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ההון ושברו (Capital and its Crisis)
No full textהקפיטליזם שולט בעולם. דיונים סוערים מתנהלים בין המלומדים הממסדיים לבין "הביקורתיים" על טיבו של הקפיטליזם הגלובלי. הבעיה היא שטיבו של המוסד המרכזי בקפיטליזם -- ההון -- אינו ידוע. לאחר יותר ממאתיים שנה של התפתחות קפיטליסטית נמרצת לא קיימת תיאוריית הון הגיונית אמפירית -- לא במדע הכלכלה, לא בכלכלה הפוליטית המרקסיסטית ולא במדעי החברה בכלל, בין אם הם פוזיטיביסטיים או ביקורתיים, בין אם הם מודרניים או פוסטיסטיים
הדבר בולט בעת משברי הון. אז נחשפת אוזלת ידם של המומחים והמנהלים האמונים על רזי ההון, ולעתים, ברגעי חרדה, הם אף מתוודים כי אין הם מבינים לא את טיבו של ההון ולא את משבריו. וכאשר מונפים דגלי המחאה והמפגינים יוצאים בזעם אל הרחובות, מתברר שאין להם תוכנית אלטרנטיבית. אין הם מבינים את מהותו של ההון ואת תוצאותיו
הספר מציג דרך חדשה להבנת ההון ומשבריו המחזוריים. ההון אינו עצם מטריאלי ואף לא תהליך ייצור כלכלי. הוא אינו הצבר של אמצעי ייצור או מלאי של ציוד וטכנולוגיה, אלא מוסד מרכזי של יחסי שליטה, המאפשר בין השאר לשלוט בקווי הייצור, במלאי הסחורות ובעבודה השכירה. ההון הוא סימבול פיננסי של יחסי כוח מאורגנים הפרושים ברשת היררכית, ובמרכזם ניצבות קבוצות ההון הדומיננטי ,אותן תשלובות תאגידיות-מדיניות. אלה כפויות לחלק-מחדש את יחסי הכוח לטובתן מול ההתנגדות ההולכת וגוברת, ובצירוף היחסים נוצר משבר ההון. משטר ההון (הקפיטליזם) הוא אופי-כוח מסוג חדש יחסית בהיסטוריה של המין האנושי -- משטר שהתמסד במאות האחרונות והלך והתגבש מחדש לאורך שבעת משברי ההון שהתחוללו מאז תחילת המאה התשע–עשרה
הספר כתוב בשפה תמציתית פשוטה, ללא ערפל אקדמי, ואינו דורש מן הקוראים ידע מוקדם, "כלכלי", מתמטי, או אקדמי. הוא אינו מסתפק בסיסמאות ובהכרזות. הוא מציג לא רק היסטוריה ביקורתית, אם לא קטלנית, של תיאוריות ההון המרכזיות המקובלות, האקדמיות והרדיקליות, אלא גם תיאוריות ומודלים כמותיים אלטרנטיביים של ההון ומשברי ההון אשר יוכלו לשמש את הרוצים בדרך רדיקלית חדשה להריסת משטר ההון ולהחלפתו במשטר אנושי
כותבי הספר, יהונתן ניצן ושמשון ביכלר, הם מרצים בכלכלה פוליטית באוניברסיטאות ובמכללות בקנדה ובישרא
Have We Passed Peak Capitalism?
No full textThis paper uses word frequency to track the rise and potential peak of capitalist ideology. Using a sample of mainstream economics textbooks as my corpus of capitalist thinking, I isolate the jargon of these books and then track its frequency over time in the Google English corpus. I also measure the popularity of feudal ideology by applying the same method to a sample of Christian bibles. I find that over the last four centuries, biblical language fell out of favor and was replaced by the language of economics. Surprisingly, however, I find that since the 1980s, the trend has reversed. Today, the language of economics is waning, while biblical language is on the rise. Is this evidence that we’ve passed the peak of capitalist ideology
Global Capital: Political Economy of Capitalist Power (YorkU, GS/POLS 6285 3.0, Graduate, Fall Term, 2022-23)
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What is capital? Despite centuries of debate, there is no clear answer to this question – and for a good reason. Capital is a polemic term. The way we define it attests our theoretical biases, ideological disposition, view of politics, class consciousness, social position, and more.
