[...] Technology is not ‘progressive’ in itself; its positive or negative effects are always conditional on power relations. In any event, it is certain that it will not abolish capitalist exploitation solely through its own development, for labour is not simply an occupation but, in the last instance, a social relationship.

it leads to advocating ‘autarchic’ solutions, which consist in ‘delinking’ the economies of the periphery from the world market and pursuing ‘auto-centred’ economic development

Arrighi is a ‘world-systems’ theorist, one of the best known after Wallerstein, who is primarily responsible for developing this theory

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.

According to Arrighi, we are currently witnessing the decline of the systemic cycle of accumulation dominated by the United States. The defeat suffered by the latter during the Vietnam War was the ‘signal crisis’ of this decline, the war in Iraq is its ‘terminal crisis’. Wars – combined with growing deficits, to which they contribute significantly – play an important role in the transition from one instance of hegemony to the next. For Arrighi, the power of the United States persists to this day, but it represents a typical case of ‘domination without hegemony’. The Italian thinker’s analysis is close here to that of Robert Cox. ‘Domination’ is predicated on instances of economic and military superiority that are not accompanied by the consent of the dominated. The latter endure the domination for want of an alternative, but they do not actively collaborate with it, and invariably seek to undermine it. For domination to be converted into hegemony, it is indispensable that it should rest on a mixture of interests that is clearly understood by the dominated – the dominant classes among the dominated populations must have an interest in the domination – and cultural identification. Until the 1970s, the United States combined these elements, which made it an authentic hegemon. But since the Vietnam War, and still more the war in Iraq and the failure of the ‘Project for a New American Century’, it clearly lacks them.

China’s economic development suggests the possibility of a Chinese twenty-first century, with a ‘Beijing Consensus’ succeeding the ‘Washington Consensus’.

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.

One of the contributions made by The New Spirit of Capitalism is that it put the word ‘capitalism’ back into circulation in France. The term had almost completely vanished from the public sphere during the neo-liberal decades of the 1980s and 90s, the naturalization of the system (‘there is no alternative’) having entailed the disappearance of the word referring to it. Boltanski and Chiapello define capitalism in minimal fashion as the ‘unlimited accumulation of capital by formally peaceful means’. It is a profoundly absurd system. The ‘unlimited’ character of accumulation is without foundation or justification: why should it be necessary for capital to be infinitely accumulated, given that human needs are by definition limited? Aristotle called the unlimited accumulation of goods as an end in itself ‘chrematistics’. He condemned it and contrasted it with ‘economics’, or accumulation for a purpose. The essence of capitalism, affirm Boltanski and Chiapello, is chrematistic.