and didn't realize they'd be learning dialectics. I'm telling you, man, we've got to get on. Some high-profile leftist has to get on Joe Rogan. Could you imagine explaining this to Joe Rogan? Just blowing his fucking mind. It's like that Vince McMahon meme by the end of it. Joe Rogan's just, oh!

Just blow his mind. I've listened to him enough to know that this was blowing his mind. Well, maybe you can do it, man. Jump into the breach. You got this. Dialectics on Rogan. Right. you can do it man jump into the breach you got this dialectics on rogan right um well and so also just to not lose sight of this aspect of it as we mentioned we have this sort of this set of

costs associated with accumulation and while the genoese and spanish um the genoese had to resort to the spanish and externalizeize their protection costs to them. The Dutch were able to internalize those costs. Well, the British then are able to internalize another set of costs. In this case, it's the production costs, which, as you were just saying, the Dutch basically relied on other parts of the world through through all kinds of violent extractive measures, to obtain all of their commodities for trade and turn Amsterdam essentially into an entrepot, as you were saying, a hub where you store shit and trade and everything else.

The British were actually able to internalize these production costs in the sort of agro-industrial sector. They were able to grow their own shit, they were able to makeize these production costs in the sort of agro-industrial sector. They were able to grow their own shit. They were able to make their own shit. And I guess this is kind of what you, when you were referring to what the vulgar historians refer to as an industrial revolution, that is basically what you're referring to. Yeah, and real quick, one thing to remind people is it's not just that the Dutch merely did trading and finance.

Origi talks about how they were able to turn their cost of warfare, their cost of defense, into a method of accumulation themselves by having a very strong military-industrial complex. That made it so that all this capital coming into the Netherlands could actually be used instead of paying somebody else, paying mercenaries in order to fight war for you. They could have individual capitalists in their territory making war goods and tax those people. So it was an internalization of military costs at the same time. So it becomes, of course, industrialized. And then, as we know, eventually it becomes financialized and blah, blah, blah. But they did have a very strong productive apparatus at a certain point in time.

Well, and what does that remind you of? Yeah. Reminds you of the United States. I think I think there's all these little like light bulbs hopefully going off in people's heads as we go through, as they see how these different cycles, you know, move through history and thinking about different periods of American history and what we've been through. Exactly. So, you know, you have this process. And one thing we haven't talked about at all, and maybe this is another light bulb that sort of goes off, maybe a little more terrifying one, though, is that generally as these phases transition from one to the next... Oh, no, you're going to give them the bad news, fuck.

Yeah, we waited like halfway through to give people the bad news about these chaotic moments where systemic cycles shift. Exactly. Generally, in these moments, systemic chaos arises. And in the scrum, a sort of victor has to arise. And so if you map out the sort of large interstate, semi-global struggles that generally have erupted over the last 400 to 500 years or so they have aligned almost perfectly with the transition so i'm referring of course to the napoleonic wars uh the world wars that we know yeah i mean it's uh it's it's one of the the that that i think is probably the maybe the basis for the thousand year stare where you're like oh shit if you understand that as we're going to talk about the shift from great britain's hegemonic capitalist

power over the basically the world system and the united states rise if you understand that that was a period between 1914 and 1945, that becomes pretty scary because we see what that chaos means in human terms. Exactly, exactly. So just continuing on, I guess, with the narrative of Great Britain's sort of rise and fall, you know, you have this Great Depression in the mid to late 19th century, where Great Britain's sort of industrial production starts to slow down.

They have this massive, massive industrialization process in the early 19th century. That's where you get, you know, E.P. Thompson's making of the English working class and all this. Thompson's making of the English working class and all this. But that starts to slow down in the later part of the century, and then they have their signal crisis and switch over to their financial expansion. And in doing this, they start to empower the rising superpower on the other side of the Atlantic, the United States. And so I think that it's probably a good point to sort of switch over to looking at what the United States did to sort of take advantage of that. And one thing that I think that can't be discounted and that Rigi spends a lot of time looking at is just how innovative and powerful the vertical integration of companies was.