Is capital the same as machines, or is it merely a financial asset? Is it a material article or a social process? Is it a static substance or a dynamic entity? The form of capital, its existence as monetary wealth, is hardly in doubt. The problem is with the content, the stuff that makes capital grow – and on this issue there is no agreement whatsoever. For example, does capital accumulate because it is productive, or due to the exploitation of workers? Does capital expand from within capitalism, or does it need non-capitalist institutions like the state and other external forces? Is accumulation synonymous with economic growth, or can capital expand by damaging production and undermining efficiency? What exactly is being accumulated? Does the value of capital represent utility, abstract labour – or perhaps something totally different, such as power or force? What units should we use to measure its accumulation?
Surprisingly, these questions remain unanswered; in fact, with the victory of liberalism, most of them are no longer being asked. However, the silence is incomplete. As crisis and social strife intensify, the questions resurface. The accumulation of capital is the central process of capitalism, and unless we can clarify what that process means, we remain unable to understand our world, let alone change it.
The seminar has two related goals: substantive and pedagogical. The substantive purpose is to tackle the question of capital head on. The course explores a spectrum of liberal and Marxist theories, ideologies and dogmas – as well as a radical alternative to these views. The argument is developed theoretically, historically and empirically. The first part of the seminar provides a critical overview of political economy, examining its historical emergence, triumph and eventual demise. The second part deals with the two ‘materialistic’ schools of capital – the liberal theory of utility and the Marxist theory of labour time – dissecting their structure, strengths and limitations. The third part brings power back in: it analyses the relation between accumulation and sabotage, studies the institutions of the corporation and the state and introduces a new framework – the capitalist mode of power. The fourth and final part offers an alternative approach – the theory of capital as power (or CasP for short) – and illustrates how this approach can shed light on conflict-ridden processes such as corporate merger, stagflation, imperialism and the new wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Pedagogically, the seminar seeks to prepare students toward conducting their own independent re-search. Students are introduced to various electronic data sources, instructed in different methods of analysis and tutored in developing their empirical research skills. As the seminar progresses, these skills are used both to assess various theories and to develop the students’ own theoretical/empirical research projects
Costly Efficiencies: Health Care Spending, COVID-19, and the Public/Private Health Care Debate
No full text* Winner of the 2022 RECASP First Essay Prize *
Proponents of private healthcare often claim that the private sector is more ‘efficient’ at delivering healthcare services. This paper tests the privatization thesis in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a large sample of countries, I investigate how healthcare privatization affects the correlation between COVID-19 death rates and healthcare spending (as a share of GDP). In countries with healthcare that is mostly public, I find no correlation. However, in countries with significant healthcare privatization, I find that greater healthcare spending was associated with more COVID-19 deaths. This result is consistent with the theory of ‘capital as power’, which argues that to earn profits, the private sector seeks to strategically limit the provision of social goods
Book Review: Steve Keen (2021) The New Economics: A Manifesto
No full textSteve Keen’s book, The New Economics: A Manifesto (2021), offers a new path for economics, and for good reason. In his view, neoclassicism, the paradigm that rules modern-day economics, has become a serious menace: "I regard Neoclassical economics as not merely a bad methodology for economic analysis, but as an existential threat to the continued existence of capitalism – and human civilization in general. It has to go. (155). "
Strong words? Of course, but they are wholly warranted. Neoclassical economics is the official scientific underpinning of capitalism as well as its main ideological defence, and according to Keen, it fails in both tasks.2 Contrary to received opinion, neoclassicism cannot explain capitalism – either in detail or in the aggregate – and the policies it prescribes do not support but undermine the very system it defends. It must be scrapped, says Keen, and the purpose of his book is to explain why and outline what should come in its stead.
Half a century worth of research and writing on the subject has made Keen one of the world’s foremost critics of neoclassical economics. His previous bestseller, the rigorous-yet-accessible Debunking Economics (2011), dismantled neoclassical microeconomics. His new volume hammers its macro framework.
