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이윤의 경고: 피를 부를 것이다 (Profit Warning: There Will Be Blood)
Get PDF우리는 2014년 RWER에 게재한 논문 ‘여전히 석유 문제인가Still About Oil?’의 차트들을 업 데이트 해 보았는데, 그 차트들이 제시하는 그림은 자본이 무력을 요구하고 있는 것으로 해석 된다.
1980년대 말부터 우리는 중동이 1960년대 말 이래로 무기 달러-석유 달러 동맹 (Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition)의 자본화된 권력에 의해 크게 좌우되어 왔다 고 주장했다. 이 동맹은 주요 석유 기업들, OPEC 카르텔, 무기 하청기업체들, 건설기 업들, 거대 금융기관들로 이루어진 느슨한 연합체이다. 이들의 차등적 축적은 한편으 로 중동의 ‘에너지 분쟁’으로부터 수혜를 입었으며, 다른 한편으로는 그러한 분쟁을 부채질 하고 지속되도록 조력했다. 우리는 이러한 분쟁들이 지역을 넘어서 지구적 차 원에서 성장의 성쇠, 인플레이션 소용돌이, 그리고 일부 중요한 부문에서는 자본주의 적 권력 양식의 진화 그 자체에 영향을 미치며 엄청난 파장을 일으켰다고 주장했다. 그리고 우리가 보기에, 지금 다시 이러한 충격에 관해 문제의식을 던져야 한다
The Trouble with Human Capital Theory
Get PDFHuman capital theory is the dominant approach for understanding personal income distribution. According to this theory, individual income is the result of ‘human capital’. The idea is that human capital makes people more productive, which leads to higher income. But is this really the case? This paper takes a critical look at human capital theory and its explanation of personal income distribution. I find that human capital theory’s claims are dubious at best. In most cases, the theory is either not supported by evidence, is so vague that it is untestable, or is based on circular reasoning. In short, human capital theory is a barrier to the scientific study of income distribution
Can Capitalists Afford Recovery? A 2018 Update
Get PDF. . . Looking forward, the prognosis for capitalists seems negative. Over the last few years, unemployment has fallen sharply, and if the predictive power of our chart remains intact, the capitalist income-share-read-power is bound to contract further, raising the ante for a prolonged accumulation crisis. Eventually, though, capitalists are likely the resolve their CasP crisis, as they have done repeatedly for nearly a century, by offloading it onto the underlying population in the form of rising unemployment
Corporate Urbanization: Between the Future and Survival in Lebanon
Get PDFIf you look today at the skyline of downtowns throughout the Middle East and beyond, the joint-stock corporation has transformed the urban landscape. The corporation makes itself present through the proliferation of its urban mega-projects, including skyscrapers, downtown developments and gated communities; retail malls and artificial islands; airports and ports; and highways. Built into these corporate urban structures are edifices of politics, ideology and certain forms of socio-spatial and temporal organization. The corporation, however, has largely escaped critical scholarly analysis in Geography and/or Urban and Middle East Studies. In this thesis, I argue that the corporation is far more than a mere business enterprise and is in fact one of the most important apparatuses in the organization of our socio-spatial relations. Through an analysis of the 19th-century French joint-stock corporation, Compagnie Impériale Ottomane de la Route Beyrouth-Damas, and Solidere the corporation that led the reconstruction of Beirut following the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1991), this thesis considers and explores the force of the corporation in assembling socio-spatial relations and certain urban futures. Drawing on work in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Geography, I consider the process of capitalization, which is central to how the corporation organizes its operations. Capitalization represents the present value of a future stream of earnings. I argue that capitalization is now central to the urbanization process and that the urban fabric has provided the corporation with a durable structure to guarantee a stream of income. Capitalized urbanization, I contend, is the building of a certain future into the urban present - also understood as the extension of time (the future) through the concentration of space (urbanization). It is therefore not only an economic proposition but one that necessitates broader socio-political and spatial control. In the case of the Compagnie, I argue, through its capitalization this corporation established a new power network that not only generated great profits for its shareholders but also contributed to the rise of Beirut as a central trading hub and facilitated the French domination of the Levant. The establishment of Solidere would once again create an urban corporate imposition that greatly altered the socio-spatial relations of Beirut and Lebanon more broadly. Solidere, I contend was central to the formation of the Second Lebanese Republic. Through Solidere’s corporate socio-spatial apparatus and its capitalization of the built environment, the company was able to build a certain future into the urban present, foreclosing other possible futures and socio-spatial formations.
