[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Proyect v Arrighi

[Patrick Bond]

Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
May 21, 2008

Giovanni Arrighi’s Vico-Marxism

Giovanni Arrighi

On March 5th, Red Emma, a radical bookstore in Baltimore, hosted a 
symposium on Giovanni Arrighi’s new book “Adam Smith in Beijing”. The 
panel consisted of Arrighi, David Harvey and Joel Andreas, a Sociology 
professor at Johns Hopkins University and specialist on class relations 
in China from 1949 to the present.

You can watch the event here. [link]

When I first saw the title of Arrighi’s book, I jumped to the conclusion 
that it was some kind of hard-hitting exposé of the capitalist 
transformation of China. After all, what better symbol of neoliberalism 
is there than Adam Smith?

I was shocked to discover that Arrighi views Adam Smith as a prophet of 
markets, but not of capitalism. Not only that, what’s been happening in 
China for the past 20 years ago is the development of markets rather 
than capitalism. Boy, you learn something new every day.

Except for this part of Arrighi’s talk, the rest of it was not so 
controversial albeit long-winded and hard-to-follow. I had to listen to 
it twice in order to really figure out what he was trying to say. Like 
some other big-time Marxists (I am using the term liberally) who lecture 
extemporaneously and who are assured of their prominent place in 
history, Arrighi seems to disdain the usual need for clarity and economy 
of expression. The only other big-shot who I have heard in person that 
is more opaque and boring is Etienne Balibar.

Arrighi addressed the Sinophobia that has cropped up from time to time 
in the bourgeois press and on talk radio that tends to speak of the 
“China threat” as if we were still in the 1950s. It is of course hard to 
sustain this paranoia in the face of the evidence that just about 
everything for sale in Walmart and Home Depot is made in China. Who 
would want to nuke the country that makes your underwear?

Although Arrighi dismisses the rightwing hysteria over China, he does 
view the country’s rapid economic growth as a challenge to Western 
imperialism. He describes China’s embrace of markets as a “tactic”. In 
order to expand its influence in the world (totally benign in Arrighi’s 
view), it builds up its economic strength and gives short shrift to the 
military, Western Europe and the U.S.’s traditional means to build up 
hegemony.

Effacing the differences between Mao’s China and the China of today, 
Arrighi explains its growing power as a function of its “revolutionary” 
tradition. When Mao made his revolution, he prioritized education and 
health care. The “iron rice bowl” and other such institutions made the 
Chinese workforce extremely productive. It is this productivity rather 
than its willingness (and need) to work for coolie wages that explains 
China’s rise.

Additionally, the market reforms in China hearken back to an earlier 
period in the country’s history when an extensive network of 
non-capitalist markets made it the richest country in the world. In the 
Qing Dynasty (1644-1911 A.D), the emperors pursued a policy of 
developing a self-sufficient peasantry that had a vested interest in 
fighting against invaders. In contrast to Europe, which was producing a 
proletariat through expulsion from the land, China enjoyed what Arrighi 
called “accumulation by possession”, a play on David Harvey’s 
neo-Luxemburgian notion of “accumulation by dispossession”.

In effect, the Chinese Communist Party is today emulating the successes 
of the Qing Dynasty by empowering a non-capitalist market system 
throughout the country. Although Arrighi does not use the term “market 
socialism”, it is clear that his views overlap with Eric Olin Wright, 
another Marxist totally committed to China’s economic development path 
today. (I took up Wright’s ideas here.)

As it turns out, Arrighi’s definition of capitalism stems from Fernand 
Braudel, the French historian associated with the Annales school, named 
after the scholarly journal he published. Here is how Arrighi explained 
Braudel’s approach in a 2007 Positions article (unfortunately only 
available to those with access to Project Muse) titled “States, Markets, 
and Capitalism, East and West”:

There are many conceptions of capitalism, but for our purposes Fernand 
Braudel’s is the most useful. In Braudel’s conception, capitalism is 
“the top layer” of the world of trade. It consists of those individuals, 
networks, and organizations that systematically appropriate the largest 
profits, regardless of the particular nature of the activities 
(financial, commercial, industrial, or agricultural) in which they are 
involved. Braudel distinguishes this layer from the lower layer of 
“market economy,” which consists of participants in buying and selling 
activities whose rewards are more or less proportionate to the costs and 
risks involved in these activities.

