☉ 太和智库线上英文刊物《太和观察家》2024年9月刊第48期原创文章，转载请注明出处。
☉ This article is from the September issue of TI Observer (TIO), an online publication of Taihe Institute. Please indicate the source if you hope to share this article.
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正文4936字，读完约需20分钟。
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·太和智库高级研究员
·Senior Fellow of Taihe Institute
Introduction
Amid turbulence and chaos, the global order is undergoing a seismic shift from uni-polarity to multi-polarity. Structural changes are occurring across various fields, including finance, technology, and energy, reshaping the international landscape. How will this transformation unfold?While change is a constant, there are periods of time in which the extent and nature of change are more pronounced. We are living through one such period, in which a dominant global political economic configuration is giving way to new arrangements. For the past century or so, the global economic system has revolved around the dominant role of the American economy and, to a lesser extent, the economies of the transatlantic colonial powers. These "advanced economies" functioned as systematic cores, which extracted resources and wealth from peripheral, or "developing" economies.This has been, broadly speaking, a dominant pattern - particularly for the evolution of Western capitalism - for the past 600-700 years. During this period, insofar as Western capitalism evolved, the processes of capital accumulation were accompanied by spatial expansion and the evolution of a political-military system that buttressed the economy of expropriation and uneven exchange. Emanating from the merchant capitalism of Venice and Genoa and progressively expanding through the periods of Dutch, English, and now American dominance, the multinational economic system became increasingly global in nature. Previously autonomous territories were progressively integrated into the ever-expanding networks of colonial exploitation. South America, Africa, West Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia were inveigled into the networks of colonial expansion during the 16th to 19th centuries, and Northeast Asia succumbed during the 18th and 19th centuries.Periods of chaotic transition punctuated the various eras of national domination. Conflicts between nations were frequent, and internecine conflicts between different sections of elite vested interests featured as political alignments were reconfigured. Domestic and international economic structural changes prefigured the transformation of the political integument and undergirded the shifting capacity of states to secure and sustain positions of relative hegemonic authority. The historical transitions to date tended to see the "passing of the baton" from one dominant Western power to the next, with the core structural features of center-periphery capital expansion and accumulation remaining largely untouched. Who occupied the main position at the system's heart was the principal variable.Today, we are living through another period of systemic turbulence, punctuated by episodes of chaos and ultimately leading to an evolutionary transformation. However, I would suggest, there is a qualitative difference in this current phase of transitional turbulence and chaos compared to the historical pattern, namely, that we are witnessing not so much the passing of the baton from one hegemon to another, but a qualitative transformation of global configurations from one that has predominantly been unipolar or mono-nodal (center-periphery) to one that is multi-nodal in nature. This essay explores the system dynamics and some of the features of the contemporary period of turbulence.The relatively stable patterns of capital accumulation and expansion that marked the post-WWII period to early 1970s have given way to episodes of instability and turbulence. The stagflation of the 1970s catalyzed a decade of radical national and international economic restructuring, ushering in a period of intensified industrial hollowing out of economic centers (the US and Europe in particular), the decline of organized labor, and the expansion of national and global finance. Two decades of notional stability, for developed economies at the very least - what former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke boasted as the "Great Moderation" - came shuddering back to earth in 2008 with the global financial crisis. Finance capital had come to increasingly dominate the global center, with (labor intensive) production activities progressively relocated elsewhere.Industrial hollowing out does not necessarily imply a diminished financial value of manufacturing output in absolute terms; however, it speaks of a relative decline in output value as a proportion of total economic output (measured in gross value added or GDP terms) and a dramatic decline in the absolute and relative significance of employment in manufacturing. Hollowing out began in the late 1960s and gathered pace throughout the 1970s and 1980s across much of the Western world. Put plainly, the phenomenon pre-dated the emergence of China as a global manufacturing and trade powerhouse by at least two decades. The continued expansion of financial capital in the developed world has been a constant feature of system evolution ever since.The underlying drivers of these structural changes are reminiscent of those that underpinned the systemic disruptions of previous episodes of turbulence, chaos, and transition. The next section explains the conceptual framework of analysis, before I return in the last section of the essay, to explore the features of our current period of system turbulence. As the next section is quite conceptual and abstract, for those not too interested in the theoretical aspects of the analysis, they can skip to the final section.The accumulation of capital and the expansion of capital accumulation in monetized form have been, and remain, the dominant driver of economic system change. Capital accumulation through real economy use-value creation and sale is relatively time and energy intensive, compared to the possibilities of monetized accumulation through the creation and trading of financial instruments. Thus, over time, in conditions where private capital accumulation is dominant, finance capital tends to grow at the expense of industrial capital. This creates systemic imbalances at a national level, catalyzing social and economic instabilities, which can have spillover effects on the global economic system as a whole.Economic systems can be understood as energy transformation systems, which also take the form of value transformation and exchange processes. The material world is defined by a given amount of energy/matter, which takes different forms. This is a foundational premise of thermodynamics. The amount of energy/matter in the universe is constant. