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Capitalizing Obesity
Get PDFIn his 2014 article, 'Food Price Inflation as Redistribution', Joseph Baines shows the intimate correspondence between differential profit and world hunger. But the capitalization of food is a dialectical process. As Michael Harrington noted more than half a century ago in his seminal book 'The Other America', the other side of affluence is poverty; and among the American poor, the other side of hunger is overweight and obesity. Over the next fifty years, the global proportion of undernourished people has diminished while that of the obese has risen; and since the early 2000s, for the first time in history, the obese have outnumbered the undernourished.
How has this remarkable hunger-to-obesity transformation evolved? What forms of capital drive the obesity epidemic, including its counter-movements of anti-obesity drugs, non-communicable disease treatments, diets, surgical fixes and psychological interventions? What are the material/ideal technologies that shift the world toward ever more destructive yet profitable forms of mass overfeeding? What policies and legislation have supported this shift, and how have they been imposed on the world’s population? And most importantly, what are the qualitative and quantitative links, if any, between these various strategies of sabotage on the one hand and differential profit and capitalization on the other
A Global Bond: Explaining the Safe-Haven Status of US Treasury Securities
Get PDFThis article offers new theoretical and empirical insights to explain the resilience of US Treasury securities as the world’s premier safe or “risk-free” asset. The standard explanation of resilience emphasizes the relative safety of US Treasuries due to a shortage of safe assets in the global political economy. The analysis here goes beyond the standard explanation to highlight the importance of domestic politics in reinforcing the safe status of US Treasury securities. In particular, the research shows how a formidable “bond” of interests unites domestic and foreign owners of the public debt and works to sustain US power in global finance. Foreigners, who now own roughly half of the US public debt, have something to gain from their domestic counterparts. The top 1% of US households, which dominate domestic ownership of US Treasuries, has considerable political clout, thus alleviating foreign concerns about the creditworthiness of the US federal government. Domestic owners, in turn, benefit from the seemingly insatiable foreign appetite for US Treasury securities. In supplying the US federal government and US households with cheap credit, foreign investors in US Treasuries help to deflect challenges to the top 1% within the wealth and income hierarchy
Call for Papers for a Special Issue of RECASP: “Broadening the Vista”
Get PDFSubmissions deadline: December 31st, 2016
Submission guidelines: http://www.recasp.com/contact
Contact: Tim Di Muzio, University of Wollongong, Australia ([email protected]
CasP Conference on "Capital as Power: Broadening the Vista": Program and Videos
Get PDFThe theory of capital as power (CasP) offers a radical alternative to mainstream and Marxist theories of capitalism. It argues that capital symbolizes and quantifies not utility or labour but organized power writ large, and that capitalism is best understood and challenged not as a mode of consumption and production, but as a mode of power. Over the past decade, the Forum on Capital as Power has organized many lectures, speaker series and conferences. Our most recent international gatherings include “Capitalizing Power: The Qualities and Quantities of Accumulation” (2012), “The Capitalist Mode of Power: Past, Present and Future” (2011), and “Crisis of Capital, Crisis of Theory” (2010).
The 2016 conference, to be held at York University on September 28-30, 2015, broadens the vista. With 25 papers on a wide range of topics, presenters extend and deepen CasP research, compare CasP with other approaches and critique CasP’s methods and findings.
The conference is open to everyone and is free to attend
Public Debt, Inequality and Power. The Making of a Modern Debt State
Get PDF[This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution + Noncommercial + NoDerivatives 3.0 license. Copyright is retained by the author(s)]
FROM THE BACK COVER:
Who are the dominant owners of US public debt? Is it widely held, or concentrated in the hands of a few? Does ownership of public debt give these bondholders power over our government? What do we make of the fact that foreign-owned debt has ballooned to nearly 50 percent today? Until now, we have not had any satisfactory answers to these questions. Public Debt, Inequality, and Power is the first comprehensive historical analysis of public debt ownership in the United States. It reveals that ownership of federal bonds has been increasingly concentrated in the hands of the 1 percent over the past three decades. Based on extensive and original research, Public Debt, Inequality, and Power will shock and enlighten.
