Thought I would do a thread on this. So here we go: China, Carroll Quigley, and the civilization of capital. https://twitter.com/StephenPiment/status/1264284185138614273

The great American historian Carroll Quigley wrote a book called The Evolution of Civilizations. In it, he critiques lazy "organicist" views of civilizations, which posit that they have life-cycles but do not provide a mechanism for how this works.

His mechanism proposal is that societies develop instruments of expansion. This instrument is a social technology that allows it to invent, accumulate surplus, and allocate that surplus in turn to future invention. The cycle causes a society to expand and makes it a civilization.

Conversely, the stagnation, decline, and fall of a civilization is precisely the decay of this instrument.

Quigley proposes the following model of the life-cycle. As decay continues, we enter stage 4: conflict between center and periphery.

Stage 4 is interesting. Peripheral powers can take over civilizations. If they create a new instrument, it returns to stage 3. If they become hegemonic but don't create a new instrument, we get a period of peace--but not of reinvestment of wealth into invention. This is stage 5.

You can also skip from stage 4 into 6, but this is an aside for this thread. What's really interesting is considering how this applies to what Quigley considers Western civilization.

Quigley notes that the Western world is on at least its third instrument of expansion. The current instrument is industrial capitalism. Quigley was thinking about this in the 1960s. We know in retrospect that industrial capitalism globalized production + overcame its Soviet rival

We'll leave Quigley aside here. Industrial capitalism has created a very interesting situation wherein essentially the entire world is now based on the same instrument of expansion. America came from the periphery and usurped the European powers, and now leads this world order.

Now we can argue that, although established forms of production have expanded, real innovation has slowed or even stopped. If so, then we have likely entered a stage 4 period.

But let's take a moment to think about this world order. We generally think of the American-led order as contending with China at the moment.

Wait, but Chinese society is currently predicated on the same instrument of expansion. Moreover, it adopted this from the West.

When you read the CCP's own theory, it generally doesn't see itself as part of some different world order. Rather, it is participating in the same world order as America. This is consistent with a Marxist lens, where means of material production are what matter.

If we take connection and expansion of societies via the instrument of industrial capitalism seriously, then China is not actually outside the American-led world order at all.

It's part of it. This world order is more hegemonic than popularly imagined.

The piece @sysimmolator wrote at @palladiummag on Jiang Shigong explicitly states this. Even Jiang, a Schmittian deeply concerned with questions of sovereignty, admits that China and Russia are part of the American-led system. They can only act within it. https://palladiummag.com/2020/02/05/jiang-shigongs-vision-of-a-new-chinese-world-order/

So what precisely is going on? We seem to have stagnating innovation, and a world order encompassing all great powers. Plus, the major rival of American hegemony explicitly self-conceives as part of this world order.

China is a periphery power of the American world order.

In Quigley's model, this starts to look a lot like Stage 4. And happens in Stage 4? Conflict wherein the periphery often triumphs over the center--as America did over Europe a century ago.

China's focus on reorienting global systems of production toward itself makes sense. It is attempting control of the instrument of expansion that undergirds the world order. But that world order is more properly Industrial Capitalist civilization rather than Western civilization.

Some possible scenarios include:

1) Chinese victory + renewed/new instrument of expansion
2) Chinese victory + continued stagnation
3) American victory + renewal
4) American victory + stagnation

We won't consider a Mule scenario where something else disrupts everything here.

Scenario 1) means that industrial capitalist civilization continues to expand. Or perhaps we get a new civilization. Either way, it's Sinocentric. This places us back in Stage 3.

Scenario 2) would probably create a Stage 5 universal empire scenario. Hegemony, but decline.

If America totally defeats China but does not renew the instrument, we may also get a Stage 5. Things will probably be better for America, but the end is a matter of time.

Only victory combined with renewed innovation puts America back on the path of expansion.

It seems rare for the same power to renew its instrument. Western powers previously created new instruments in Quigley's reading. But either way, this is probably the only path toward American renewal.

To sum up the lessons here:
1) Our world order is more properly defined by industrial capital than values, language, etc
2) The American world order is not opposed to China, but includes it--and China knows it
3) Innovation is literally of civilizational importance to America

Questions of governance don't just apply to formal electoral structures. The social technologies which undergird the world order are complex. But if they cease to function, that order will fall and another will arise.