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Can Capitalists Afford Recovery? Three Views on Economic Policy in Times of Crisis (Reprint)
No full textEconomic, financial and social commentators from all directions and of various persuasions are obsessed with the prospect of recovery. The world remains mired in a deep, prolonged crisis, and the key question seems to be how to get out of it. The purpose of our paper is to ask a very different question that few if any seem concerned with: can capitalists afford recovery in the first place? The article contextualizes and examines this question from the viewpoint of economic policy. The analysis is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the mainstream macroeconomic perspective. This approach claims to have already solved all the theoretical riddles, so the main emphasis here is on the practical question of how to engineer a recovery. The second part deals with the Marxist view. Marxists stress the inherent contradictions of accumulation, so the question for them is the very possibility of sustained growth. The third and final part takes the view of capital as power. Capitalized power hinges not on growth, but on strategic sabotage. So from this viewpoint, the key question is not how capitalists can achieve and sustain a recovery, but whether they can afford it to start with
Call for Papers: "Capital as Power: Broadening the Vista"
No full textThe 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 seeks to broaden the vista. We are looking for papers that extend and deepen CasP research, compare CasP with other approaches and critique CasP’s methods and findings. Articles could be general or specific, theoretical or empirical, analytical or historical.
The conference is open to everyone, with submissions vetted entirely on merit. We accept applications from established and new researchers, in and outside academia. However, we are particularly interested in submissions from young researchers of all ages, including MA and PhD students, private and public employees and free spirits. If you have an interest in the subject and something important – or potentially important – to say, please apply.
Financial assistance: we may be able to assist presenters by partly covering the cost of travel and accommodation. This possibility is still tentative; it is conditional on ability to secure sufficient funding.
Deadline for abstract submissions: March 20, 2015
Notes de lecture sur le livre "Le capital comme pouvoir"
No full textCertaines des thèses du livre de Nitzan et Bichler se rapprochent de celles de Temps critiques et nous avons jugé bon d’aller y voir de plus près
El Capitalista Ilustrado
No full textEn los últimos años hemos estado escribiendo una serie de artículos sobre la crisis global (1). Estos artículos trataban de romper los límites convencionales del liberalismo y el marxismo y el examen de la crisis desde una nueva perspectiva teórica sobre el capital como fuente de poder.. Los capitalistas y las Corporaciones, decíamos, no están impulsados por una maximización de los beneficios, sino que tratan de distinguirse del promedio y aumentar el poder en base a esa diferencia. Según este enfoque, la redistribución de los ingresos y de los activos no es un efecto secundario de una economía social, sino el conflicto central que impulsa el moderno Capitalismo. Y la principal arma en esta lucha, afirmábamos, no es la inversión y el crecimiento, sino lo que el economista estadounidense Thorstein Veblen llamó sabotaje estratégico, es decir, las restricciones, limitaciones, riesgos y molestias que los capitalistas imponen al resto de las sociedad con el fin de mantener y aumentar su poder diferencial. . .
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
Wal-Mart's Power Trajectory: A Contribution to the Political Economy of the Firm
No full textThis article offers a power theory of value analysis of Wal‐Mart’s contested expansion in the retail business. More specifically, it 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 article contends that these problems are in part born out of resistance that Wal‐Mart is experiencing at multiple social scales. The case of Wal‐Mart may tell us about the wider limits of corporate power within contemporary capitalism; and the research methods outlined here may be of use to scholars seeking to conduct political‐economic research on the pecuniary trajectories of other major firms
The Capitalist Algorithm. Reflections on Robert Harris' 'The Fear Index' (Reprint)
Get PDFAlexander Hoffmann is a physicist-turned-financier, a refugee from the particle accelerator complex in CERN who now runs a $10-billion algorithmic hedge fund from nearby Geneva. The fund is managed by VIXAL, Hoffmann’s machine learning algorithm, and is incredibly successful. The company’s statistics boast a consistently huge Alpha – a measure indicating by how much the fund beats the average and exceeds the normal rate of return – and the world’s biggest oligarchs and financial institutions are salivating at the mere thought of being allowed to invest in it. Managing their money has made Hoffmann very rich. In just a few years, he has seen his net worth rise from nothing to over a billion dollars. He has acquired a huge mansion, complete with a beautiful wife and a library full of antique books. There is no limit to what he is set to achieve. But things are not exactly what they seem to be
No Way Out: Crime, Punishment and the Capitalization of Power
No full textThe United States is often hailed as the world's largest 'free market'. But this 'free market' is also the world's largest penal colony. It holds over seven million adults – roughly five per cent of the labour force – in jail, in prison, on parole and on probation. Is this an anomaly, or does the 'free market' require massive state punishment? Why did the correctional population start to rise in the 1980s, together with the onset of neoliberalism? How is this increase related to the upward redistribution of income and the capitalization of power? Can soaring incarceration sustain the unprecedented power of dominant capital, or is there a reversal in the offing? The paper examines these questions by juxtaposing the ‘Rusche thesis’ with the notion of capitalism as a mode of power. The empirical analysis suggests that the Rusche thesis holds under the normal circumstances of ‘business as usual’, but breaks down during periods of systemic crisis. During the systemic crises of the 1930s and the 2000s, unemployment increased sharply, but crime and the severity of punishment, instead of rising, dropped perceptibly
The Capitalist Algorithm. Reflections on Robert Harris' "The Fear Index"
No full textAlexander Hoffmann is a physicist-turned-financier, a refugee from the particle accelerator complex in CERN who now runs a $10-billion algorithmic hedge fund from nearby Geneva. The fund is managed by VIXAL, Hoffmann’s machine learning algorithm, and is incredibly successful. The company’s statistics boast a consistently huge Alpha – a measure indicating by how much the fund beats the average and exceeds the normal rate of return – and the world’s biggest oligarchs and financial institutions are salivating at the mere thought of being allowed to invest in it. Managing their money has made Hoffmann very rich. In just a few years, he has seen his net worth rise from nothing to over a billion dollars. He has acquired a huge mansion, complete with a beautiful wife and a library full of antique books. There is no limit to what he is set to achieve. But things are not exactly what they seem to be
Palan on Piketty
No full textIn late August, 2014, we received an invitation from the New Left Project to comment on Ronen Palan’s article ‘Capitalising the Future’. Palan’s piece examines Thomas Piketty’s book ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ (2014), and the editors felt it had strong affinities with our approach. The affinities are certainly there (albeit unmentioned). But they are largely superficial. Palan demonstrates little understanding of our framework, and we very much doubt he has comprehended Piketty’s. His article contains so many elementary errors and fallacies that it is unclear how it got published in the first place.
[The NLP piece has been revised to make the text less confrontational. For those interested, we also provide the original unedited version.