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; through the application of "work," forms of energy are harnessed, combined, and transformed. This is what economic systems are about. Human beings are biological energy transformation entities that harness the energies of food (among other things) to be able to mobilize and deploy energies by way of various activities. Humans gather resources (as matter) and harness forms of energy (heat, motion, etc.) to transform resources into useful forms. Things that humans can use - either for the production of other things or for final human consumption - can be called use values. Overall, we can call this the real economy of use values.Economic systems that involve a division of labor require ways in which different nodes of "work activity" interact with others to access and deploy resources to enable successful energy transformation to take place. Put another way, different economic agents engage in various forms of activity and trade with others because none are fully self-sufficient. Due to the difference in time between when resources are required and when new resources are created and dispatched, the circulation system of energy transformation requires a unit of account and a medium of exchange to enable trade to take place. This function is fulfilled by what can be called money capital or in more abstract terms an exchange value. Money capital is an unconditional exchange value because money capital can - in any applicable jurisdiction - be exchanged for another exchange value or for use values.Energy transformation systems are, therefore, activated through the deployment of money capital to mobilize other resources (energy, humans, machines, and matter) to put them to work. Money capital can take a number of forms. Broadly speaking, it can be either equity or credit. In either case, both involve a duality of exchanges: (1) the exchange of money capital for fixed capital (e.g., machinery) or means of production (energy, labor resources/time, know-how, raw materials, etc.) and (2) at the same time the exchange of money capital for fictitious capital.Fictitious capital is a conditional exchange value and is a claim on future monetized value (a claim on future payment of money capital, namely an unconditional exchange value) or future equity value (e.g., an economic resource that has the potential to be converted into money capital or be consumed). Examples of these two are, respectively, (1) interest on loans/bonds or dividends paid on shares, and (2) options or futures contracts that enable the holder to convert those into ownership of some resource or another. Additionally, fictitious capital can be exchanged for other forms of fictitious capital, and money capital can also be exchanged for other forms of fictitious capital. Here, I am talking about the markets for derivatives, processes of refinancing, etc.Circuits of production and circulation are critical to understanding the dynamics of capital formation, accumulation, and expansion. The real economy of use values is an energy and time intensive system through which money capital is committed at the beginning of the circuit so as to enable the production and sale of use values to conclude the circuit. The sale of use values at the completion of the circuit returns money capital to the capitalist/producer. The amount of money capital returned through this process must exceed that committed for the process to be reproducible. Retained profits are hoarded or invested. While there are resource barriers to market entry that vary from one type of real economy activity to another, the real economy of use value production is simultaneously impacted by the dynamics of market competition.In conditions of market competition, individual producers and service providers are driven to maximize capacity utilization and revenues to enable cost recovery at a minimum. They thus pursue intense price competition, which drives down the average rate of profit. Those best able to retain or capture revenue share available profit. Those that lag, fail. These competitive dynamics also propel other forms of responses so as to preserve profit margins or increase margins.1. Firms can respond by seeking new markets so as to expand revenue opportunities, and also enable access - temporarily at least - to above-average profits. This spatial or demographic expansion is the basis of the expanded globalization of economic systems. Yet as competitors catch up or emerge, the advantages of this move diminish.2. As Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter long ago described, firms are also compelled to innovate new processes or new products that can either (1) reduce costs to expand the spread between costs and revenues or (2) introduce new products for which there is little to no competitive pressure, therefore enabling the firm to access above-average profits. These activities require innovation and research and development (R&D), all of which take time and involve uncertainty as to future success. Uncertainty can repel firms from innovation.
