The Bichler and Nitzan Archives
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Palan on Piketty (Reprint)
No full textThe authors of 'Capital as Power' comment on Ronen Palan’s article 'Capitalising the Future', finding much to disagree with regarding his interpretation of Thomas Picketty's theory that when the return on capital far exceeds the rate of growth of the economy it leads to the concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands
The Rise and Fall of Debate in Economics
No full textOnce upon a time, economists regularly used to publicly criticise each other’s work in academic journals. But not any more. New data illustrate the extent to which economists have stopped discussing each other’s work
Energy Conflicts and Differential Profits: An Update (Reprint)
No full textDuring the late 1980s and early 1990s, we identified a new phenomenon that we called ‘energy conflicts’ and showed that these conflicts were intimately linked to the differential profitability of the leading oil companies. This link remains as true today as it was in the early 1970s. Like earlier energy conflicts, the ‘Arab Spring’, the outsourced wars that followed and the third Gulf War against ISIS continue to march to the drum beat of differential profits
Nonlinearities of the Sabotage-Redistribution Process
No full textThe relationship between sabotage and redistribution is inherently nonlinear. This research note illustrates aspects of this nolinearity in the case of the United States
Capital as Power: Essay Prize
No full textThe Review of Capital as Power (RECASP) announces an annual essay prize of $1,000 for the best paper on the subject of capital as power. Submitted articles should not have been published in a refereed journal or book before. The particular topic is open. The paper can be theoretical, historical or empirical, and it may support or critique the capital as power framework. Winning essays will be published (with revisions, if necessary) in the Review of Capital as Power.
Deadline: December 31 of the competition yea
Energy Conflicts and Differential Profits: An Update (Reprint)
No full textDuring the late 1980s and early 1990s, we identified a new phenomenon that we called ‘energy conflicts’ and showed that these conflicts were intimately linked to the differential profitability of the leading oil companies. This link remains as true today as it was in the early 1970s. Like earlier energy conflicts, the ‘Arab Spring’, the outsourced wars that followed and the third Gulf War against ISIS continue to march to the drum beat of differential profits
The Ontology of Finance: Price, Power, and the Arkhéderivative
No full textFROM THE EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: In what promises to be a significant contribution to political economy, Malik seeks to combine the philosophical understanding of the nature and logic of the derivatives market with an analysis of the entirely novel, structurally-specific mode of capitalist power it expresses. This ambitious ‘ontology of finance’ supplements Ayache’s understanding of the fundamental logic of derivatives with Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s account of capital as power. Such a ‘power theory of finance’ answers both to Ayache’s claims as to the singular importance of derivatives for an understanding of pricing as such, and to Land’s claim that risk-bearing vehicles and agencies tend to corrode the inherited social forms from which they historically emerge. According to Malik, though, this inquiry requires the adjunction of Nitzan and Bichler’s understanding of capital qua absentee ownership, with its primary ordering mechanism of differential accumulation. Equally, however, it necessitates a supplement to Nitzan and Bichler’s own account: the latter already agree that ownership of property, stocks, bonds, and derivatives all pertain ultimately to the same, immanent market, with all of them being ordered by means of the universal mechanism of pricing (namely, through the discounting of anticipated future earnings). They also countenance the refusal to subordinate the analysis of capitalism to any dependency upon conditions exogenous to finance (diverging from Marxism in insisting that finance is not an excrescence of ‘real production’ or a ‘parasitical, supplementary or “fictitious” mode of capital’). However their analysis must be extended to take account of the specific operations of derivatives, in order that it might encompass the new modalities through which their complex operations multiply and transform the power axiom of differential accumulation, and, crucially, the transformations they bring about in the inherent dimension of sabotage that Nitzan and Bichler see as integral to capital-power
The Buy-to-Build Indicator: New Estimates and Comment
No full textThe first part of the exchange is a short article by Joe Francis. The article provides new long-term estimates and an assessment of the buy-to-build indicator for the United States and Britain, going back to the beginning of the 20th century. The second part offers commentary by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan
Political Economy of Capital Accumulation (YorkU, LAPS/POLS 4292 6.0, Undergraduate, Fall Term, 2013-14)
No full textCapital is the central power institution of capitalism: it is the main force underlying the relentless transformation of power relations in capitalist societies. The course explores the accumulation of capital from three interrelated perspectives: conceptual, historical and empirical. At the conceptual level, the course examines the evolution of different orthodox and critical theories of value and how these theories serve to explain and justify contending notions of accumulation. At the historical level, it traces the development of capital from its humble pre-capitalist origins to its present world dominance. At the empirical level, it studies and juxtaposes the qualitative and quantitative aspects of capital accumulation and study what they mean for the contemporary political economy. In parallel to these explorations, the course introduces students to the art and science of empirical research. By the end of the course, students are expected to be able to develop and integrate theoretical arguments with their own empirical work
Capitalism as a Mode of Power: Piotr Dutkiewicz in Conversation with Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan
No full textPREAMBLE BY PIOTR DUTKIEWICZ: In a unique two-pronged dovetailing discussion, frequent collaborators and coauthors Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler discuss the nature of contemporary capitalism. Their central argument is that the dominant approaches to studying the market – liberalism and Marxism – are as flawed as the market itself. Offering a historically rich and analytically incisive critique of the recent history of capitalism and crisis, they suggest that instead of studying the relations of capital to power we must conceptualize capital as power if we are to understand the dynamics of the market system. This approach allows us to examine the seemingly paradoxical workings of the capitalist mechanism, whereby profit and capitalization are divorced from productivity and machines in the so-called real economy. Indeed Nitzan and Bichler paint a picture of a strained system whose component parts exist in an antagonistic relationship. In their opinion, the current crisis is a systemic one afflicting a fatally flawed system. However, it is not one that seems to be giving birth to a unified opposition movement or to a new mode of thinking. The two political economists call for nothing short of a new mode of imagining the market, our political system, and our very world