And if you look at the other hegemonic force, or I don't want to, that's not the right word, the other major global force challenging Britain's hegemony in the late 19th century, Germany. They took a different path. Most of their economy was horizontally integrated. And so Ariki sort of spells this out as like the Americans, you know, great success story. That they were, through the vertical integration of companies, they were able to internalize transaction costs. So they were able to internalize protection, production, and transaction costs. And so I guess, you know, before we go any further, what does it mean to be vertically integrated, for those that don't know? Oh, sure. I mean, J.P. Morgan's probably the best example of this.

Sure. I mean, JP Morgan's probably the best example of this. He managed to not only control the steel production, but he also managed to control the coal production and the railroads that brought all that shit to the steel factories. steel factories, right? So instead of having three different capitalists doing three different things, if you're vertically integrated, that means that all of the quote unquote transactions that happen in the circulation of commodities all the way through to their production, and then ultimately through their realization and sale, all happen within one capitalist enterprise. And this is true, of course, not only schematically, if we think about the production process, but it's also true through space, right? So you have the movement of goods from one place to another within one company becoming a fluid transaction because there's no other capitalists to like intercede, right? And it creates a very powerful mechanism of accumulation, because as you said,

like, all of the transport costs and all of the trading that would happen otherwise is internalized into one big company that can do everything from soup to nuts. Right, totally. And so as we, as, you know, Britain's sort of hegemony starts to decline, I guess these companies are sort of well-positioned. I mean, really, from the word go, they had already started to expand out into sort of transnational spheres of activity. And so you have this situation in the early 20th century everybody's aware of, right? And so, you know, you have this situation in the early 20th century. Everybody's aware of, right? The two world wars and sort of like rearranging of the decolonial situation, but rearranging of the world system in general.

And so I guess let's talk about the moment right after World War when america's material expansion begins before we before we do that uh there's one one part of a reege's book i want to highlight real quick if we can sidebar yeah all right so he it's just like incredibly trolly thing but i think it's true in its own weird way right he's got i i didn't write down the page number for it but he's got this thing about how um you had the conservative world powers of great britain in the lead and then france behind it right trying to keep this hegemonic hegemonic order centered in britain going through the first and the second world war was trying to hold on to its empire obviously we know it didn't work but he says that germany and the united states were these in in the sense that we're talking about revolutionary world powers. Right. And he goes so far as to say that Wilson with his 15 points about freedom and decolonization and Lenin, Vladimir Lenin, were both anti-colonial, right? They were both Lenin and Wilson were trying to bring down the old world order.

So the U.S. and like the USSR are both counter systemic forces within the Second World War. And Germany, we see, too, is also like trying to use the territorialist logic Hitler in the Second World War in order to expand against British power at at that point because they were vying in order to control the next systemic cycle of accumulation and they obviously failed because like total war uh it was was insufficient in order to like bring the entire world around you in a capitalist fashion right they ended up exhausting themselves through like destroying europe and killing fucking tens of millions of people. Right. Well, in this dynamic between the two powers, between the U.S. and the USSR, it's funny, like, he frames it like that, and then it arises again after World War II with the Cold War.

Right. When you've got the U.N. basically dividing the world up. And again, he explains this process that in many ways it is simultaneously, and this is another aspect of the book we haven't talked about, the simultaneous forward and backwards motion of history. But it's simultaneously, the UN simultaneously grants more sovereignty to nation states and colonized people. But at the same time, it pulls back their ability to function within the world system. So it's inconceivable now, pretty much now, especially after World War II, that states would do anything unilaterally. You were sort of checked by the UN and its global,

and its powers under the auspices of the United States. Right. And even when the United States, after the 1950s and 60s, started to go outside the rubric of the UN by doing police actions around the world, it was still doing it under the same rubric that there is a quote-unquote international community, that there's international laws that all the nations have to follow. And you can, if not have the UN sign off on it like in Korea,

you can at least have a coalition of the willing, as it were, right? Right. In order to pull everybody around you. Right, right. Well, so, I mean, let's talk about this. Let's talk about the long 20th century now. Let's do it. We're at the long 20th century.