3. Firms can seek to secure and expand revenue share through mergers and acquisitions, which effectively reduce competition. This mitigates the effects of competition on average profits.
4. Firms can seek to secure various forms of economic rent privileges through ownership of certain exclusive rights (e.g., intellectual property, patents, licenses, land use permits, etc.) which also mitigate the impact of competition on profit margins. In simple terms, economic rents are above average profits.
As money capital and fictitious capital are produced and, in due course, accumulated through the processes of real economy valorization, these value forms can be activated as monetized exchange value creating systems. Money capital generally isn't idle, though some is likely to be hoarded as a reserve while other portions are invested in various other activities. The investment could be to expand fixed capital formation (new machinery, additional factories, or facilities) or could be channeled into fictitious capital instruments. In other words, money-as-exchange value can be exchanged for fictitious capital through the acquisition of instruments such as shares, bonds, etc.
Monetized exchange-values-in-exchange-for-exchange-values systems are relatively low in energy intensity, and monetization circuits are comparatively fast. In less abstract terms, outside the time-consuming and energy-intensive world of commodity and service production, the expansion of capital accumulation systems enables the creation and expansion of financialized systems and markets. The creation of financial instruments is relatively quick and consumes little energy. The ability for such instruments to be bought and sold is also relatively fast; indeed, automated trading algorithms make trading securities and derivatives (that is, fictitious capital) essentially instantaneous.An additional feature of the system of financial instrument creation and trading is that, while they are fast and consume relatively little energy - nominally meaning that there are few barriers to market entry - they are usually activities that can only be conducted by those granted with various regulatory-protected rights and authorities by way of licenses and permits. In other words, the creators of finance capital and fictitious capital are limited in number and can earn economic rents through their activities and privileged status.This has been a rather elaborate and abstract presentation of the forces that work through the systems of value transformation, capital formation, and capital accumulation. It shows how there are powerful tendencies for the formation of financialized instruments to enable low-energy, high-speed monetization as an alternative to the energy- and time-intensive work of commodity or service production.I want to highlight four aspects to draw some threads together.1. First, I will overview the dynamics of financialization and hollowing out of real economy use-value creation in advanced economies and the spatial shifts in the distribution of productive capacities over the past half century.
2. Second, I reflect on the emergence of Big Tech and its intersection with (1) the drive toward economic rents and (2) the weaponization of technology as US technology became synonymous with global technology. This shift has prompted what I have previously described as a Digital Westphalia-to-be.
3. Third, I address energy transitions. Since economic systems are energy transformation systems, the economics of energy are central to the future trajectory of value creation and circulation. Emerging technologies also impact the global geopolitical-economy configuration, which brings me to my final point.
4. Finally, I reflect briefly on the reemergence of concerns over sovereignty and how these are not only reactions to the overreach of US-dominated imperial exploitation and hegemony, but also a response to the possibilities of a multi-nodal network of sovereign capabilities made possible by transformations in energy systems and information technologies.Financialization and Hollowing Out
The expansion of financialization in advanced economies has been a key feature of development over the past 40 years. Today, the annual global value of trade in goods and services is in the order of over 40 trillion USD. By way of contrast, the annual value of trade in foreign exchange and foreign exchange derivatives is in excess of 1,200 trillion USD. The total value of the derivatives market is as large as quadrillions, according to some estimates.Global trade in goods and services has also transformed from a situation in which the US was the dominant trading partner of most countries in 1990 to today, where China now occupies the position. This shift is the result of the changing spatial distribution of productive capacities. Today, China is the world's only manufacturing superpower, responsible for 29% of value added in manufacturing (2021) compared to the US - the next country - with 12%. Conversely, the US, US dollar, and US dollar-denominated financial instruments are the dominant aspects of the world of money capital and fictitious capital. The expansion of the finance sector in the US was an expression of the dynamics described earlier, as increased accumulation led to a progressive diversion away from the real economy of use-value creation to the economy of fictitious capital trading.American industrial hollowing out is a consequence of the financialization of the political-economic structure over the past five decades. Professor of Finance at RMIT University Imad Moosa, Lecturer in Economics at Goldsmiths, University of London Maria Ivanova, Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science