For Arrighi, China has never been subject to the top layer of 
capitalism. It is instead characterized by the lower level of happy, 
goods-exchanging farmers and small entrepreneurs who, at least to me, 
summon up the image of hobbits in Tolkien’s fantasy novels.

As an example of these fat and happy merchants, Arrighi refers to the 
township/village enterprises of the 1980s that supposedly transformed 
the Chinese economic landscape by providing an ample supply of rural 
labor and allowing native entrepreneurial instincts to rise to the 
surface. Once this bee hive of economic activity got started, Western 
corporations jumped in.

Rather than answer Arrighi’s obviously ridiculous ideas, I would urge 
you to listen to David Harvey and Joel Andreas, who both recapitulate 
Marx’s definition of capitalism and explain how it functions as the 
dominant mode of production in China. Harvey is quite telling in an 
account of a visit to one of these village enterprises which transformed 
itself from a collective farm into what amounts to a sales office for 
condominiums recently.

All of those who were part of the collective became property owners 
immediately (after the “reform” allowed them to) and were transformed 
into millionaires, as explained by their chief, a man sitting under a 
big hammer-and-sickle banner. This man also explained to Harvey that 
their enterprise made heavy use of migrant labor. When Harvey asked 
through a translator if the migrant workers shared in the profits, the 
chief said of course not. They were not part of the original collective. 
Harvey then asked the translator to ask him how that squares with the 
Communist iconography he was sitting underneath. The translator told 
Harvey that this question would mean the end of the interview.

None of this is of interest to Arrighi, who like nearly all “World 
Systems” theorists, disdains the class struggle in favor of the larger 
contests between hegemons and hegemons-to-be, which are either states or 
collections of states. Geopolitics trumps class in this quarter of the 
academic left and as such dovetails neatly with the discipline called 
“International Relations” in political science departments all across 
the world.

Arrighi’s book can be seen as the second installment of Andre Gunder 
Frank’s “Re-Orient”, which argued that China, after a long period of 
second-class citizenship in a world dominated by Western imperialism, 
was about to be restored to its glorious past. Frank and Arrighi most 
certainly would like to see the U.S. and Europe reduced to the status it 
once had, when Great Britain was considered the backwaters of world 
trade. I for one have a hard time sharing their enthusiasm. A world that 
consists of the cyclical rise and decline of Great Powers has more to do 
with Vico than Marx.

Giambattista Vico (1668 - 1744) was an Italian philosopher and historian 
who argued in the Scienza Nuova that civilization develops in a 
recurring cycle (ricorso) of three ages: the divine, the heroic, and the 
human. (From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giambattista_Vico) It is 
basically a cyclical view of history that accepts domination of states 
over states as a given. Heroic states dominate human states and that’s 
just the way it is. Europe had its turn for 500 years and now it is East 
Asia’s. Which reminds me, unrepentant Marxist that I am, of the words in 
Peggy Lee’s classic:

IS THAT ALL THERE IS?
Peggy Lee

I remember when I was a very little girl, our house caught on fire.
I’ll never forget the look on my father’s face as he gathered me up
in his arms and raced through the burning building out to the pavement.
I stood there shivering in my pajamas and watched the whole world go up 
in flames.
And when it was all over I said to myself, “Is that all there is to a fire”

Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is

And when I was 12 years old, my father took me to a circus, the greatest 
show on earth.
There were clowns and elephants and dancing bears.
And a beautiful lady in pink tights flew high above our heads.
And so I sat there watching the marvelous spectacle.
I had the feeling that something was missing.
I don’t know what, but when it was over,
I said to myself, “is that all there is to a circus?

Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is

Full: 
http://www.lyricsdownload.com/peggy-lee-is-that-all-there-is-lyrics.html