Dublin Opinion

It seems that every where I look today there are websites filled with kind words about famous people who’ve recently died. It’s grim. Of course, there’s Farrah, Michael, and the former NME writer Swells. But now there’s Giovanni Arrighi to add to the list. He passed away on June 24th last.

Steven Colatrella provides the kind words and for simple souls like me, gives an accessible run through of Arrighi’s work.

This is an interesting excerpt.

Arrighi argued that capitalism had its laws of development as shifts in economic and political power led one hegemon after another to gain the upper hand in production, commerce, and finally finance, the latter stage being, to use Braudel’s famous phrase that Giovanni was fond of quoting, “a sign of autumn”. This view of finance enabled him to be among the very few who foresaw the current crisis and the form it has taken, of a financial bubble that has burst definitively. But it also led him to be able to identify October 1979, when Paul Volker, now dismayingly an advisor to President Obama, prefigured the Reagan-Thatcher destruction of the power of labor by raising interest rates four full percentage points, leading to the financialization of US capitalism and the beginning of the end for its dominance in the world, though that was far from apparent at the time.

Here’s some of his personal biography, from his recent interview in the New Left Review with David Harvey.

Could you tell us about your family background and your education?

I was born in Milan in 1937. On my mother’s side, my familybackground was bourgeois. My grandfather, the son of Swiss immigrants to Italy, had risen from the ranks of the labour aristocracy to establish his own factories in the early twentieth century, manufacturing textile machinery and later, heating and airconditioning equipment. My father was the son of a railway worker, born in Tuscany. He came to Milan and got a job in my maternal grandfather’s factory—in other words, he ended up marrying the boss’s daughter. There were tensions, which eventually resulted in my father setting up his own business, in competition with his father-in-law. Both shared anti-fascist sentiments, however, and that greatly influenced my early childhood, dominated as it was by the war: the Nazi occupation of Northern Italy after Rome’s surrender in 1943, the Resistance and the arrival of the Allied troops.

My father died suddenly in a car accident, when I was 18. I decided to keep his company going, against my grandfather’s advice, and entered the Università Bocconi to study economics, hoping it would help me understand how to run the firm. The Economics Department was a neoclassical stronghold, untouched by Keynesianism of any kind, and no help at all with my father’s business. I finally realized I would have to close it down. I then spent two years on the shop-floor of one of my grandfather’s firms, collecting data on the organization of the production process. The study convinced me that the elegant general-equilibrium models of neo-classical economics were irrelevant to an understanding of the production and distribution of incomes. This became the basis of my dissertation. Then I was appointed as assistente volontario, or unpaid teaching assistant to my professor—in those days, the first rung on the ladder in Italian universities. To earn my living I got a job with Unilever, as a trainee manager.

Here to lighten the mood is some music. Here’s the strange and brilliant Grizzly Bear cover of the Phil Spector/ Chrystals song He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss) which was used very effectively in the BBC Documentary The Agony and Ecstasy Of Phil Spector).

Actually, here’s something cheerier – Bibio – Ambivalence Avenue, from the same titled album just released, like.

 

 Ambivalence Avenue: Play Now | Play in Popup