We made it. at the long 20th century now let's do it we're at we're at the long 20th century we made it so so this moment right after world war ii is pretty um pretty crucial um and people are probably familiar with the sort of agenda. And that's the United States. And so it starts to reassemble the world through, you know, everybody knows the Marshall Plan, but also the GATT. The Bretton Woods Agreement on international finance. Exactly. And so in this process, you know, we get, as you say, the sort of golden age of American capitalism.

But in this process, the United States essentially has to start consolidating global markets again so and this is another as we as we've sort of lain at this whole process we generally see a sort of pendulum swing um so maybe in the case of the genoese we see um seeking out new markets and creating new markets and then we see the pendulum swing back to the Dutch, who can only consolidate markets. And it's interesting that the Dutch are a sort of corporate national power and the Genoese are a sort of cosmopolitan imperial power. The pendulum swings back to the British,

who consolidate their world hegemony by creating more markets. And then it swings back to the United States, who can't expand geographically in the terms of markets. They can only consolidate them. So, okay, so we see, like we've shown before, we've got this series of dynamics that result in a signal crisis, a switch to a financial expansion. And so maybe throughout these cycles that we've presented so far, you can start to see some trends. I mean, Origi himself, he identifies three crucial features. And these are the ones,

again, that will sort of trigger the thousand years there. One, the cycles have sped up and they've contracted. So if you look at the Genoese cycle, it took place over about a 200 year, 250 year time span. I think the Dutch one was probably closer to 190 years. The British was closer to 120 years or so. And now, you know, just in the span of the 20th century, the United States went up and then down. Well, I guess if you were looking at the United States by the 90s, you would think that they were still probably at the lead of the sort of global world system.

And they were in many ways. They definitely were. It's more of a trend line, right? It's part of this pattern of development that, you know, and I could put this in Marxist terms, but I don't want to confuse things. It's part of this pattern where you still have this mass of profits, right? But like the rate of it is falling and this financial process makes the economy, certainly in the 1990s, seem very dynamic and very, very profitable. But underlying that, beneath that is a systemic rot, you know, a kind of

tiring out of the productive apparatus of the country and sloughing off this surplus to finance and elsewhere. Right, right. So, yeah, we see that the cycles, they speed up and they've contracted, which doesn't spell, doesn't seem good for the future. If we're, by my calculation, about 105 years into the long 20th century, into the era of United States dominance, then by Rigi's measures, we should be just about ready to go bye-bye if it is indeed speeding up and contracting. Just something to think about. I mean, Rigi himself, this is very interesting, Rigi himself pinpoints the terminal crisis

of America's hegemony with the Iraq War. He sees the fact that the United States is not able to assemble a global coalition to go into that and essentially has to fight it unilaterally as the moment that the United States has sort of lost its credibility and power to assemble sort of global forces towards its own um agenda which is interesting to think about um i mean because if you read most journalism analyses today the thing that you hear across the board is that you know obviously the united states hegemony isn't going anywhere anytime soon but for origi it was like in the mid-2000s he was like he was like oh that's it yeah no i i this is where it starts to get tough when you're talking about recent history because we're starting now that

the united states is in the picture and now we're like in a systemic cycle of accumulation we're in it right now we can't like look dispassionately like we did at the genoese you know and say oh yes this happened but then if you look a hundred years later this happened when it starts to get closer now you know i i think ariki is right about the signal crisis being in the 1970s because it very much matches matches up with his uh his uh understand his formula for these things in terms of when the actual terminal crisis begins, I think you could go 2003 with the Iraq war, or you could go 2008 with a financial crisis. There's the question that is like, how far along are we? And what does it look like to go down? And since we're, we seem to be in that now, we don't really have any easy answers for that. But it that again the united states is um is displaying this pattern

