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Price and Income Dynamics in the Agri-Food System: A Disaggregate Perspective
No full textThis dissertation seeks to illuminate contemporary processes of redistribution in the agri-food sector, with particular reference to the US. It addresses the following questions: How has the rapid rise in food price instability since the turn of the twenty-first century impacted income shifts within the agri-food system? Which groups within agriculture and agribusiness benefit from high and volatile food prices and which groups have suffered amid the tumult? Are all of these groups 'price-takers' that simply respond to price signals? Or are some of them 'priceshapers' that, with varying degrees of success, actively seek to restructure the agri-food system, and the regulatory architecture that governs it, in ways that make certain price developments more likely?
Hitherto, there has been little in the way of sustained analysis of the connections between prices, power and redistribution in the agri-food system. The dissertation addresses three approaches that offer some perspective on the redistributional-power dynamics of agricultural commodity price movements: global value chains analysis, the food regime approach and the emergent international political economy literature on post-crisis commodity derivatives regulations. As the thesis argues, although these approaches offer important qualitative insights, they have yet to offer quantitative means of gauging the power-shifts between different agricultural and agribusiness groups and their connection to price-shifts between different agri-food sub-sectors.
The thesis attempts to enfold the multiple insights of the existing literature into the capital as power approach. I submit that the process of enfoldment results in an analysis that offers a rich and highly differentiated understanding of the redistributional dynamics of high and volatile agricultural commodity prices. The arguments are made in relation to the contestation within agriculture and agribusiness over perhaps the two most controversial developments within the US agri-food sector in the early twenty-first century: the diversion of grain into agrofuels production and the rise of 'excessive speculation' in agricultural derivatives markets.
The importance of these two developments is underlined by the fact that a number of scholars have attributed the sharp food price peaks in 2007-08 and 2010-11 to the influx of speculative investment in futures markets, and the general upward trend in food prices in the 2000s to the agrofuel boom. By analyzing the redistributional effects of high and volatile prices, and by examining the contestation over the course taken by agrofuels policy and commodity derivatives regulation, the dissertation outlines the winners and losers of high and volatile food prices within both agribusiness and agriculture.
[This thesis was nominated for the York University Dissertation Prize.
Carbon Capitalism. Energy, Social Reproduction and World Order
No full textModern civilization and the social reproduction of capitalism are bound inextricably with fossil fuel consumption. But as carbon energy resources become scarcer, what implications will this have for energy-intensive modes of life? Can renewable energy sustain high levels of accumulation? Or will we witness the end of existing capitalist economies? This book provides an innovative and timely study that mobilizes a new theory of capitalism to explain the rise and fall of petro-market civilization. Di Muzio investigates how theorists of political economy have largely taken energy for granted and illuminates how the exploitation of fossil fuels increased the universalization and magnitude of capital accumulation. He then examines the likelihood of renewable resources providing a feasible alternative and asks whether they can beat peak oil prices to sustain food production, health care, science and democracy. Using the capital as power framework, this book considers the unevenly experienced consequences of monetizing fossil fuels for people and the planet
Blockbuster Cinema: Hollywood’s Obsession with Low Risk
Get PDFHollywood is obsessed with blockbusters – for 20 years the major studios have been making them, and it appears that blockbuster cinema will be with us for many years to come. This presentation will theoretically and empirically explain how blockbusters, and the associated business strategies that surround them, serve Hollywood’s financial goals. The key to blockbusters is that they allow major studios to reduce their risk. The revenues of designed-to-be blockbusters rarely fall below expectations, making the world of cinema increasingly predictable. Moreover, this predictability affects how the film business controls the social creativity of filmmakers and, indirectly, the behaviour of consumers.
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James McMahon is a PhD student at the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought, York University ([email protected])
This presentation is the third 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, November 3, 2015, 3:00-5:00 pm
WHERE: Verney Room, 674 South Ross, Keele Campus of York Universit
Encumbered Behemoth: Wal-Mart, Differential Accumulation and International Retail Restructuring (Preprint)
No full textThis chapter draws on, and develops, some aspects of the capital as power framework so as to provide the first clear quantitative explication of the company’s power trajectory to date. After rapid growth in the first four decades of its existence, the power of Wal-Mart appears to be flat-lining relative to dominant capital as a whole. The major problems for Wal-Mart lie in the fact that its green-field growth is running into barriers, while its cost cutting measures seem to be approaching a floor. The chapter contends that these problems are in part born out of resistance that Wal-Mart is experiencing at multiple social scales
The Plutonomy of the 1%: Dominant Ownership and Conspicuous Consumption in the New Gilded Age
No full textThis article offers a study on the plutonomy of dominant owners and what their consumptive practices might tell us from the lens of the capital as power framework in IPE. I argue that the differential consumption of dominant owners is an important dimension of an internationalised capitalist mode of power for two reasons. First, Nitzan and Bichler argue that the primary driver of accumulation is the desire for differential power symbolically expressed in a magnitude of money. In this article, I argue that there is a secondary dimension noted but underdeveloped in their framework and influenced by Veblen: the drive for social status and the display of positionality through differential intraclass consumption. Second, as identified by Kempf, I argue that the consumptive practices of dominant owners are helping to lock global society into an unsustainable and ethically indefensible quest for perpetual economic growth. This growth project not only undermines calls for needed social and economic change but also threatens populations with environmental collapse
Capital Accumulation: Fiction and Reality
No full textWhat do economists mean when they talk about ‘capital accumulation’? Surprisingly, the answer to this question is anything but clear, and it seems the most unclear in times of turmoil. Consider the recent ‘financial crisis’. The very term already attests to the presumed nature and causes of the crisis, which most observers indeed believe originated in the financial sector and was amplified by pervasive financialization.