Benjamin Braun, and Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research William Milberg and Associate Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research Deborah Winkler, among many others, have shown how growth in financialization since the 1970s adversely impacts capital accumulation in American industry; the growth of the former is the direct corollary of the hollowing out of the latter. Using the IMF's index of "financial development," Moosa shows the relationship between the expansion of financialization and the contraction of employment in American manufacturing. Indeed, concerns about the decline of American manufacturing go back to the early 1980s, when figures like Ira Magaziner, former Senior Advisor for Policy Development to President Bill Clinton, warned of declining productivity and competitiveness. This predates the growth of Chinese industrial capability by two decades.Financialization coincided not only with the decline in manufacturing employment - the major source of political complaints driving the political cycle - it also enabled a massive concentration of financial wealth and economic power. The wealthiest 10% of Americans now own 93% of stock value, according to Federal Reserve data. Rising stock prices benefit the few, but reinforce the deindustrialization dynamics of capital accumulation in a highly financialized America. According to a recent Oxfam report, the top 1% of American corporations own 97% of corporate assets in the US. Economists Spencer Kwon, Ma Yueran, and Kaspar Zimmermann have shown the long-term trend for the concentration of American capital across all industries, with manufacturing concentration dynamics taking place most obviously in the 1970s. Financialization, along with the concentration of ownership and market concentration, has all been pivotal to the structural transformation of the American political economy.Big Tech and the Weaponization of Technology
Aside from the expansion of the financial sector, the US economy has also seen dramatic growth in the technology sector. Technology platforms have not only expanded (usually off the back of substantial US government support by way of Department of Defense contracts), but they have also secured the privileges of economic rent. The economic rents of US Big Tech are evidenced by profit margins far in excess of marginal costs (indicative of limited competition) and are monetized through the intersection of Big Tech with markets of fictitious capital. Big Tech is listed on public exchanges, enabling the monetization of fictitious capital-based value to a relatively small number of shareholders.
Set against these institutional privileges, US Big Tech also expanded globally, creating an environment in which US technology has become synonymous with global technology. Few countries have remained unaffected by the ubiquity of US technology platforms, hardware, and software. The effects have been far from benign.For the past 30 years, much of the world's technological architecture - whether it's hardware or software, including the all-pervasive operating systems - has been dominated by American Big Tech. US big technology firms have led the world in the development of information and communications technologies, equipment, and software applications. By securing positions of rent-seeking advantage, these firms have garnered super-profits and also enabled US firms and government regulators to exercise outsize influence over an increasingly digitized globe.In their recent book, Underground Economy: How America Weaponized the World Economy, US researchers Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman document the history of the US security state progressively transforming the global networks of fiber optic cables, routers, switches, and data centers into tools of domination. Amazon estimates that around 70% of global data traffic goes through the data centers concentrated in Northern Virginia. SWIFT - the global bank-to-bank platform - operates a data center in Northern Virginia.After 9/11, as the US ramped up its global counter-terrorism efforts, intelligence agencies and other US government departments increasingly exploited this reality to initially gather intelligence on the affairs and dealings of others around the world and, in time, to intervene in the transnational payments systems to weaponize the US dollar international finance network. As these measures escalated, the US Treasury demanded access to SWIFT's data. Although similar requests had been previously refused, SWIFT eventually relented. The US gained access to a treasure trove of real-time data on global financial transactions. Access to data was one thing, but it wasn't long before the US took the next step, responding to suspicions that Iran was using SWIFT to finance its nuclear program. Although similar requests were refused in the past, this time SWIFT gave in. The US gained an unprecedented real-time look into global financial transactions. US officials pushed for Iranian banks to be cut off from the global financial network. SWIFT yielded to pressure once more.The weaponizing of SWIFT has now extended to the confiscation of the USD reserves of the Venezuelan and Afghan governments, and the sanctioning of assorted entities and countries such as North Korea, South Sudan, Belarus, and Myanmar, preventing them from facilitating cross-border transactions. Russia is the most recent case.Cross-border transactions conducted in non-USD terms are growing, as currency multipolarity continues to expand. Reduced dependency on USD loans or foreign direct investment is also an emerging feature of the global financial landscape. I have also discussed these trends in more