[Marxism] (More) Thinking Out Loud

[Ed George]

Around two years ago, I wrote an article, 'Through What Stage Are We
Passing?', which was published, amongst other places, the journal _What
Next?_. [1] The general conclusions that I drew were these:

* First, that the global capitalist system had undergone four successive
long-wave cycles of (relative) development and (relative) stagnation, a
pattern of development that could be dated like this:


CYCLE         ASCENDING       DESCENDING
                PHASE           PHASE


I      1780/90 -- A -- 1810/17 -- B -- 1844/51

II     1844/51 -- A -- 1870/75 -- B -- 1890/96

III    1890/96 -- A -- 1914/20 -- B -- 1940/45

IV     1940/45 -- A -- 1967/73 -- B --    ?


* Second, that cycles II and IV in this pattern coincided with the
global political (state) hegemony exercised by a single state
(respectively Britain and the United States), while cycles I and III
were marked by an absence of such global state hegemony.

* And third, that once mass proletarian movements appear historically,
genuinely anti-systemic struggles, i.e. socialist revolutionary crises,
in the metropolis tended to be clustered in the 'B' (descending) phase
of cycle III, i.e., that the conditions for socialist revolution in the
heartlands of capital seem to include both generalised economic crisis
and a break in global state political hegemony.

Thus far, all this appears to me quite incontrovertible: it is an
observable fact that there _are_ long wave economic cycles; that
alternately they _have_ coincided with periods of global state
predominance (to avoid begging he question of what 'hegemony' in this
sense consists in [2]); and that socialist revolutionary crisis _have_
occurred in the most recent 'B' phase that took place in the context of
an absence of such predominance.

But I also sought in my article to try to answer _why_ all this had
occurred, and what it _meant_. Thus, I made the following tentative
suggestions:

* First, that, at the level of state political power, which is
necessarily under the regime of capitalist social relations a system of
many national states, it seemed as if the global capitalist mode of
production _needs_, so as to function with more stability, one of these
states to operate as a hegemon. This is a conclusion indicated, at the
level of the economic, by the less stable and more crisis-prone
ascendant phases of non-hegemonic cycles compared with hegemonic ones
(1780 to 1810 and 1890 to 1914 compared with 1848 to 1875 and 1945 to
1970), and at the level of the political by the fact that the
non-hegemonic cycles are punctuated by severe inter-metropolitan
political (including military) conflict and, of course, by oppositional
anti-systemic movements. Indeed, I even went as far to suggest that
inter-metropolitan conflict was not simply a consequence of an absence
of hegemony but also had the function of resolving that absence of
hegemony.

* Second, that, between themselves, periods of global state political
hegemony seemed to coincide with different modes of capital
accumulation: that British political hegemony, realised through
manufacturing dominance and naval policing of 'free' trade coincided
with and conformed to a mode of preclassical imperialist industrial
capitalist accumulation, and that United States hegemony, imposed
through the hegemony of the dollar (and subsequently the US military
machine) and US dominance within supranational state institutions,
including those set up under the auspices of Bretton Woods, coincided
with and conformed to globalised financial capitalist accumulation. This
is to say that that there is global state political hegemony, and how it
is carried out, is intimately connected to the nature of the predominant
mode of capitalist accumulation in a given period, and that the passage
from one mode goes accompanied by a change in the global hegemon, not
only in the sense of which state fulfils this role, but also in how it
fulfils it; as well as to suggest that periods in which there is no
global hegemon are periods in which the nature of capitalist
accumulation is changing from one mode to another.

* This in turn suggests the existence of a specific relation between
state and economy, a relation governed by how and to what degree the
operation of global political state hegemony in turn governs and
guarantees capital accumulation. Summarising, I wrote: '[T]his relation
between cycles of political hegemony and economic rhythms is not casual:
[...] capitalist relations need - and find, through force of necessity -
a stable institutional political framework in which to unfold
themselves, and this institutional stability is granted them through a
state system held in balance by a hegemonic state power. Each cycle of
state hegemony corresponds with a phase in the economic cycle. But, as
the modalities of capitalist accumulation evolve [...], the necessities
of the economic structure vis-à-vis the institutional framework change,
and the hegemon [and how it exercises its hegemony] acts as a break on
economic development, while new possible contenders for the role of
hegemon are pushed forward [...]. Finally, freed from the shackles of a
redundant hegemon, a new economic cycle begins - less spectacular, less
stable and more prone to crisis than the preceding one. Increasing
instability at the institutional level - manifested most clearly in wars
(the Napoleonic Wars and the two twentieth-century World Wars) -
supervenes to bring the cycle to a close. The political instability -
the wars - have the function of resolving the interregnum, and a new
cycle, now newly hegemonic, begins.'