The End of the Long Twentieth Century?
The Rise of China and the Possibilities of a New
Global Fordism
Nick Jepson
It is now 20 years since the publication of Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, a highly influential and ambitious work charting the evolution of global capitalism over five centuries. Arrighi’s account posits the history of capitalism as a series of secular cycles, each consisting of expansionary material and financial phases. Every cycle is led by a hegemonic state, which houses an alliance of capitalist and governmental agencies best placed among various competitors to create the conditions for a stable profitable investment regime. The incipient hegemon’s competitive advantages over rivals (organizational, technological, geographical, etc.) gradually allow its capitalists to become the central actors in and beneficiaries of the most profitable circuits of accumulation. The dynamism of the hegemonic state-capital alliance drives (uneven) growth across the world-system as a whole, meaning that, generally speaking, the interests of all other capitalist actors become increasingly tied to supporting continued processes of hegemonic expansion. This tends to establish periods of relatively stable systemic growth, the material phase, which are eventually progressively undermined by their own contradictions. As returns on productive expansion under the organizational paradigm instituted by the hegemon diminish, capital begins to pull out of these activities and retreat into finance, in search of higher returns. The ensuing phase of financial expansion constitutes a brief belle époque in which the power of the hegemon appears to be resurgent. This proves illusory, however, as the financial expansion, not underpinned by growth in the real economy but in fact predicated upon an undermining of the bases of real growth, tends towards instability and quickly generates crisis. In turn, declining returns to financial capital promote a search for investment opportunities in a rising state-capitalist bloc that possesses the most advantages under the new conjuncture, eventually emerging as the new hegemon and providing the basis for another round of material expansion.
AND BARRIERS TO CHINA’S HEGEMONIC ACCESSION
ABSTRACT
Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century is an almost unfathomably ambitious and
complex work. Its monumentality derives from Arrighi’s conviction that the best way to handicap
the possible futures of the world capitalist geo-economy is to analyze the structural evolution of
this global system, an evolution spanning more than five centuries; the genius of the work rests in
the distinctive approach that Arrighi takes. At the core of his approach is the identification of
those long-term trends and accreted characteristics – one might call them “systemic
contradictions” – that promise to send the world capitalist geo-economy in a radically different
developmental direction as US hegemony wanes. Arrighi’s assessment of these contradictions
compel him to make a provocative suggestion: in all likelihood, no singular concentration of state
and economic power possesses the territorial scale or the organizational capacities required to
lead the global system through another round of restructuring and expansion. Properly framed,
this illuminating insight could serve as the starting point for a theoretical exploration of the
socio-ecological constraints to global capitalist reproduction, but such is a journey (mostly) not
taken by Arrighi in The Long Twentieth Century. In fact, to the degree that he subsequently
contemplates the prospect of a China-centered reconstitution of the world geo-economy, Arrighi
marginalizes the question of global systemic contradictions altogether.