detail previously, so will not dwell on the issue any further here.If economic systems are fundamentally energy transformation systems, the ability to reduce the costs of harnessing and using energy surely lies at the heart of economic competitiveness and the system's ability to realize real productivity growth. Putting aside climate change, and the so-called Jevons Paradox wherein improved energy efficiency leads to an aggregate increase in energy use (rather than reduced energy consumption), the core observation in the context of this essay is that the development of renewable energy systems and the dramatic fall in their costs, driven by Chinese capabilities, create possibilities of a more even distribution of productive capacities globally.There is no economic development without energy development. The correlation between energy production, consumption, and overall economic growth is tight and positive. The ability of countries - heretofore excluded from low-cost energy production at scale - to access technologies that enable them to participate in increasingly complex energy transformation systems (that is, value-added activities) represents a transformative agent that has centrifugal potential. The ability to harness the energy from nature, such as sunlight, wind, and water motion, and store the energy at relatively low cost is now possible in ways that were previously unattainable. The difference in absolute and marginal cost per unit of energy generated by means of different technologies (traditional fossil fuel compared to renewables plus battery storage) is now tilting in favor of the latter. Once installed, renewable energy capture and storage systems are in effect indigenous to the locality and enable the development of energy sovereignty that was historically limited.Sovereignty and Multi-Nodal Systems
For much of the past century or so, the US political economy has been the pivotal force in the global economic setup. The advanced economies of the UK and Western Europe have also been at the center of the global system. However, over the past fifty years, the center-periphery structure has begun to change. Initially, these shifts took place as manufacturing activities began to globalize. Industrial capital substituted machinery for labor (and continues to do so today) and, where more cost-effective, established operations in regions with relatively low labor costs. At the same time, the finance sectors in the West - those of fictitious capital (stocks, derivatives, insurance, property funds, etc.) and money markets generally - expanded rapidly to become the dominating branches of national and, in many respects, global, capital.
Financialization via USD loans and USD-denominated capital investments into developing nations effectively locked in a form of post-colonial economic settlement. While sovereignty was ostensibly realized through the processes of post-WWII decolonization struggles, effective sovereignty was curtailed through the strength of the financial and other value-flow networks in place. The center-periphery dynamic was reinforced, as shown by a recent study on the rates of return from foreign assets held by first world nations.The growth of China changed this. China became a manufacturing powerhouse and a major trading partner for over 140 nations. China offers pathways to trade and capital formation that are no longer dependent on the historical centers of the global economic system. The development of national currency-based cross-border transaction systems is beginning to enable the establishment of financial sovereignty. The advent of technology systems independent of US Big Tech enables the creation of a Digital Westphalia, which emphasizes data sovereignty while enabling secure cross-border interoperability. Open-source systems undermine the privileges of economic rent that have defined the business model of American Big Tech. Lastly, the dramatic reduction in the costs of renewable energy capture/generation and storage technologies achieved in China opens up the vista for developing countries to overcome one of the biggest historical hurdles of all: sovereign, accessible, and low-cost energy to fuel modernization.The dominant theme of today's turbulence revolves around the reassertion of national sovereignty. This is pitted against the economic, political, and cultural hegemony that has dominated the landscape for the past half millennia, in which the West has pursued a strategy of "civilizing the savages" in the name of liberalism and modernity. The privileges of the center-periphery global setup are coming to an end. Nations are not only asserting their sovereignty but, through the economic transformations that are taking place, are in a position to grasp and anchor those claims. Little wonder that the vested interests of finance capital, technology capital, and military capital in the collective West are fighting back.We live not only in turbulent times but also in an era of chaos. Conflicts rage in over 50 nations today. The collective West is deeply entangled in most of these. As Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci once observed, "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."
The above contents only represent the views of the authors, and do not necessarily represent the views or positions of Taihe Institute.太和智库线上英文刊物《太和观察家》（TI Observer）致力于促进中外沟通交流，弥合“理解鸿沟”。
TI Observer (TIO) is an online monthly English publication produced by Taihe Institute. TIO is dedicated to promoting transnational interaction and mutual understanding, thus bridging the gap of misunderstanding and bringing China and the world closer to each other.
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