Who cares about Michael Jackson?

The worst part about celebrity deaths is that they tend to dominate our attention, to the exclusion of more important matters. So the Iran election turmoil gets pushed off the front page by a bleached man with no nose.

[Nothing much against Michael Jackson, who was more sick than monstrous. He was a bizarre human being; his bad childhood had rendered him unstable and his massive wealth and fame had insulated him from having to seek therapy. Look at the catalogs from this year's auction of his Neverland accoutrements. They describe a balloon, free-floating from reality.]

One death will even push another off the front page if it belonged to a more famous celebrity. Jackson bumps aside Farrah Fawcett. And that's to say nothing of the ordinary folks! Tiny items in an obituary page that is probably never viewed.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that I read this on Saturday: Giovanni Arrighi died last week.

The department of Sociology at SUNY-Binghamton was the centre for world systems studies in the 1980s and 1990s, though fading when I reached there. Giovanni Arrighi, along with Immanuel Wallerstein, Terence Hopkins, Dale Tomich, Caglar Keydar, others from the global North, and a host of intellectuals who came yearly to Binghamton from the global South, had built the graduate program, combining what may be called orthodox Marxist ideas with historical approaches to capitalism more familiar in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

There was plenty of heated debate. How did the Atlantic slave trade fit into the development of world capitalism? What about formal colonialism, and countries of largely peasant-producers? Does national development have to emulate development in Western Europe in order to be called 'capitalism'?
...
[Arrighi] went on to pose larger questions about development and capitalism - "how is it that world wealth and power are concentrated in a handful of countries" - a question still relevant today. His major work, The Long Twentieth Century (1994), was the answer he offered, having worked on the question for some 15 years, primarily in Binghamton. The dedication in the book is worth noting, as it demonstrates the intimate relation Arrighi had to his intellectual inquiries:

'Between conceiving a book like this and actually writing it, there is a gulf that I would never have bridged were it not for the exceptional community of graduate students with whom I have been fortunate to work during my fifteen years at SUNY-Binghamton. Knowingly or unknowingly, the members of this community have provided me with most of the questions and many of the answers that constitute the substance of this work. Collectively, they are the giant on whose shoulders I have travelled. And to them the book is rightfully dedicated.'

Arrighi's most famous work, The Long Twentieth Century, has been sitting on my metaphorical bookshelf for two or three years at this point. I've read bits and pieces and references, and drawn on his ideas (especially that of transitions from one world-system to another through episodes of financial crisis, which seems pertinent these days). Last year I started in on it, got sidetracked, and had to return it to the library. Three weeks ago, I bought a copy from Moe's. It's got competition: Jameson, Foucault, Dostoyevsky, Judt, Keynes, Derrida, Lefebvre - but it's moving to the top.

In a recent interview with David Harvey, Arrighi spoke of the need for a new world-system, a "commonwealth of civilizations living on equal terms with each other, in a shared respect for the earth and its natural resources." Harvey asked if this could be described as socialism, to which Arrighi responded:

...unfortunately, socialism has been too much identified with state control of the economy. I never thought that was a good idea. I come from a country where the state is despised and in many ways distrusted. The identification of socialism with the state creates big problems. So, if this world-system was going to be called socialist, it would need to be redefined in terms of a mutual respect between humans and a collective respect for nature. But this may have to be organized through state-regulated market exchanges, so as to empower labour and disempower capital in Smithian fashion, rather than through state ownership and control of the means of production. The problem with the term socialism is that it’s been abused in many different ways, and therefore also discredited. If you ask me what would be a better term, I’ve no idea—I think we should look for one. You are very good at finding new expressions, so you should come up with some suggestions.

I tend to think of that last "you" in a broad sense, directed towards the reader rather than Arrighi's interlocutor.

Reflecting upon this point: One of the advantages/drawbacks of my education to date is that it's been long on whats and whys, and short on hows. I haven't exactly minded - I'm no pragmatist, and I prefer solid theoretical grounds to rushing off half-baked.

But I'm short on praxis. One of the benefits of my current job in an economic policy agency is that it's long on the whats and hows. In short, a theory of how the world works is no good if it can't be put into action. (It tends to be the case that theory gets lost entirely, but that's a story for another time.)

As a result of this, I've become more attentive to the "how" questions. It's one thing to be say that the world should be changed. (And it needs to be.) It's another to say what it should change into - let alone to pursue that. Filling out the idea of a better world is a task for our times.

And yes, I am aware of the difficulties involved in any agenda-based politics. Compromises - some fatal to the enterprise's principles - are inevitable. And there is a certain slippage from iconoclastic utopianism - the humanist kind, that affirms that a better world is possible without wrapping actual people around the proposed details - to blueprint utopianism - the kind espoused by Mao and Milton Friedman, in which the principles for a better world are run roughshod over human corpses.

Anyway, RIP Giovanni Arrighi. You should pick up something he's written - perhaps his last book, Adam Smith in Beijing, which discussed China's rise and the possible new world-systems that might result. And maybe think about the sort of world system you want.