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The Capitalist Mode of Power: Second Speaker Series
No full textExisting theories of capitalism, mainstream as well as heterodox, view capitalism as a mode of production and consumption. This speaker series interrogates capitalism as a mode of power. The five presentations deal with the past, present and future of the CasP project (Bichler & Nitzan), the historical connection between economic growth and the formation of social hierarchy (Fix), the role of blockbuster cinema in reducing Hollywood's risk (McMahon), the external-internal power dynamics of the U.S. public debt (Hager), and General Electric’s staying power and what can be learned from it for the study of capital accumulation (Cochrane).
The speaker series is organized by the Forum on Capital as Power and sponsored by the York Department of Political Science and Graduate Program in SPT.
LOCATION: Verney Room, 674 South Ross, Keele Campus (open to all, with refreshments)
DATES: October 20, 27; November 3, 10, 17, 2015
TIME: 3:00-5:00 P
Risk and Capitalist Power: Conceptual Tools for Studying the Political Economy of Hollywood
Get PDFIn this article, the structure of Hollywood film distribution will be analyzed through the lens of risk. In both its technical and conceptual senses, risk is relevant to the study of Hollywood’s dominant firms. In the interest of lowering risk, the business interests of Hollywood look to predetermine how new films will function in an already instituted order of cinema, which includes the creativity of filmmakers and the habits of moviegoers. This presentation of risk will explain why, for the political economy of Hollywood, the social world of cinema is an instrumental order. While risk is specifically about the size and pattern of future earnings, it is also an indirect prediction about the stability of the social conditions that would help translate potential earnings into an actual stream. The social world of cinema has a bearing on the Hollywood film business’s degree of confidence, which refers to the ability of capitalists to make predictions about future earnings
Public Debt as Corporate Power: Mapping the New Aristocracy of Finance
No full textIn various writings Karl Marx made references to an ‘aristocracy of finance’ in Western Europe and the United States that dominated ownership of the public debt. Drawing on original research, this paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of the pattern of public debt ownership within the US corporate sector. The research shows that over the past three decades, and especially in the context of the current crisis, a new ‘aristocracy of finance’ has emerged, as corporate holdings of the public debt have become rapidly concentrated in favor of large corporations classified within Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE). Drawing on Wolfgang Streeck’s concept of the ‘debt state’, the paper goes on to demonstrate how concentration in ownership of the public debt reinforces patterns of social inequality and proceeds in tandem with a shift in government policy, one that prioritizes the interests of government bondholders over the general citizenry
Capital Accumulation: Fiction and Reality -- Video and Paper
No full textVideo duration: 1:57 hours
There are many explanations for the recent global crisis, but most seem to agree that the origins of this crisis are largely financial: the crisis started in and was amplified by the financial sector.
Of course, when economists speak about a financial crisis, they don’t speak of finance in isolation; they speak of finance in relation to the so-called real capital stock. The current crisis, they argue, happened not because of finance as such, but due to a 'mismatch' between financial and real capital. According to this view, the world of finance deviated from and distorted the real world of accumulation; and since there is no such thing as a free lunch, the ensuing financial crash and Great Recession were the price we all had to pay for failing to prevent the distortion.
This 'mismatch thesis' – the notion of a reality distorted by finance – is broadly accepted. It is the basic premise of liberals, it is endorsed by Marxists, and it guides policy makers.
There is only one problem. The mismatch itself does not – and cannot – exist, and for the simplest of reasons: the very distinction between 'real' and ‘financial’ capital is entirely fictitious. . . .
LOCATION: la chaufferie du Coeur des sciences de l’UQAM, MontreaL, Quebec.
DATE/TIME: March 31, 2015, 18:00-20:00
[The presentation is in English and is open to everyone
Capital as Power: Broadening the Vista -- Tentative Programme (Conference Postponed to 2016)
No full text*** THE CONFERENCE HAS BEEN POSTPONED TO 2016 ***
The 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 2015 conference, to be held at Carleton University on October 1-3, broadens the vista. With 30 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
The CasP Project: Past, Present, Future -- Video
No full textThe study of capital as power began when we were students in the 1980s and has since expanded into a broader project, involving a growing number of researchers and new areas of inquiry. The presentation explores what we have learned so far, reviews ongoing research and suggests future trajectories – including the coevolution of concepts and modes of power; the origins of capitalized power; the state of capital; finance as the symbolic creordering of capitalism; the role of labour, production and waste; the capitalized environment; and the need for post-capitalist accounting.
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Shimshon Bichler teaches at colleges and universities in Israel. Jonathan Nitzan teaches at York University in Canada. All of their publications are available for free under the Creative Commons License from The Bichler & Nitzan Archives.