that has happened three times before um right and the cycle speeding up and contracting means that you know we're probably due for for something that looks like a uh a moment of chaos we are in a moment of chaos i mean it's pretty fucking clear we're in a moment of chaos we're in a moment of chaos absolutely i mean i think what we what we're hoping doesn't happen is a sort of like global interstate conflict i'm really hoping that doesn't happen although with uh all of the nods from uh the mainstream media from the trump administration and the Dems, the liberals. Thanks, guys. And MSNBC about attacking China as though the pandemic was its mistake, was the mistake of the CCP or the Chinese state or the Chinese people. That's a really good way to heighten global tensions and potentially create, you know, a violent situation. So good job, Dems. I would expect it from the Republicans and from Trump because they're hawkish, mouth breathing, mouth breathing psychopaths.

But like you got to love how the Democrats have fallen in line with this. And Joe Biden has. It really goes to show. And if I could make another point on that, it what this history also shows us is in a sense how overdetermined so much of our politics is, right? The fact that you have this rising competition now between another power in the United States and, like, all the political forces, the ruling class, all falls in line at the same time goes to show that even their view of it is overdetermined by what seems to be structurally necessary for the United States to try to continue in some path

moving forward it's kind of frightening but it's also a good part of the thousand year stare you're like oh yeah yeah like well the dems have to say that i mean that's part of like the way that this you know dynamic is progressing and there has to be a united states ruling class response to this chaos arising in the world system so yeah it makes sense yeah right right right well and you know we're not saying that like any of these things are inevitable and i'm not even sure that arigi is saying that um i think that we're just pointing out that these uh these these dynamics of political economic um developments they always bring into existence other contradictions that either have to be resolved or they don't become resolved. They just sort of rise to the surface and in that sphere,

conflict and other things play out. Yeah. And if you look at that, the unresolvedness, look at the last 12 years of U.S. political economy. We had this massive financial crisis in 2008. And instead of solving the problem, as a rising hegemonic power might do, we instead pushed it off into the future. We doubled down on all the financial speculation that caused that crash. And we deferred a reckoning up until today for like 12 years. We managed to just say, oh, we'll continue this without changing anything we'll make the banks whole again too big to fail you know we'll continue with the shitty like labor policies we have and let the capitalists loot everything we we we decided not to resolve that or at least there was something within the tendencies of american

capitalism and the state that said we we can't resolve this in a way that would be adequate to solving the crisis. Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. Well, and so, you know, you have, I mean, earlier I mentioned, like, you've got three crucial features of these cycles, that they've sped up and contracted. The second one is that the size and organizational complexity of the leading agencies, they've expanded and increased. I mean, just think about how complex and interwoven the leading agencies. They've expanded and increased. I mean, just think about how complex and interwoven the world is now. I mean, look at the sort of Dutch,

the kind of investment banking they were doing back then compared to now. I mean, that kind of speaks for itself. And then the third feature is the double movement, the forward and backwards at the same time, that each step forward is a process of cost internalization that involves a revival of old governmental business strategies and structures that have been preceded by superseded by previous regimes and so if we're looking towards the near future and again it's it's a fool's game anybody's trying to tell you what the near future

is going to look like this time is trying to sell you something right um but but we might be able to sort of tease out some of the dynamics that it would will at least um face us in the near future and um one of the things that ariki sort of identified early on not in this book but i think in another book with um his, Bethany Silver, was the rise of East Asia as the next center of global economic activity. I think

Arrighi thought probably that Japan would sort of fill the role of the United States in that hegemonic process. Because he's writing this in the 90s. Right, early 90s, exactly. And, you know, anybody at that time probably would have thought the same thing.

But it's become quite obvious now that the leading challenger for that position would be China, obviously. And so, you know, one of the things that, if you haven't listened to it, definitely go listen to Antifata's Line Goes Down series about Chinese political economy. It's excellent. It does a really great job of explaining, you know, how things got to where we are.

