A review of Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long 20th Century (1994, 2nd Edition 2010) Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long 20th Century is a history of capitalism, and a diachronic contexutalization of the distinguishing features of US dominance in the 20th century. Building on Wallerstein and especially Braudel, Arrighi revises both Marx and world systems theory to […]
Anarchy in World Systems Read More »
So I saw “The Rum Diary”, a film that is based on an early novel by Hunter S. Thompson. This is a great movie to showcase the inescapable but often overlooked fact that the world that we live in is fundamentally fucked up. The movie follows the character “Paul Kemp”, played by Johnny Depp, as
Booze, Corruption and Rage Read More »
A novel concerning the fitting together of macro scale to interpersonal scale relationships in different essential fields of activity and without any defined protagonist.
The plot is set ‘in the future’ between 1984 and 1987 and describes the process by which capitalist production is overcome by the Bolo Bolo network.
Whilst the jargon occasionally grates (I adopted the tactic of not even attempting to learn it) and the fine detailing of survival becomes rococo and tedious by the last pages; and whilst the introduction sets up the critique of capitalism in rather facile terms… i.e. positively valued ‘intentional’ activity set against negatively valued inherited processes; and whilst it greatly overvalues, and on their own terms, the post-60’s countercultural milieu (rather than evaluating it as an aspect of capitalist restructuring), despite all of this, I still found the book well-researched, of its time, provocative, pleasingly written, honest and real.