However, when theorists speak about a financial crisis, they don’t speak about it in isolation. They refer to finance not in and of itself, but in relation to the so-called real capital stock. The recent crisis, they argue, happened not because of finance as such, but due to a mismatch between financial and real capital. The world of finance, they complain, has deviated from and distorted the real world of accumulation. And since, according to Milton Friedman, there is no such thing as a free lunch, it is only fitting that, having indulged in this distortion, we must now pay the price for it in the form of a financial crisis.
This ‘mismatch thesis’ – the notion of a reality distorted by finance – is broadly accepted. In 2009, The Economist of London accused its readers of confusing ‘financial assets with real ones’, singling out their confusion as the root cause of the brewing crisis. Real assets, or wealth, the magazine explained, consist of ‘goods and products we wish to consume’ or of ‘things that give us the ability to produce more of what we want to consume’. Financial assets, by contrast, are not wealth; they are simply ‘claims on real wealth’. To confuse the inflation of latter for the expansion of the former is the surest recipe for disaster.
The division between real wealth and financial claims on real wealth is a fundamental premise of political economy. This premise is accepted not only by liberal theorists, analysts and policymakers, but also by Marxists of various persuasions. And as we shall show below, it is a premise built on very shaky foundations.
When liberals and Marxists say that there is a mismatch between financial and real capital, they are essentially making, explicitly or implicitly, three related claims: (1) that these are indeed separate entities; (2) that these entities should correspond to each other; and (3) that, in the actual world, they often do not.
In what follows, we explain why these claims don’t hold water. To put it bluntly, neither liberals nor Marxists know how to compare real and financial capital, and the main reason is simple enough: they don’t know how to determine the magnitude of real capital to start with. The common, makeshift solution is to estimate this magnitude indirectly, by using the money price of capital goods – yet this doesn’t solve the problem either, since capital goods can have many prices and there is no way of knowing which of them, if any, is the ‘true’ one. Last but not least, even if we turn a blind eye and allow for these logical impossibilities and empirical travesties to stand, the result is still highly embarrassing. As it turns out, financial accumulation not only deviates from and distorts real accumulation, it also follows an opposite trajectory. For more than two centuries, economists left and right have argued that capitalism thrives on ‘real investment’ and the growth of ‘real capital’. But as we shall see, in reality, the best time for capitalists is when their ‘real accumulation’ tanks! . . .
Economic Growth as a Power Process -- Video
Get PDFIs economic growth a miracle of the free market? According to mainstream theory, growth is best ensured through conditions of ‘perfect competition’. However, economic growth is tightly correlated with the concentration of power in the hands of large corporations. Why? The capital as power framework provides potential answers that turn mainstream theory on its head: growth seems to be intimately related to the formation of hierarchy.
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Blair Fix is a PhD student at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University ([email protected])
This presentation is the second 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 27, 2015, 3:00-5:00 pm
WHERE: Verney Room, 674 South Ross, Keele Campus of York Universit
Profit from Crisis: Why Capitalists Do Not Want Recovery, and What That Means for America
No full textCan it be true that capitalists prefer crisis to growth? On the face of it, the idea sounds silly. According to Economics 101, everyone loves growth, especially capitalists. Profit and growth go hand in hand. When capitalists profit, real investment rises and the economy thrives, and when the economy booms the profits of capitalists soar. Growth is the very lifeline of capitalists.
Or is it
The Enlightened Capitalist (Reprint)
No full textOn April 16, 2014, we published a short article in the Indian fortnightly Frontline, titled 'Profit from Crisis'. Scarcely had a day passed from the article’s publication that we got an angry email from an asset manager whom we'll call 'Mr. X'. Mr. X is an enlightened capitalist, and reading our piece had set him on fire. Our article, he protested, was 'terribly flawed'. It 'failed miserably' in understanding capitalism, and its allegation that capitalists do not want recovery is doing 'tremendous harm'. This note deconstructs Mr. X's protestations in the context of the current capitalist angst
Profit from Crisis: Why Capitalists Do Not Want Recovery, and What That Means for America (Reprint)
No full textCan it be true that capitalists prefer crisis to growth? On the face of it, the idea sounds silly. According to Economics 101, everyone loves growth, especially capitalists. Profit and growth go hand in hand. When capitalists profit, real investment rises and the economy thrives, and when the economy booms the profits of capitalists soar. Growth is the very lifeline of capitalists.
Or is it