This presentation is the first in the Second Speaker Series on the Capitalist Mode of Power, organized by capitalaspower.com and sponsored by the York Department of Political Science and the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought.
Refreshments will be served and all are welcome.
WHEN: Tuesday, October 20, 2015, 3:00-5:00 pm
WHERE: Verney Room, 674 South Ross, Keele Campus of York Universit
What Makes Hollywood Run? Capitalist Power, Risk and the Control of Social Creativity
Get PDFThis dissertation combines an interest in political economy, political theory and cinema to offer an answer about the pace of the Hollywood film business and its general modes of behaviour. More specifically, this dissertation seeks to find out how the largest Hollywood firms attempt to control social creativity such that the art of filmmaking and its related social relations under capitalism do not become financial risks in the pursuit of profit. Controlling the ways people make or watch films, the thesis argues, is an institutional facet of capitalist power. Capitalist power—the ability to control, modify and, sometimes, limit social creation through the rights of ownership—is the foundation of capital accumulation. For the Hollywood film business, capitalist power is about the ability of business concerns to set the terms that mould the future of cinema.
The overall objective of Part I is to outline and rectify some of the methodological problems that obscure our understanding of how capital is accumulated from culture. Marxism stands as the theoretical foil for this argument. Because Marxism defines capital such that only economic activity can create value, it needs to clearly distinguish between economics and politics—yet this is a distinction it is ultimately unable to make. With this backdrop in mind, Part I introduces the capital-as-power approach and uses it as a foundation to an alternative political economic theory of capitalism. The capital-as-power approach views capital not as an economic category, but as a category of power. Consequently, this approach reframes the accumulation of capital as a power process.
Part II focuses on the Hollywood film business. It investigates how and to what extent major filmed entertainment attempts to accumulate capital by lowering its risk. The process of lowering risk—and the central role of capitalist power in this process—has characterized Hollywood’s orientation toward the social-historical character of cinema and mass culture. This push to lower risk has been most apparent since the 1980s. In recent decades, major filmed entertainment has used its oligopolistic control of distribution to institute an order of cinema based on several key strategies: saturation booking, blockbuster cinema and high-concept filmmaking.
[This thesis was nominated for the York University Dissertation Prize.
Acumulación de capital: ficción y realidad
Get PDF¿Qué quieren decir los economistas cuando hablan de “acumulación de capital'? La respuesta es todo, menos clara. La opinión convencional es que hay dos tipos de capital: real y financiero, que deben guardar correspondencia y que, infortunadamente, la mayoría de las veces no se corresponden, pues el crecimiento del capital financiero tiende a desajustarse y a distorsionar la acumulación de capital real. El artículo muestra que esta “tesis del desajuste” y, por tanto, la capacidad de los economistas para explicar la acumulación, se construyó sobre bases deleznables. Argumenta que no pueden medir el capital real y que las proxies que elaboran con ese propósito los enreda en circularidades lógicas e imposibilidades empíricas
Still About Oil?
No full textDuring the late 1980s and early 1990s, we identified a new Middle East phenomenon that we called 'energy conflicts' and argued that these conflicts were intimately linked with the global processes of capital accumulation. This paper outlines the theoretical framework we have developed over the years and brings our empirical research up to date. It shows that the key stylized patterns we discovered more than twenty years ago – along with other regularities we have uncovered since then – remain pretty much unchanged: (1) conflict in the region continues to correlate tightly with the differential profits of the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition, particularly the oil companies; (2) dominant capital continues to depend on stagflation to substitute for declining corporate amalgamation; and (3) capitalists the world over now need inflation to offset the spectre of debt deflation. The convergence of these interests bodes ill for the Middle East and beyond: all of these groups stand to benefit from higher oil prices, and oil prices rarely if ever rise without there being an energy conflict in the Middle East
Differential Taxation: A Convergence of Interests between American Banking and Government
No full textThis paper demonstrates that the interests of American banking and government have converged after the early 1980s and relates this trend to modern financial deregulation, revealing a symbiosis that would later influence the global financial crisis of 2007-2008. An examination of corporate profit and taxation in the United States reveals an anomaly: from the early 1980s until the financial crisis, banking profits after tax sharply outpaced those of the corporate average despite their effective tax rates having simultaneously increased relative to those of the corporate average. These conditions thereby created a mutually beneficial relationship between American banking and government in which banks earned higher profits and the government earned higher tax revenues. However, this tax arrangement ultimately depended on unsustainably deregulated banking profits, and fell apart during the financial crisis of 2007-2008