The Bichler and Nitzan Archives
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Aki and Friends
No full textAki, a man enamoured with life and enchanted by animals – including humans of different varieties – pays a visit to his friend, the veterinarian. The vet tells him of two seniors who suffer from depression, and Aki is quick to raise their spirits and warm up their aching bodies. He hangs the boa constrictor on his neck and places the hairy tarantula on his head. There is no need to worry, he assures us. After all, why would two elderly creatures hurt an empathetic being so eager to help them?
This view was typical of Aki. That is how he viewed the world, its history and conflicts – as well as the solutions for those conflicts.
'Just think about it logically', he says. 'Why would a Palestinian suddenly turn into a "terrorist"? What reason does he have to oppose "peace"? Why should he be eager to fight the "only democracy in the Middle East"? Is it his culture, religion or race? Is it "in his nature", as the Zionist propaganda machine reiterates?'
Of course not, he answers.
For more than a century, the Palestinians have confronted a Zionist movement whose colonial policies have gradually deprived them of their life, land and autonomy. As often happens with occupiers, the Israelis have preferred to blame their victim. Their fancy academic theories, spiced up with ideologies of culture, religion and race, prove, at least to themselves, that there can be no 'political solution'. The 'Arabs', they say, cannot be trusted. Like the boa constrictor and tarantula, it is 'their nature' to bite and strangle.
Nowadays, these explanations have no traction. Most sensible observers around the world have come to accept Aki’s logic and reject the official Israeli line as self-serving, if not ludicrous. But that wasn’t always the case.
Half a century ago, when Aki and his friends started their hazardous journey to explore the underlying logic of the conflict, they were considered illogical, if not weird, and branded as 'traitors' (although it was never clear exactly what or who they had 'betrayed')
Food Price Inflation as Redistribution: Towards a New Analysis of Corporate Power in the World Food System (Preprint)
No full textThis paper outlines the contours of a new research agenda for the analysis of food price crises. By weaving together a detailed quantitative examination of changes in corporate profit shares with a qualitative appraisal of the restructuring in business control over the organisation of society and nature, the paper points to the rapid ascendance of a new power configuration in the global political economy of food: the Agro-Trader nexus. The agribusiness and grain trader firms that belong to the Agro-Trader nexus have not been mere 'price takers', instead they have actively contributed to the inflationary restructuring of the world food system by championing and facilitating the rapid expansion of the first-generation biofuels sector. As a key driver of agricultural commodity price rises, the biofuels boom has raised the Agro-Trader nexus’s differential profits and it has at the same time deepened global hunger. These findings suggest that food price inflation is a mechanism of redistribution
The Capitalist Mode of Power: Critical Engagements with the Power Theory of Value
No full textThis edited volume offers the first critical engagement with one of the most provocative and controversial theories in political economy: the thesis that capital can be theorized as power and that capital is finance and only finance. The book also includes a detailed introduction to this novel thesis first put forward by Nitzan and Bichler in their Capital as Power.
Although endorsing the capital as power argument to varying extents, contributors to this volume agree that a new understanding of capital that radically departs from Marxist and Neoclassical theories cannot be ignored. Offering the first application and appraisal of Nitzan and Bichler’s theory, chapters examine the thesis in the context of energy and global capitalization, US Investment Banks, trade and investment agreements between Canada, the US and Mexico, and multinational corporations in Apartheid South Africa. Balancing theory, methodology and empirical analysis throughout, this book is accessible to new readers, whilst contextualising and advancing the original theoretical debate
The Power of Love: Diamonds and the Accumulation of De Beers -- Video and Chartbook
No full textThrough the early-20th century, the power of the De Beers’ diamond cartel was dwindling. Its resurrection came with WWII. The company’s reversal of fortune required the construction and maintenance of relations with romantic couples, industrial diamond users, multiple government agencies and diamonds themselves. This presentation will examine De Beers’ accumulation and the translation of these qualitative relationships into capital.
This presentation is the fourth in a four-part Speaker Series on the Capitalist Mode of Power. The series is organized by capitalaspower.com and sponsored by the York Department of Political Science and the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought
Treasury Ownership Marks Wealth Divide
No full textFROM THE ARTICLE: "Contrary to the usual assumption that government debt is widely held, Mr Hager's data suggests ownership has become far more concentrated recently, echoing a wider concentration of wealth in the US. . . . [E]ven if you disagree with Mr Hager’s leftwing political bent, the data certainly casts a new light on the political dynamic in the current fiscal rows. To the wealthy elites in the US who hold government bonds, it seems self-evident that the government needs to preserve the sanctity and value of Treasuries; this group has a strong incentive to ensure this happens via fiscal reform (particularly if this entails budget cuts, rather than higher taxes.) But what is rarely debated is that millions of poor Americans have far less (or no) skin in the Treasuries game. Little wonder, then, that the fiscal debate is so polarised, and unlikely to become any less so any time soon.