But one of the things that you sort of highlight is the sort of interwovenness of the Chinese economy with the United States and how we do seem to be sort of locked together in this sort of arrangement this dynamic and so you know the the weird thing about the current moment is that there are all kinds of of weaknesses in the Chinese economy itself that would maybe make you think twice to say that well maybe they aren't going to emerge from this as the sort of leading global hegemon even though they plan to if you look at their five year communist party's five year plan they want the Chinese currency

I can't remember if it's the to be the sort of global currency that most global deals are done in right now it's the dollar but they want that to be their currency and it makes sense. But then again, you look at how sort of debt ridden their economy is and that would also give you pause. So I don't know. I mean, what do we make of this situation?

I mean, how could even a hegemon arise out of such a situation, you think? I mean, that's the that's the million dollar question i think that um like you said we can identify these tendencies we can try to see how history doesn't quite uh repeat itself but it certainly rhymes and we can try to make some guesses some estimations on how this would go down but i think the best thing to do is to look at how the United States superseded Britain in the last systemic cycle of accumulation, then compare that to what's happening today. So what you saw was capital in its financialized form flowing out of Britain during the 19-teens and 20s and being used in order to create productive capacity in the United States. This is a process, U.S. American financialized capital and foreign direct investment that's been happening with the U.S. and China since the 1990s, right? You've got a massive trade

surplus right now that China has with the United States, and they've got tons of dollars floating in their system. They've got a ton of productive capacity, making stuff for America and the rest of the world, presumably, like in a vertically integrated way, and that the US corporations are tied into the production of China. But ultimately, that production is in their home in their homeland, they are becoming more and more powerful in that sense. And then similar to, well, this hasn't happened yet, though, but the United States started to make more demands up through the Second World War and towards the end of it, mostly through land lease for Britain to start giving up its holdings and its power around the world of its empire. You don't see that yet, but you see

how that could be possible because of the $1. trillion dollars of U.S. government debt that the Chinese central bank holds. Right. It's been it's been investing its reserve in a lot of different ways. But one of them is by buying up the safest asset that you possibly can, which is U.S. Treasury bronze, U.S. debt. Right. Right. So they have if they wanted to use it, I don't think they do, because it'd be, you know, extremely chaotic is they have a leverage point over the United States because of our financialization, because of our need to borrow, borrow, borrow more money in order to keep things going. They have a lever with which to make demands on the United States potentially. And, you know, obviously, yeah, change the way that the world hegemonic system works. And then lastly, you know, what the United States started to do is started to duplicate in the period leading up to the Second World War duplicate a lot of the institutions that Great Britain had, in terms of like Great Britain, the sterling was the global reserve currency up until that point. The United States started to supplant that role by using British financial assets in order to make our own banks, in order to make our own governance system.

And if you look at China's reaction after 2008, it's done exactly the same thing. There's something called the Asian Investment Infrastructure Bank, it's called. And it's basically the IMF, but run by China with Chinese money, Chinese capital. And then you also- Yeah, they build out a lot of the world after 2008. The Belt and Road Initiative, which China is engaged in right now, it's alongside that five year plan, is China doing international development and creating new ports, new infrastructure in order to supplement, in order to make easier Chinese trade, world trade around the world.

This is something that the United States has done as well. So like, it's impossible to say what, how this crisis will develop moving forward, but it's easy to look at at least a few things that China, the Chinese government, the CCP has been doing to try to essentially implement institutions and orders that might allow them to rise above the United States in this global role. Yeah. Well, and Rigi points out, this is a very, this is another very interesting aspect of this.