[Posted with the author’s permission
CasP's 'Differential Accumulation' versus Veblen's 'Differential Advantage'
Get PDFThis paper clarifies a common misrepresentation of our theory of capital as power, or CasP. Many observers tend to box CasP as an ‘institutionalist’ theory, tracing its central process of ‘differential accumulation’ to Thorstein Veblen’s notion of ‘differential advantage’. This view, we argue, betrays a misunderstanding of CasP, Veblen or both. As we show, CasP’s notion of differential accumulation is not only different from, but also diametrically opposed to Veblen’s differential advantage. Veblen, who wrote at the turn of the twentieth century, before the appearance of business indices and financial benchmarks, emphasized the absolute drive for ‘maximum profit’ and saw strategic sabotage merely as a power means to an economic end. By contrast, CasP, which was developed at the end of the twentieth century, sees power not only as a means of accumulation, but also – and perhaps more importantly – as its ultimate purpose. Accumulators, it argues, are conditioned and driven to augment not their profits and assets as such, but their relative power, and this means that, as symbolic bearers of power, these profits and assets should be measured not absolutely, but relatively to those of others – hence the imperative of differential accumulation
With Their Back to the Future: Will Past Earnings Trigger the Next Crisis?
Get PDFThe U.S. stock market is again in turmoil. After a two-year bull run in which share prices soared by nearly 50 per cent, the market is suddenly dropping. Since the beginning of 2018, it lost nearly 10 per cent of its value, threatening investors with an official ‘correction’ or worse.
As always, there is no shortage of explanations. Politically inclined analysts emphasize Trump’s recently announced trade wars, sprawling scandals and threatening investigations, as well as the broader turn toward ‘populism’; interest-rate forecasters point to central-bank tightening and china’s negative credit impulse; quants speak of breached support lines and death crosses; bottom-up analysts highlight the negative implications of the Face-book/Cambridge Analytica debacle for the ‘free-data’ business model; and top-down fundamentalists indicate that, at near-record valuations, the stock market is a giant bubble ready to be punctured.
And on the face of it, these explanations all ring true. They articulate various threats to future profits, interest rates and risk perceptions, and since equity prices discount expected risk-adjusted future earnings, these threats imply lower prices.
But there is one little problem. Unlike their pundits, capitalists nowadays tend to look not forward, but backward: instead of matching asset prices to the distant future, they fit them to the immediate past
Theory and Praxis, Theory and Practice, Practical Theory
Get PDFIn their paper ‘The CasP Project: Past, Present and Future’, Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan invite readers to engage critically with their theoretical framework, known as capital as power (CasP). This call for further research, reactions and critiques is the perfect occasion to raise a few questions that have grown in my mind in reading Nitzan and Bichler’s work
Can Capitalists Afford Recovery? A 2018 Update
Get PDF. . . Looking forward, the prognosis for capitalists seems negative. Over the last few years, unemployment has fallen sharply, and if the predictive power of our chart remains intact, the capitalist income-share-read-power is bound to contract further, raising the ante for a prolonged accumulation crisis. Eventually, though, capitalists are likely the resolve their CasP crisis, as they have done repeatedly for nearly a century, by offloading it onto the underlying population in the form of rising unemployment
The Aggregation Problem: Implications for Ecological Economics
Get PDFThis article discusses the aggregation problem and its implications for ecological economics. The aggregation problem consists of a simple dilemma: when adding heterogeneous phenomena together, the observer must choose the unit of analysis. The dilemma is that this choice affects the resulting measurement. This means that aggregate measurements are dependent on one’s goals, and on underlying theory. Using simple examples, this article shows how the aggregation problem complicates tasks such as calculating indexes of aggregate quantity, and how it undermines attempts to find a singular metric for complex issues such as sustainability
Hierarchy and the Power-Law Income Distribution Tail
Get PDFWhat explains the power-law distribution of top incomes? This paper tests the hypothesis that it is firm hierarchy that creates the power-law income distribution tail. Using the available case-study evidence on firm hierarchy, I create the first large-scale simulation of the hierarchical structure of the US private sector. Although not tuned to do so, this model reproduces the power-law scaling of top US incomes. I show that this is purely an effect of firm hierarchy. This raises the possibility that the ubiquity of power-law income distribution tails is due to the ubiquity of hierarchical organization in human societies