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Degrowth and Capital: Assembling a Power-Centred Theory of Change
Full text linkIn the context of contemporary socio-environmental shifts, the concept of “degrowth” advocates for transforming societies to ensure environmental justice and a well-being for all within planetary boundaries. This PhD thesis, positioned within degrowth studies, provides a processual, holistic and interdisciplinary exploration of the dynamics between degrowth transformations and capital accumulation, understood as an all-encompassing power process.
I start by critically exploring the role of capital accumulation in the unfolding of degrowth transformations, highlighting some shortcomings of conventional views that predominantly see capital accumulation as a primarily production-oriented process. While, historically, the degrowth project has opposed economism, these perspectives tend to overlook the deep intertwinement between economics and politics in the intersection between degrowth transformations and capital accumulation. This thesis then considers the theory of “Capital as Power” (CasP), which dissolves the boundaries between economics and politics in the study of capital. Key implications of CasP for the unfolding of degrowth transformations are highlighted. Through this lens, I identify four distinct elements of dynamics, each represented as a causal loop diagram (CLD), capturing the complex relationship between degrowth transformations and the power processes of capital accumulation. Using insights from Social Practice Theory (SPT), I further investigate how degrowth-aligned practices, reforms, and ruptures may be inhibited by “strategic sabotage” processes that bolster capital accumulation, conceptualising four modes of sabotage, set into motion through two additional elements of dynamics. These six elements of dynamics are then assembled into a single CLD, which is used to explore four scenarios for the unfolding or marginalisation of degrowth transformations against the process of capital accumulation.
In short, as the journey progresses, this thesis assembles a power-centred theory of change for degrowth against the process of capital accumulation. It emphasises the importance of understanding and navigating these power dynamics for those willing to move towards a degrowth society
Is Stagflation the Norm?
No full textAs much of the world grapples with post-Covid price gouging, it seems like a good time to revisit our understanding of inflation. In this post, I’m going to test Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s ‘stagflation thesis’.
The idea is that ‘stagflation’ — economic stagnation combined with high inflation — is not some exogenous ‘market shock’. According to Nitzan and Bichler, stagflation is a business strategy — one of two main routes to profit.
The first route to profit is for businesses to hold prices steady while they try to sell more stuff. The second route is to jack up prices. Since this latter option requires restricting the flow of resources (stuff that flows freely cannot be dear), Nitzan and Bichler reason that when inflation rears its head, it ought to come with economic stagnation. In other words, stagflation is the norm.
If this stagflation thesis is correct, then inflation ought to correlate negatively with economic growth. Looking at the United States, Nitzan and Bichler find evidence that it does. Here, I broaden their stagflation research by looking at all countries in the World Bank’s global development database.
I find that both within and across countries, economic growth (measured in terms of energy use) tends to decline as inflation increases. So Nitzan and Bichler appear to be onto something. Over the last half century, stagflation is the general rule
Inflation as Redistribution. Creditors, Workers, Policymakers
Full text linkThis paper is part of a dialogue with Blair Fix on how inflation redistributes income between creditors and workers and the way in which monetary policy affects this process. In his 2023 paper, ‘Inflation! The Battle Between Creditors and Workers’, Fix shows, first, that the impact of U.S. inflation on creditor-worker distribution has been historically contingent (favouring workers during some periods and creditors in others); and second, that since the 1970s, Fed policy to combat inflation with higher interest rates boosted the yield of creditors relative to the wage rate of workers. Our own research suggests that these conclusions might be too general. We point out that creditors are not a monolithic class and that different types of creditors are affected differently, and often inversely, by the rate of interest. We illustrate that, contrary to bank depositors, bondholders tend to lose from inflation. And we show that monetary policy, at least in the United States, appears to follow rather than determine market yields. More generally, since most capitalists nowadays are lenders as well as borrowers, and given that ‘dominant capital’ profits from the full spectrum of investment instruments, we wonder if ‘creditors’ is still a useful category for analysing redistribution in general and inflationary redistribution in particular
Unemployment and the Maturity of Capitalism
Full text linkIn my last post, I discussed the underwhelming relation between interest rates and unemployment. In this post, I’ll look at a better way to connect unemployment to interest income.
