The Bichler and Nitzan Archives
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Energy, Capital as Power and World Order
Get PDFUntil late, the subject of energy and its importance for capitalism and the constitution and reconstitution of world order has been sorely overlooked in the international political economy (IPE) literature. Indeed, only two of the major textbooks in IPE have chapters on energy. This is also true of the literature known as classical political economy. With few exceptions, the main questions that animated the classics such as the origins of the wealth of nations and the distribution of wealth are somehow disconnected from the production and consumption of energy. Marginal exceptions granted, there is little acknowledgement that the last three centuries of uneven and combined “progress” and “development” have anything to do with the exploitation of coal, oil and natural gas. However, if recent scholarship is any indication, this appears to be changing both within IPE and within other academic fields such as geography, sociology and environmental studies. In this emergent literature, we can find an argument that energy should not be treated as auxiliary to our analysis of the global political economy but essential to understanding and interpreting its emergence, transformations and future trajectories. Since fossil fuels make up an overwhelming share of global energy production and consumption I will mainly concentrate of non-renewable fossil fuels and aim to provide a critical political economy approach to energy, capitalism and world order by using the capital as power perspective.
This is certainly not the only approach that we could take, but it is the one I find most revealing and convincing. To make this argument, I have divided the article in the following way. First, I concisely survey why energy is important for our theorizations of the global political economy as well as for understanding the practices of everyday life. With this background information in place, I briefly review how mainstream and critical accounts have approached the question of energy and the global political economy and demonstrate how the capital as power approach is distinctive for its focus on capitalization and social reproduction. In the second section, I will consider the power of the oil and gas firms in shaping and reshaping social reproduction and how there are strong indicators to suggest that renewable forms of energy cannot presently -- and likely never will -- replace fossil fuels and perpetuate energy intensive modes of living centuries into the future. Moreover, because of the entrenched power of oil and gas firms and their connection with affluent social reproduction, transitioning to less carbon intensive modes of social reproduction are being stalled. I conclude the article by discussing the relationship between energy, violence and world order
Miksi Kapitalistit Eivät Halua Talouden Elpyvän (Why Capitalists Don't Want Recovery)
Get PDFMotiivinsa onkin kasvattaa valtaansa suhteessa muihin? Tällöin kapitalisteilla on hyvä syy rakastaa kriisiä ja jämähtää paikoilleen.
Suomennos: Matias Kaupp
A Podcast Interview with Sandy Hager on Public Debt and Inequality
No full textWho owns the U.S. public debt? Why is it such an important commodity in global capitalism? Why does public debt provoke such intense political debate? And how can the quantitative data on the ownership structure of public debt provide insights into these topics? Our guest today, Sandy Hager, reveals answers to all of these questions and more.
Duration: 41 minute
Korea’s Post-1997 Restructuring: An Analysis of Capital as Power
No full text*** WINNER OF THE RRPE ANNUAL BEST PAPER AWARD FOR 2016 ***
This paper aims to transcend current debates on Korea’s post-1997 restructuring, which rely on a dichotomy between domestic industrial capital and foreign financial capital, by adopting Nitzan and Bichler’s capital-as-power perspective. Based on this approach, the paper analyzes Korea’s recent political economic restructuring as the latest phase in the evolution of capitalist power and its transformative regimes of capital accumulation.
[The full text PDF is a postprint of an article published by the Review of Radical Political Economics (0486613415594147, first posted on August 20, 2015 as doi:10.1177/0486613415594147, and later published in Volume 42, Number 2, May, pp. 287-309).
Concentration and Power in the Food System: Who Controls What We Eat?