points out this is a very this is another very interesting aspect of this while we can't predict the future we can look at the set of costs associated with accumulation and as we pointed out the the dutch managed to internalize protection costs the british internalized production costs the united states internalized transaction costs and what he sees is that the next hegemon would figure out a way to internalize social reproduction and environmental costs. So anybody who lives where I live in eastern Kentucky knows what externalized environmental costs look like. And so, you know, that is an interesting thing to look at. this book this book doesn't in many ways like if you were to read this book not knowing anything about origi and his past and his activism and other things you would think almost that this book was trying to sort of find a way to square the circle of how capitalism could continue in the future um and so that's kind of the basis we're coming at this from i mean we're sort of

assuming that like maybe what we're going through now i, I'm sort of bearish on the idea that this would look like a collapse of capitalism. And that capitalism might very well adapt and prove to be as resilient as it always has been and find a way through this. That's the fundamental question, right? If we can state anything, it's that there seems to be a fork in the road right now. If we can state anything, it's that there seems to be a fork in the road right now. And either the world system will be able to adapt. A new system of hegemony will supersede the system that we have right now. And great power, presumably China, right?

Because it's not going to be Japan. Rigi can only kind of see what he could see back in the 1990s. But potentially, China will rise to take the role and continue the process of accumulation of capital forward through time and presumably then have their own systemic cycle. When I first read this, 10-12 years ago, I was trying to think about this myself, because it's the question, as you say, that's posed in this book, like what's going to happen? And I looked at the state of China and I saw how primitive its governmental structures are. I don't mean that in like a judgment way, just like did not have the same sort of institutions like the IMF that I was talking about earlier. Looking at the way at the like per capita income through of Chinese workers.

And it was something like 20 times less than in the United States. And I was looking at the ability. I was thinking about the way that China could pull different nations into its orbit around itself to craft a new hegemony. And back 10, 12 years ago, it didn't seem possible to me. I did not think that they had the capacity to rise to that. Now, in this day and age, I with all the changes that have happened since then, I think it's actually possible. And I think as I said, since 2008, you've seen them doing moves to start to essentially, I think it's a survival mechanism, right? But they started to make moves to try to like disentangle themselves from the United States because the U.S. has been in such chaos that it's kind of like a matter of survival that they started to be able to survive on their own as not just U.S. governance, but also the U.S. economy starts to decline and decline.

I think they're trying to find an exit to that. So I'm a little bit more, I'm not even sure it's 50 50. But I think that if we could not blow up the world, if the climate crisis or various pandemics don't just obliterate most of human life in the next 20 years, I could see the possibility of this and the social reproduction costs and the environmental shit is really interesting and forward thinking on a Reggie's parts, because you've seen in some ways the Chinese government's massive subsidy of solar panels and other forms of green energy and green production. You've seen that over the last 10 years. You've seen that a lot of the innovations are happening in China and a lot of production of that. are happening in China and a lot of production of that. And then the social reproduction stuff is kind of a little bit more complicated. So I know enough about China to not like say that the internalization of social reproduction costs is like given moving to the future. But certainly a state system that's more centralized in a way than the United States would do a better job of cheapening what it

costs to create new workers and to continue and to maintain human life moving forward. So I don't know. It's all very intriguing. Yeah, yeah, very much so. Well, one of the things that's interesting is one of the possibilities is that capitalism could, we could be at a point where the cycles can't contract anymore. If they keep speeding up and contracting, it implies that there is a terminal point in which maybe there is like you have one month where there's like a state that's a hegemon and then the next month, like three weeks. The vanishing point of imperialism.

Exactly. Yeah, just logically on its face, it doesn't make any sense point of imperialism. Exactly. Yeah, just logically on its face, it doesn't make any sense. You're right. Right. So, I mean, and so that could also be the case. It could be the case that we're entering an era of just mass systemic chaos that has no end point and no sort of organizing feature to it or force to it. On that point, I think the global capitalist economy is about as global as it could possibly get.