It turns out that if you take US net interest and divide it by corporate profit, you get a ratio that closely tracks unemployment. It’s a measure that Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler call the ‘maturity of capitalism’.
If this language sounds odd, that’s because Nitzan and Bichler see capitalism differently than your average economists. So before we get to the data, let’s review some of their thinking
All You Need to Know About Climate Change
Full text linkWhat if I told you that they knew everything? And that they have known it for a very long time? On January 13 of this year, 2023, in the journal Science, perhaps the most important article to date on climate change was published. In political, social, and ethical terms, this article represents the equivalent of a nuclear bomb, despite the fact that (as is sadly obvious to expect) no one in mainstream news channels (and very few in academia) has mentioned it
제국주의와 금융주의 : 어느 결합체에 관한 이야기(비클러 & 닛잔 2012) (Imperialism and Financialism: A Story of a Nexus)
Full text link지난 세기 동안 제국주의와 금융주의의 결합은 마르크스주의 이론과 실천에서 중심축이었다. 수많은 마르크스주의자가 이 결합이 전 세계를 병폐에 빠뜨린 원인이라 생각했다. 하지만 시간이 지남에 따라 그들이 이 결합에 부과한 역사적 역할은 극적으로 변했다. 핵심적으로 변화한 것은 잉여와 유동성 흐름의 성격과 방향이었다. 20세기로 접어들면서 제국주의와 금융주의의 결합체가 명확해졌다. 그 결합체의 첫 번째 구현 형태는 금융 자본이 ‘초과’ 잉여를 수출할 수 있는 식민지를 얻기 위해 제국주의자들이 벌인 쟁탈전을 설명했다. 다음 두 번째 버전에선 중심부의 잉여가 국내로 흡수되고 군사 지출과 금융 중개라는 ‘블랙홀’로 빨려 들어가는 독점 자본주의의 신제국주의적 세계를 상정했다. 세 번째 스크립트는 종속적인 주변부에서 금융 중심부로 잉여가 유입되는 세계체계를 가정했다. 그리고 가장 최근 판본은 미국이라는 중심부의 공동화를 설명한다. 즉, 중심부인 미국은 이미 자체 생산 연료의 상당 부분을 태워버렸고 이제는 세계체계의 외부 유동성을 사용하고자 나머지 세계를 ‘금융화’하는 ‘적색 거성’이다. 본 논문은 마치 카멜레온과 같은 이러한 변형의 윤곽을 보여준다. 그리고 그 결합체에서 놓친 게 무엇인지 따져본 뒤, 이를 유지할 가치가 있는지 묻는다.
Over the past century, the nexus of imperialism and financialism has become a major axis of Marxist theory and praxis. Many Marxists consider this nexus to be a prime cause of our worldly ills, but the historical role they ascribe to it has changed dramatically over time. The key change concerns the nature and direction of surplus and liquidity flows. The first incarnation of the nexus, articulated at the turn of the twentieth century, explained the imperialist scramble for colonies to which finance capital could export its excessive surplus. The next version posited a neo-imperial world of monopoly capitalism where the core's surplus is absorbed domestically, sucked into a black hole of military spending and financial intermediation. The third script postulated a World System where surplus is imported from the dependent periphery into the financial core. And the most recent edition explains the hollowing out of the U.S. core, a red giant that has already burned much of its own productive fuel and is now trying to financialize the rest of the world in order to use the system's external liquidity. The paper outlines this chameleon-like transformation, assesses what is left of the nexus and asks whether it is worth keeping
Blood and Oil in the Orient: A 2023 Update
Full text linkThe 2023 war between Hamas and Israel elicits many different explanations. As with previous regional hostilities, here too, the pundits and commentators have numerous overlapping processes to draw on – from the struggle between the Zionist and Palestinian national movements, to the deep hostility between the Rabbinate and Islamic churches, to the many conflicts between Israel and Arab/Muslim states, the contentions between the declining superpowers (United States and Russia) and their rising contenders (like China, Iran, Turkey), the rift between western and eastern cultures, and so on.
