The industrial working class was fragmented, while formerly auxiliary subaltern sectors made their voice heard independently. The outcome was the situation of indeterminacy we are still in today, which is prompting more sophisticated theoretical accounts.
To say that productivity increases only by dint of constant socio-technical development amounts to claiming that a growing expenditure of energy is the sine qua non of profit creation.
China’s economic development suggests the possibility of a Chinese twenty-first century, with a ‘Beijing Consensus’ succeeding the ‘Washington Consensus’.
It is then that the systemic cycle of accumulation enters into its ‘financial’ phase. This phase corresponds to what we above called ‘financialization’ – that is, capital’s tendency as a result of the fall in profit rates to take refuge in the financial sphere and speculation.
Arrighi is a ‘world-systems’ theorist, one of the best known after Wallerstein, who is primarily responsible for developing this theory