So I'm not sure what more, say, a Chinese hegemony could do to expand the scale of that. Right, well, that's one of the questions I had. I don't think there's any more planet to... Right, right. That's one of the questions i had there's any more planet uh right right that's the that's one of the questions i had on here like does the world have another material financial expansion in it in space well trump wants to mine the moon now so i don't know if you saw that uh maybe uh elon musk will go get a contract with the chinese government and like try to i don't know uh capture some asteroids and bring Chinese government and like try to I don't know capture

some asteroids and bring all that booty home with him I don't know well if we know if past behavior is any indication he would say that he was but with not actually do some press release that made it

seem like he had done that exactly but end up talking about half the time about tesla stock or uh grimes right right so yeah that's i mean there's there's no there's no real other place to go it seems unless we're i'm thinking about this incorrectly maybe there's the possibility of instead of like an extension kind of like a deepening of capitalist relations but then you're getting into social reproduction again and how much more could like capitalist social relations be imbued into our everyday lives you know it does right everything's on the market now every aspect of human life is commodified so it's

exactly maybe there's something we're not thinking of but it seems right what are the frontiers that we don't see right i don't know and that frontier as always can be and this is harvey could be extensive or intensive right so you can intensify that or you can extend it and chinese china doesn't seem like it could extend it elsewhere except maybe to space on the internalization of that seems like if it continued that it would only just be more of the same and if i reading a reiki correctly it couldn't chinese hegemony couldn't just come by making quote-unquote middle class like all the chinese workers it would have to be something the expansion of that would have to like be on a different scale

using like superseded principles if you know what i mean yeah no i know exactly what you mean um well i mean it's yeah it's fun to think about um it's the again it's the weird thing about a rigi he kind of is almost sort of like an alien who's like where is the future gonna go you know what i mean like what's next and i mean i think that any any socialist, anybody on the left trying to understand sort of organizing situation and the possibilities for contingencies wants to know those questions. This book doesn't answer that. But it does give you a framework within which you can look out at the world and see, well, what are the dynamics that are arising? And more importantly, like capital itself, like Marx, it shows you how to look at the world in terms of dialectics. And that is the most important

part. I mean, there's parts of Marx that I don't fully agree with, but that doesn't matter. It's not even the substance so much of capital. It's the way that you look at the world and the way that, you know, social forces and dynamics play out. And anybody who wants to change the world, anybody who is infested in that idea and has devoted their life to it, you know, this book will help you do that. I think it'll make you sharper and, you know, it'll add another sort of lens on your Google Glass. I would like to apologize because about 10 minutes ago I said there's a fork and there's two paths to go on. There is indeed the path where China becomes the global hegemon replacing the United States. There is the path of global climate collapse and the end of human civilization as we know it.

Of course, there's also a third option, which I would call it global proletarian revolution to right get out of this cycle this endless cycle you know um this this this endless what what did nietzsche call it eternal return right of uh systemic cycles of accumulation like i i don't think a reiki that's not what he's trying to do in this book but that's how we should think about this book. Because we seem to be at some limit capital as it's, as it has existed has reached some limit, which if we were to if we take up the mantle, if we understand that the working class and the capitalist class have nothing in common, and that ultimately, this is their system, and we just live in it, we can see the Arigi book then as the terrain that

we fight on, the terrain of struggle, right? Look at it as our battle map, right? We're like all little generals in the proletarian army, just trying to think about where the weak points are in our enemy and hopefully think about the way that transition happens, but not the kind of transition that seems quote unquote natural or inevitable of capitalism, which would mean like 20 years of like warfare and destruction. If we, if we understand where we're at right now in that cycle, I think it gives us more tools to, to fight back. And lastly, I would say a really doesn't always use marks in his book.

Like he, I've mentioned, he uses Hegel. He uses Machiavelli by way of Gramsci. The double movement is Polanyi. Karl Polanyi, who's a great non-Marxist socialist thinker. He uses all these different thinkers in a kind of eclectic way.

I think the sum of the parts, greater whole, that sort of thing. But he uses Marx in one important part and again i have to find a page number but he uses the famous line from capital volume three which is um the barrier to capital is capital itself right what does that mean right well as i understand it it's about dynamic, capitalism being two things in contradiction with each other. Capital since the Florentine period, we're going back to the 14th, 15th century now, capital in its infancy and capital today has a contradiction mode of accumulation and a mode of production. So capital tries to do two separate things.