The experts also highlight the growing importance of local militias – from Jewish settler organizations, to ISIS, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthi movement, the Wagner Group and Kadyrovites Chechens – groups that operate under different political, religious and criminal guises, with varying financing and support from local, governmental and international sources to proxy and/or challenge different states.
Our article does not deal with these specificities. Instead of focusing on the particular and unique, we concentrate on the general and universal. Concretely, we argue that the current war between Hamas and Israel shares an important common denominator with prior clashes in the region – namely, that it constitutes an energy conflict and that it correlates with the differential nature of capital accumulation. We coined these two terms in the late 1980s and have studied their underpinnings and implications for the Middle East and beyond ever since. Our purpose in this paper is to highlight our theoretical arguments, update some of our key empirical evidence and show how both the theory and findings apply to the current Hamas-Israel war
מחירי הנפט, הקפיטליזם ו-7 באוקטובר (Oil Prices, Capitalism and October 7th)
Full text linkהאנליסטים שוב חוזים את עליית מחירי הנפט בעקבות מחסור? הם טועים ומטעים, כך טוענים ניצן וביכלר, ומסבירים מדוע מלחמת ישראל-חמאס משמחת את קואליציות הנפט-נשק • דם ונפט במזרח התיכון, סיבוב רווחים נוס
Re-Considering the Origins of the Climate Emergency: War, Finance, and the State
Full text linkOne of the most important and recurring debates in the field of International Political Economy and international affairs are the links between capitalism, fossil fuel energy and climate change. In these debates, the origins of our current climate emergency are rooted in how Britain became the first country to become reliant on mass production and consumption coal (fossil fuels) for economic growth, industrialization, as well as social reproduction. Britain becoming a coal-fire capitalist-imperial global empire deeply influenced and structured the current world order and global political economy which is still locked-into a vicious cycle of path dependency whereby balance of power, production and social reproduction is dependent on energy, predominately fossil fuels
Capitalism, Money and Inequality in the World
No full textThere is little doubt that, in the last hundred years or so, progress has been made in lifting more people out of extreme poverty. Yet, considerable economic inequalities both within and between nations persists and, as recent work has shown, if the rate of return on capital surpasses the rate of growth, inherited wealth will grow faster than earned wealth. Together, these inequalities contribute to radically different life chances for people around the world. For some it means multiple mansions, private jets, hundred-foot yachts and access to life-saving technologies, while for a substantial portion of humanity it means a daily struggle just to survive or maintain a livelihood. However, why this radical inequality exists is not altogether clear and is much debated in the academic literature and popular press. Moreover, some view economic inequality as natural and beneficial since it is reasoned that the less well-off will want to emulate the wealthy and thus work harder to achieve their goals. However, is gross inequality rooted in human nature or is it the result of certain ways of organizing society and certain policy choices regarding the human economy?
While it cannot possibly canvass the enormous literature on capitalism, money and inequality, this chapter will suggest that it is the latter by considering the important relationship between capitalism and money to explain the persistence of economic inequality in our world. The chapter also asks what can be done to lessen global economic inequalities once we gain a deeper appreciation of the relationship between capitalism, money and inequality. I will argue that it is too often forgotten that, while economic growth over the last three centuries has lifted many people out of extreme poverty, that capitalism is primarily an economic, monetary and accounting system whose very aim is to generate income and wealth inequality, not level the economic playing field.
To explore this argument and examine potential solutions to lessening financial inequality, this chapter is divided into three main sections. In the first section, the chapter provides an explanation for the historical rise of capitalism, what constitutes capitalism as a specific politico–economic system and how economically unequal our world is today. In the second part of this chapter, a theoretical analysis of how we might consider the relationship between capitalism, money and inequality is developed. In the final section, the chapter explores what is to be done about economic inequality from both mainstream and radical perspectives and argues that there are indeed some plausible public policy initiatives that would work towards achieving objective 10 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)