The book focuses on three key issues: (1) the bizarre neoclassical perspective that money, credit and debt do not matter for the macroeconomy; (2) the neoclassical insistence that the economy’s complex, nonlinear turbulences are best explained in linear, self-equilibrating terms; and (3) the fact that neoclassicists have hijacked the economics of climate change, using patently false assumptions to justify do-nothing policies with untold future consequences
Pravda o inflácii: prečo sa Milton Friedman mýlil, nie prvý raz
No full textMilton Friedman už viac ako desaťročie nie je medzi nami, ale stále nás prenasleduje jeho duch. V 60-tych rokoch Friedman vyhlásil, že inflácia je „vždy a všade monetárnym fenoménom“ – problém spočíva v tlačení priveľa peňazí. Odvtedy so železnou pravidelnosťou, vždy keď začne strašiť inflácia, určite sa nájde niekto, kto vyvoláva Friedmanovho ducha a obviňuje vládu, že má priveľké výdavky.
Keby to však s infláciou bolo také jednoduché.
Ako mnohé závery ekonomickej teórie, aj toto Friedmanovské myslenie vyzerá na prvý pohľad rozumne. Inflácia je všeobecný rast cien. A keďže ceny nevyjadrujú nič iné, len peňažné transakcie, keď je v obehu viac peňazí, znamená to, že ceny musia byť vyššie. Preto inflácia je „vždy a všade monetárny fenomén“.
Je smola, že pri podrobnejšom preskúmaní tohto fenoménu musíme toto myslenie zavrhnúť. Hlavný problém je v tom, že s infláciou narába ako s rovnomerným zvýšením cien. Toto je pohodlné pre teóriu, ale empiricky to nie je pravda. V reálnom svete je inflácia veľmi nerovnomerná. Napríklad v určitom čase si všimneme, že cena jabĺk stúpla o 5 %, ale zároveň cena áut o 50 %, pritom cena oblečenia mohla klesnúť o 20 %.
Ak chceme pochopiť skutočnú podstatu inflácie, nesmieme študovať ekonomické učebnice, ale si musíme všímať údaje z reálneho sveta. Presne toto urobil začiatkom 90-tych rokov politický ekonóm Jonathan Nitzan počas svojej práce na PhD. Jej výsledkom bola dizertácia Inflation As Restructuring (Inflácia ako reštrukturalizácia). Nitzan si všimol, že v skutočnom svete sa ceny menia veľmi rozdielne, čo znamená, že vždy na tom niekto získa a niekto stratí. V dôsledku toho inflácia nie je len „monetárny fenomén“, ako prehlásil Milton Friedman. Inflácia reštrukturalizuje sociálne usporiadanie.
Práve táto vlastnosť inflácie je v reálnom svete najdôležitejšia, lebo jej pričinením inflácia signalizuje zmenu v mocenskej štruktúre spoločnosti. Podľa očakávania, práve tento jav z reálneho sveta ekonómovia hlavného prúdu ignorujú – do veľkej miery preto, že to nezodpovedá ich úhľadnej teórii o inflácii ako „monetárnom fenoméne“. S dôkazom si našťastie poradíme sami. Inflácia je (a vždy aj bola) veľmi nerovnomerná. Inflácia vykonáva reštrukturalizáciu.
Dnes, keď zažívame návrat obáv z inflácie a zároveň ožíva Friedmanov duch, stojí za to podrobnejšie sa pozrieť na fakty z reálneho sveta
Have We Passed Peak Capitalism?
No full textAmong leftists, predicting the end of capitalism is a favorite parlor game. For example, as a graduate student in the 2010s, I remember discovering the 1976 edition of Marx’s Capital and being struck by the introduction. Written by the Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel, the foreword concluded that it was ‘most unlikely’ that capitalism would survive another half-century.
This prediction (and many like it) did not age well. What capitalism’s critics often misunderstand is that social orders rarely ‘die’. More often, they fade into irrelevance. Just as no one can point to the end-date of feudalism, it seems unlikely that capitalism will have a decisive ‘finish’. But what it may have is a peak.