It tries to make more stuff, right? But it only does that to the extent that it makes more profits. So capital becomes a barrier to the expansion of the productive capacity, the expansion of human beings in our material world. the expansion of human beings in our material world, it becomes that barrier because a profit system, and I think this is how you understand financialization, a system for making profits, making money out of money, is not a good system if you want to give everybody the things that they need and be able to produce everything that a good human life would include all throughout this planet. So the barrier of capital being capital itself, I think shows that capital if left to its own devices is in this financialized period right now is trying to turn money into money. This is causing chaos throughout the world. One way for us to increase the productive forces in society would be to have this disastrous period where United States hegemony

goes up against China, where like there's war and there's chaos and refugees and pandemics and all that shit. And the other option is to say, look, if these two things are in conflict, then we need to create a system, some might call it socialism, communism, whatever, that allows us to increase the productive forces, which is to say, make more useful stuff for people so that they can live better lives. But but tear it away from the imposition of it also being a mode of accumulation and a mode of profit. And for that, you would need to get rid of in one way or another. This capitalist class, which all through this history has been hitting in the high sitting in the high seat.

And ultimately, they not a Origi and not us with our thousand-year stare, but the capitalist class themselves are the ones that are sitting up above all of us and reaping the benefits by taking all this surplus out of our own labor, creating a world system that works for them, and ultimately leaves the mass of us not just immiserated, as we've seen in the last 40, 50 years the united states but also powerless right this book does it gives us the ability to see what we're fighting against and we need to take the power to break out of this cycle and we can only do that collectively we can only do that together we can only do that with a movement of that one class that has nothing to lose but his chains of course that is us the working class so that's a long spiel i'm sorry

but that's kind of what i got from this book no no and and it puts it in by putting in the sort of world historical perspective in terms you put it in the world framework we it has to be internationalized it has it can't just be the sort of workers of the united states using the sort of state imperial system to deliver socialism to the rest of the world. It has to be a global revolution, in other words. And so, because again, that is the contours of this book. It shows the relocation of those centers of production as the sort of engine of the sort of global economy.

And that is the stage on which this plays out. It doesn't play out just on the stage of the United States or their Eurozone or whatever. It plays out on the stage of the world. Right. And so, yeah. And that's important. It's a matter of scale,

which ultimately means it's a matter of abstraction. So none of this history right here, which is on this, like, the highest possible plane of historical abstraction where you're talking about these, like, world-changing historical forces where individuals in this book

never come in. They're, like, barely. Like, a politician will come in every once in a while, like President Wilson or Vladimir Lenin. But mostly it's about these structures. Of course, of course, of course,

underneath all of this is the, on the lower level of abstraction, of course, underneath all of this is the on the lower level of abstraction is like the political world with our politicians, like individual economies, our lives, you know, different events that happen in our country or elsewhere. So that's another thing to note is like, don't don't think that nothing matters, right? On this larger, highest level of abstraction, it seems daunting, but you should just use it to perfect your stare, as it were, but understand that you also have power yourselves. We all have power ourselves within it.

Absolutely, absolutely. I think that's probably the best place of any to sign off. Sean, thanks so much for doing this with me. It was a blast getting to read this book and to uh getting to talk about it with you this was excellent man i couldn't think of a better partner to run through this with i think that uh you did a great job of breaking things down into very digestible terms for everybody and this is a great collaboration so i would be more than happy to have you on line goes down or anti-fod

at some point and anytime you want me to hang out with you guys on trillbillies i'd be more than happy to absolutely um so definitely check out the anti-fod and for sure check out the line goes down it's taught me a lot i know it'll teach everyone else a lot too um and uh so yeah sean try to stay sane in quarantine my friend i'm doing my best it's only uh dialectical historical materialism that's keeping me going but that's enough same here baby same here um all right well till next time we'll see you and uh stay safe out there folks so long