America's Real 'Debt Dilemma'
No full textIn the wake of the current crisis there has been an explosive rise in the level of the US public debt. These massive levels of public indebtedness are expected to keep growing unless there are drastic changes to existing budgetary policies. According to a recent series in the Financial Times, the US now faces a ‘debt dilemma’ over whether the country should bring its fiscal house in order through tax hikes on the rich or cuts to entitlement programs. This apparent dilemma has sparked a debate over which groups should bear the burden of debt repayment and fiscal adjustment. However, one crucial question remains unasked: whose powerful interests are served by the public debt? Mapping the share of federal bonds holdings of and interest to the top 1%, my research uncovers a staggering trend towards concentration over the past three decades and shows that federal income taxes and transfer payments have done little to offset this regressive distribution. Increases to the public debt without progressive redistributive policies are likely to aggravate an already explosive situation characterized by inequality, while decreases to the privately held portion of the public debt are likely to encounter resistance from the top 1%. This is America’s real debt dilemma
Can Pensions Afford Recovery?
No full textAre pension funds held hostage to the conflictual power logic of capitalism and therefore contributing to increasing inequality instead of reducing it? An exchange with Jonathan Nitzan
Capitalism as a Mode of Power: Piotr Dutkiewicz talks with Shimshon Bichler (Капитализм как режим власти: Пётр Дуткевич беседует с Шимшоном Бихлером)
No full textПоскольку мировой кризис продолжается, и правящий класс балансирует на грани паники, существует реальная вероятность массового сдвига вправо, как в 1930-е годы. Поворот будет трудно предотвратить, не говоря уже о том, чтобы противодействовать ему или обратить вспять при отсутствии новой теоретической альтернативы
The False Dichotomy of South Korean Economic Theories: An Interview with Hyeng-Joon Park (한국 경제이론의 잘못된 이분법: 박형준 연국원과의 인터뷰)
No full text국가의 친시장적 성격 강화 국내 지배자본은 초국적화 김상조•장하준식 해법 비
Public Debt, Ownership and Power: The Political Economy of Distribution and Redistribution
No full textThis dissertation offers the first comprehensive historical examination of the political economy of US public debt ownership. Specifically, the study addresses the following questions: Who owns the US public debt? Is the distribution of federal government bonds concentrated in the hands of a specific group or is it widely held? And what if the identities of those who receive interest payments on government bonds are distinct from those who pay the taxes that finance the interest payments on the public debt? Does this mean that the public debt redistributes income from taxpayers to public creditors? Who ultimately bears the burden of financing the public debt?
Despite centuries of debate, political economists have failed to come to any consensus on even the most basic facts concerning ownership of the US public debt and its potential redistributive effects. Some claim that the public debt is heavily concentrated and that interest payments on government bonds redistribute income regressively from poor to rich. Others insist that the public debt has become very widely held and instead redistributes income progressively. The lack of consensus, I argue, boils down to both the empirical and theoretical problems that plague existing studies.
Empirically, only a handful of studies have attempted to map the ownership pattern of US federal government bonds, and even fewer have made efforts to measure the redistributive effects associated with a given ownership pattern. And to make matters worse, those few studies that do attempt to map the pattern of US public debt ownership make little effort to theorize in any systematic way the distributive and redistributive dimensions of the public debt.
Anchored within a ‘capital as power’ theoretical framework, my purpose in this is to shed some much-needed light on the dynamics of distribution and redistribution that lie at the heart of the public debt. I show for the household and corporate sectors how over the past three decades, and especially in the context of the current crisis, the ownership of federal bonds and federal interest has become rapidly concentrated in the hands of dominant owners, the top 1% of households and the 2,500 largest corporations. Over the same period the federal income tax system has done little to progressively redistribute the federal interest income received by dominant owners. In this way, this dissertation argues that, since the early 1980s, the public debt has come to reinforce and augment the power of those at the very top of the hierarchy of social power.
[This thesis was nominated for the York University Dissertation Prize.