“These days, the topic of America’s debt stirs heated political debate. But one of the most important facts in this discussion has hitherto been obscured: who actually owns that debt inside America? Hager has done some fascinating and pathbreaking research to answer that question and concluded that the ownership pattern is surprisingly concentrated—and unequal—and that this may have implications for how the entire debt debate develops in the coming years. This is an illuminating work that deserves wide attention.” (GILLIAN TETT, Financial Times)
“The relationship between the ownership structure of government debt and economic inequality—between public finance and the class structure of modern capitalism—is one of several central concerns of political economy that has been almost completely neglected in recent decades. Sandy Brian Hager’s book returns to the subject with theoretical and empirical bravado.” (WOLFGANG STREECK, Director Emeritus, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies)
“Money is power, and US Treasury debt is the world’s single largest financial instrument. Hager’s insightful book fills an enormous hole in our knowledge of who owns this debt and how the power flowing from that increasingly concentrated ownership affects US and global politics.” (HERMAN M. SCHWARTZ, author of Subprime Nation: American Power, Global Capital, and the Housing Bubble)
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SANDY BRIAN HAGER is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. He has published in various journals, including New Political Economy and Socio-Economic Review
Pseudorational Control and the Magma of Reality
Get PDF1 INTRODUCTION. – 2 POWER. From magma ontology to the dual project of modernity. Some etymology. Gestaltungsvermögen. Magma concept (Castoriadis). Magma ontology. The radical imagination of the psychic monad. The social imaginary significations (SIS) of the socio-historical. Gestaltungsvermögen, magma ontology, capital. Autonomy versus Heteronomy. The SIS of autonomy versus the SIS rational control. – 3 QUANTIFICATION. Operational symbolism and computable rationality. Definition of symbolism. Operational symbolism: calculization (Kalkülisierung). Leibniz’s theory of symbols. Earlier forms of symbolism: ontological and magical symbolism. Operational symbolism and magmatic reality. Institutionalization of computable reason: bureaucracy and finance. – 4 MONEY AND FINANCE. TOWARD A POWER THEORY OF MONEY. Concepts of Money. Property-based money (capitalist money). Power aspects. Derivatives: risk management or the self-reflexivity of rational control. – 5 BUREAUCRACY, FINANCE AND PSEUDORATIONALITY OF RATIONAL CONTROL. “Bureaucratic capitalism” or bureaucracy as the organizational mode of rational control? The pseudorationality of bureaucracy. The inner contradictions of financial capitalism. Operational closedness and autocatalytic growth of bureaucracy and finance. Systemic crisis or decay of pseudorational control? – 6 WAY OUT? AUTONOMY AND OPERATIONAL SYMBOLISM.
WHEN / WHERE: Tuesday, 27 September 2016, 2:30-5:30 pm; South 674 Ross Building, Keele Campus of York University.
TEXT: A draft manuscript can be found on Ulf Martin's cloud space: https://www.magentacloud.de/share/123m.ue21f#$
Why Diamonds and De Beers?, or The Need for Accumulation Studies
Get PDFThe text of this paper served as the introductory presentation for my PhD defence, held on December 2015. In it, I explain what I tried to do with the dissertation, the methods I used, and the larger project I hope it is initiating. Specifically, I suggest there is a need for accumulation studies as a field of research and analysis. The dissertation was a case study within this not-yet-existent field. Hopefully, this text serves to clarify my approach and, ideally, will generate greater interest in such research
Capital as Power and the Corporatization of Education
Get PDFBuilding on the definition of critical education residing in the crossroads of cultural politics and political economy, this theoretical article offers an inquiry into the intersection between critical education research and the central ritual of contemporary capitalism – capitalisation. This article outlines four current approaches in education research literature to the corporatisation of education. This article argues that the approaches must rely implicitly on one of the two major theories of capitalism: modern neoclassical economics or Marxist political economy, even when the approaches are built on cultural and sociological arguments. Without an explicit engagement with the concept of capital and capitalisation, the approaches risk appearing theoretically weak and reliant on moral assumptions. In this sense, critical education literature would be strengthened by engagement with international political economy (IPE) literature. This article proposes to redress this lacuna in the literature by mobilising Jonathan Nitzan's and Shimson Bichler's theory of capital as power to better understand the corporatisation of education
The Need to Rid the World of Inequality. Review of The 1% and the Rest of Us
Get PDFFROM THE REVIEW: Tim Di Muzio, a senior lecturer in international relations and political economy at Wollongong University in Australia, has written a book – ‘The 1% and the Rest of Us: A Political Economy of Dominant Ownership’ (Zed Books, 2015) – that answers so many questions and provides so much relevant background to readily understand wealth and its maldistribution [. . .] ‘The 1% and the Rest of Us’ distills the concepts of capitalism, political economy, finance, inequality, the profligacy of the 1%-ers, and much more in morally coherent chunks of need-to-know information. It is a superb book
Uneven and Combined Confusion: On the Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism and the Rise of the West
Get PDFThis article offers a critique of Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancioğlu’s "How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism". We argue that while all historiography features a number of silences, shortcomings or omissions, the omissions in "How the West Came to Rule" lead to a mistaken view of the emergence of capitalism. There are two main issues to be confronted. First, we argue that Anievas and Nişancioğlu have an inadequate and misleading understanding of 'capital' and 'capitalism' that tilts them towards a theoretical stance that comes very close to arguing that everything caused capitalism while at the same time having no clear and convincing definition of ‘capital’ or ‘capitalism’. Second, there are at least three omissions -- particular to England/Britain within a geopolitical context -- that should be discussed in any attempt to explain the development of capitalism: the financial revolution and the Bank of England, the transition to coal energy and the capitalization of state power as it relates to war, colonialism and slavery. We conclude by calling for a connected histories approach within the framework of capital as power