Get PDFThis book seeks to illuminate which firms have become the most dominant, and more importantly, how they shape and reshape society in their efforts to increase their control. These dynamics have received insufficient attention from academics and even critics of the current food system. The power of dominant firms extends far beyond narrow economic boundaries, for example, providing them with the ability to damage numerous communities and ecosystems in their pursuit of higher than average profits. The social resistance provoked by these negative consequences is another area that is less visible to the majority of the population. When such resistance is evident at all, it frequently appears insignificant, failing to challenge the direction of current trends. Even very small movements, however, may influence which firms end up winners or losers or close off particular avenues for growth. These accomplishments also suggest potential limits and therefore the possibility that dominant firms may experience much greater threats to their power in the future
Energy and Institution Size
Get PDFWhy do institutions grow? Despite nearly a century of scientific effort, there remains little consensus on this topic. This paper offers a new approach that focuses on energy consumption. A systematic relation exists between institution size and energy consumption per capita: as energy consumption increases, institutions become larger. I hypothesize that this relation results from the interplay between technological complexity and human biological limitations. I also show how a simple stochastic model can be used to link energy consumption with firm dynamics
Financialization or Capitalization? Debating Capitalist Power in South Korea in the Context of Neoliberal Globalization
Get PDFThe article reviews debates concerning financialization in South Korea, with a focus on ongoing arguments between liberal, post-Keynesian, institutionalist and Marxist economists. It argues that post-Keynesian and institutionalist perspectives in particular neglect important class processes through which the financial circuit operates within the Korean economy, especially the power of Korea’s large, family-led conglomerates, or chaebol. In order to build upon Marxist approaches to Korean finance, we argue that Nitzen and Bichler’s approach to the ‘capitalization’ of capitalist class power provides a useful heuristic for understanding the differential power of Korean chaebol and their integration into global capital
A CasP Model of the Stock Market -- Video and Chartbook
Get PDFMost explanations of stock market booms and busts are based on contrasting the underlying, ‘fundamental’ logic of the economy with the exogenous, non-economic factors that presumably distort it. Our paper offers a radically different model, examining the stock market not from the mechanical viewpoint of a distorted economy, but from the dialectical perspective of capitalized power. The model demonstrates that (1) the valuation of equities represents capitalized power; (2) capitalized power is dialectically intertwined with systemic fear; and (3) the connection between capitalized power and systemic fear is mediated by strategic sabotage. This triangular model, we posit, can offer a basis for examining the asymptotes, or limits, of capitalized power and the ways in which these asymptotes relate to the historical and ongoing transformation of the capitalist mode of power.
Video duration: 1:53 hours
WHERE: Room 280N in York Lanes, Keele Campus, York University
WHEN: Thursday, September 29, 2016, 2:15-4:00 p
The Scientist and the Church
No full textFROM THE BACK COVER:
The Scientist and the Church is a wide-ranging biography of research, showcasing Bichler and Nitzan’s attempts to break through the stifling dogmas of the academic church and chart a new scientific cosmology of capitalism. Central to the authors’ work is the notion that capital is not a productive economic category but capitalized power, and that capitalism should be conceived and researched not as a mode of production and consumption but as a mode of power.
The articles collected in this volume outline the general contours of their approach, flesh out some of their recent research and offer personal insights into the broader politics of their journey. The first chapters reexamine the common foundations of the neoclassical and Marxist doctrines, sketch the contours of the authors’ alternative cosmology of capitalized power, identify the asymptotes – or limits – of this power and explore the all-encompassing logic of modern finance. Subsequent chapters research the connection between redistribution and cyclical crises, reassess the Marxist nexus between imperialism and financialism, rethink the oft-misunderstood role of crime and punishment in the capitalist mode of power and articulate a new theory and history of Middle-East energy conflicts. The closing chapters include two big-picture interviews, as well as riveting reflections on the authors’ own scientific clashes with the church
Globalization, Development and Social Justice. A Propositional Political Approach
Get PDFAre there existing alternatives to corporate globalization? What are the prospects for and commonalities between communities and movements such as Occupy, the World Social Forum and alternative economies?
Globalization Development and Social Justice advances the proposition that another globalization is not only possible, but already exists. It demonstrates that there are multiple pathways towards development with social justice and argues that enabling propositional agency, rather than oppositional agency such as resistance, is a more effective alternative to neoliberal globalization. El Khoury develops a theory of infraglobalization that emphasizes creative constitution, not just contestation, of global and local processes. The book features case studies and examples of diverse economic practice and innovative emergent political forms from the Global South and North. These case studies are located in the informal social economy and community development, as well as everyday practices, from prefigurative politics to community cooperatives and participatory planning.
This book makes an important contribution to debates about the prospects for, and practices of, a transformative grassroots globalization, and to critical debates about globalization and development strategies. It will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, globalization, social movement studies, political and economic geography, sociology, anthropology and development studies.
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