Material roots, the end of hegemony, the suppression of finance by nature

Boats stranded at David's Marina on the Rio Negro, Manaus, Brazil on Oct 16, 2023. River water levels hit their lowest point in at least 121 years. Credit: Bruno Kelly/Reuters

Back, after a significant pause, to publishing here. I’ve been using the space to try and organise some notes around the ongoing/neverending book project, for which it’s been useful – it’s helpful to have an audience of some sort when writing, since it forces a bit of organisation on my thinking, and feedback is very much appreciated. It does mean that what I publish tends to be a bit scattered and ad hoc but I’m hoping the various subscribers can bear with me (and with the peculiar endnoting that’s happened below.)

What follows started as some notes for a section in the book, that then spiralled off somewhat into a consideration of hegemony and finance, referencing (inevitably) Arrighi and Braudel. I’ve been particularly struck by the work on long-run real interest rates, for all the methodological difficulties it presents; the “supra-secular” decline is too clear to be easily dismissed, and needs some form of explanation.

Growth as the key to reformism

Consistent growth itself, as the revisionist work of economic historians has shown, tended only to become embedded at a national level (rather than being a feature of specific sectors and regions) in industrialising economies much later than was previously assumed, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Consistent rises in working class living standards – certainly beyond a comparatively privileged layer – only really emerge after this mid-century point.[i]

The concomitant development of reformism in the socialist movement required, as a fundamental, an alliance with the state – since what other agency could be reliably found to implement reforms? The breach with anti-state anarchism in the early workers’ movement, following the collapse of the First International, was never healed – anarchism remained as the minority, critical current relative to the great majority of the labour and socialist movements. But that alliance with the state in turn required the development of state capacity: not only in the sense of the reach of the state, in developing its bureaucratic reach and extending the scope of its functions more widely across social life, but also in the expansion of the economy on which the state rested. Economic growth provided the basis for expanded private provision of goods and services, creating