The long Twentieth century: Money, power, and the origins of our time

Giovanni Arrighi London and New York: Verso 1994

P4 More specifically, the starting point of our investigation has been Fernard Braudel's contention that the essential feature of historical capitialism over its longue duree-- that is, over its entire lifetime- has been the "flexibility" and "eclecticism" of capital rather than the concrete forms assumed by the latter at different places and at different times....

p5 It seems to me that these passages can be read as a restatement of Karl Marx's general fomular of captial: MCM'. Money capital (M) means liquidity, flexibility, freedom of choice. Commodity capital (C)means capital invested in a particular input-output combination in view of a profit. Hence, it means concreteness, rigidity, and a narrowing down or closing of options. M' means expanded liquidity, flexibility, and freedom of choice.
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P6. Marx's general formula of capital (MCM') can therefore be interpreted as depicting not just the logic of individual capitalist investments, but also a recurrent pattern of historical capitalism as world system.The central aspect of this pattern is the alternation of epochs of material expansion (MC phases of capital accumulation) with phases of financial rebirth and expansion (CM'phases).... Together, the two epochs of phases constitute a full systemic cycle of accumulation(MCM').
p6 Four systemic cycles of accumulation will be identified, each characterized by a fundamental unity of the primary agency and structure of world-scale processes of capital accumulation: a Genoese Style, from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries; a Dutch Cycle, from the late sixteenth century through most of the eighteenth century; a British cycle, from the latter half of the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century; and a US cycle, which began in the late nineteenth century and has continued into the current state of financial expansion.

P8 An agency is capitalist in virtue of the fact that its money is endowed with the "power of breading" (Marx's expression) systematically and persistently, regardless of the nature of the particular commodities and activities that are incidentally the medium at any given time. The notion of systemic cycles of accumulation which we have derived from Braudel's historical observation of recurrent financial expansions follows logically from this strictly instrumental relationship of capitalism to the world of trade and production, and emphasizes it. That is to say, financial expansions are taken to be symptomatic of a situation in which the investment of money in the expansion of trade and production no longer serves the purpose of increasing the cash flow to the capitalist stratum as effectively as pure financial deals can. In such a situation, capital invested in trade and production tends to revert to its money form and accumulate more directly, as in Marx's abridged formula MM'.