The goal of this post is to chart the rise (and potential peak) of ‘capitalism’ … as I understand it. This caveat is key. To study a social system, we must first define it. To many people, capitalism is a ‘mode of production’ (a definition inherited from Marx). The view that I take here, however, is that capitalism is primarily an ideology — or what Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler call a ‘mode of power’. Capitalism is a set of ideas that justify the modern social order.
Although there are many ways to chart the rise of capitalism, what interests me here is that it was the first major ideology to have spread during the era of mass publication. That means capitalism’s rise (and potential peak) should be visible in the word frequency of written language
Pensions and Power. The Political and Market Dynamics of Public Pension Plans
No full textThis paper uses the theory of ‘capital as power’ to analyze the struggle over public pensions in the United States. While mainstream commentators claim that public pensions must be ‘reformed’ because they are ‘under funded’, I argue that the metrics used to make this argument are unsound. Instead, the push to privatize public pension systems is driven less by actual funding problems, and more by the desires of elite investors who seek to control pension capital and reap the enormous investment fees associated with it. I propose that the deconstruction of public pensions is part of a larger effort to undermine collective action, so as to remove resistance to dominant capital
Carrying the Elephants
No full textThe big picture is unambiguous: humanity is undermining the planetary ecosystem, and the deterioration continues unhindered. According to the 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, since 1970, the capacity of nature to sustain contributions to good quality of life trends downward in 14 out of 18 different categories being analysed, with many species dwindling or becoming extinct. And if this isn’t enough, the burning of fossil fuels is believed to alter the climate, most likely for the worse.
At stake, then, is the survival of planetary life as we know it, humanity included. And in this dire context, it is worthwhile reading Romain Gary’s great 1956 novel, The Roots of Heaven (translated into English in 1958). This Goncourt Prize book is one of the first ‘ecological novels’. It tells the story of a Frenchman, Morel, a former concentration-camp prisoner and decorated war hero on a mission to save the hunted elephants of Africa.
It is a complex, intellectually gripping story, weaving key issues of the time – from postwar global politics and the nuclear arms race to the clash of colonialism and liberation movements to culture, religion and philosophy – and its broad sweep is narrated with the sensitivity, irony and occasional wishful thinking of a great humanitarian.
And it is this emphasis on humanity that makes the book so important
Star Power and Risk. A Political Economic Study of Casting Trends in Hollywood
No full textThis paper builds an empirical and theoretical model to analyze how the financial goal of risk reduction changed the insides of Hollywood’s star system. For the moviegoer looking at Hollywood cinema from the outside, the function of the star system has remained the same since the 1920s: to have recognizable actors attract large audiences to Hollywood’s biggest and most expensive productions. The composition of this system is, however, sensitive to many historical changes in the business and culture of cinema.
If the evolution of Hollywood’s star system is shaped by broader social factors, risk reduction would be a key factor after 1980. This paper uses Internet Movie Database (IMDb) casting data to analyze how the star system was a factor in this period of risk reduction. Film casting assists risk reduction when a star system is built on controlled repetition. Repetitive casting — choosing the same people to star in a series of films — is a form of control because repetitive selection is the inequality of opportunity by another name: if an in-group is internally repetitive when alternatives exist, an out-group is repeatedly excluded.
There are two key conclusions to the analysis of the IMDb dataset. First, casting repetitiveness/inequality in the blockbuster era of Hollywood (1980-present) is low compared to Hollywood’s “classical” studio system (1930-1948). Second, the historically low repetitiveness/inequality can be misleading if we ignore sector characteristics such as firm size and level of theatrical distribution. Within the top-tier, whether measured by size of distributor or number of opening theatres in theatrical release, Hollywood relies on repetitive casting.
The theoretical part of this paper will identify the role of capitalist power in the formation of a star system. Capitalist power, in this case, is defined as the ability of Hollywood to control everything from the industrial production of films to the broader social relations of cinema. This control is never absolute, but the role of capitalist power in the star system has a key purpose: to make sure that casting decisions are complementary to business interests