Cartographies of metastasis: cognitive maps, financialization and hegemonic Sino-american dispute

Abstract

This article poses to build a cognitive mapping for what we denominate the metastasis era, which is the period of crisis/dispute of the American hegemony over the modern world-system. The cardinal thesis of the research is that financialization unleashed historical processes and social forces that caused both the configuration of new geopolitical power relations ant that the interstate system to cross the antagonism threshold. In a span of time that goes from the 1970s, when the monetarist counterrevolution and financialization were applied as a solution to the overaccumulation crisis, to the Great Recession from which the Sino-American symbiosis reached a turning point, we interpret from classical social theory ―Marx, Weber, Braudel―, along with the political economy of world-systems and contemporary Marxism ―Arrighi, Wallerstein, Harvey, Anderson―to financialization as the determining process in the 21st century for the fate of the historical capitalism, which faces a triple process of decoupling, recentering and reorientation.