The Bichler and Nitzan Archives
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How Capitalists Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crisis
No full textDo capitalists really want a recovery? Can they afford it?
On the face of it, the question sounds silly: of course capitalists want a recovery; how else can they prosper? According to the textbooks, both mainstream and heterodox, capital accumulation and economic growth are two sides of the same process. Accumulation generates growth and growth fuels accumulation, so it seems bootless to ask whether capitalists want growth. Growth is their lifeline, and the more of it, the better it is.
Or is it?
In the United States, rising unemployment – which hammers the well-being of workers, unincorporated businesses and the unemployed – serves not to undermine but to boost the overall income share of capitalists. And as employment growth decelerates, the income share of the Top 1% – which includes the capitalists as well as their protective power belt – soars. Under these circumstances, what reason do capitalists have to ‘get the economy going’? Why worry about rising unemployment and zero job growth when these very processes serve to boost their income-share-read-power
Capitalism as a Mode of Power: Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan interviewed by Piotr Dutkiewicz
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.
[A shorter version of this interview is forthcoming in "22 Ideas to Fix the World: Conversations with the World’s Foremost Thinkers," edited by Piotr Dutkiewicz and Richard Sakwa (New York: New York University Press, WPF and the Social Science Research Council, 2013).
Radio Interview with Sandy Brian Hager on America's Real 'Debt Dilemma'
No full textWho owns the U.S. government debt and why does it matter? Sandy Brian Hager talks about the concentration of debt ownership, regressive transfer payments, and the class logic behind the ‘fix-the-debt’ campaign. Original research that bites.
Duration: 26 minutes
Can Capitalists Afford Recovery? Economic Policy When Capital is Power -- Video and Paper
No full textTheorists and policymakers from all directions and persuasions remain obsessed with the prospect of recovery. For mainstream economists, the key question is how to bring about such a recovery. For Marxist and heterodox critics, the main issue is whether sustained growth is possible to start with. But there is a prior question that neither seems to ask: can capitalists afford recovery in the first place?
This presentation is the first in a four-part Speaker Series on the Capitalist Mode of Power, which is organized by capitalaspower.com and sponsored by the York Department of Political Science and the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought.
Video duration: 2:03 Hour
I’ve Seen this Movie a Thousand Times: Risk and the Hollywood Film Business -- Video and Chartbook
No full textWhy does Hollywood lack originality? Why is Hollywood cinema so repetitive? This presentation will theoretically and empirically explain why Hollywood's so-called risk-aversion is strategic. The decline in risk is a sign of how the major distributors have been able to exercise greater and greater control over the social relations of cinema.
This presentation is the third 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.
Video duration: 1:38 hour
30 Years to the AIC. A Speech at Beit Sahur
Get PDFThe following is the text of a presentation delivered by Dr. Shimshon Bichler at the 30-year celebration of the Alternative Information Center (AIC), on October 5, 2013. Dr. Bichler is a political economist and veteran member of the AIC Board of Directors
The False Dichotomy of South Korean Economic Theories: An Interview with Hyeng-Joon Park
No full textIn his new book, "Chaebol: The Transnational Capital That Rules Korea," Hyung-Joon Park argues that the state has not receded, but has become more of an agent for capital – an interview with Seon-hee Ahn
Chaebol: the Transnational Capital that Rules Korea (재벌, 한국을 지배하는 초국적 자본)
No full text이 책의 목적은 지금까지 주로 국가 대 시장, 국내산업자본 대 외국금융자본이라는 이분법적 틀에서 다루어져 왔던 한국사회의 포스트-1997 본성 논쟁에 새로운 시각을 제시하는 것이다. 이를 위해, 이 책은 조나단 닛잔과 심손 비클러가 발전시킨 권력자본론을 채택했다. 권력자본론의 시각에서, 1997년 위기와 포스트-1997 구조조정을 지난 반세기 동안 진행되어온 한국자본주의 권력의 진화라는 맥락 속에 위치시키고, 차등적 자본축적체제의 전환과정으로 설명한다. 이를 바탕으로, 이 책에서는 다음의 상호 연관된 세 가지 주요 주장을 펼치고 있다. 첫째, 포스트-1997 개혁과정은 자본화를 한국사회의 가장 중심적 사회질서 원리로 확립시켰다. 둘째, 세계화의 본성은 소유권과 축적의 초국적화를 통해 한국의 지배자본을 글로벌 부재소유주 구조 속으로 편입시켰다. 마지막으로, 1997년 위기 이전에 비해 상대적으로 투자가 준 현상은 차등적 축적체제의 전환으로 설명되어야 한다.
The purpose of this book is transcend the current debates on the post-1997 restructuring of Korean society, debates that are commonly framed within the dichotomies of state versus market and of domestic industrial capital versus foreign financial capital. Instead of these dichotomies, the book adopts the perspective of capital as power, the political economic approach elaborated by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler. Using this new perspective, the analysis attempts to situate our understanding of the 1997 crisis and the restructuring that followed in the context of the Korea's half-century evolution of capitalist power and its transformative regimes of differential capital accumulation. The book advanced three interrelated arguments. First, that the post-1997 restructuring firmly entrenched capitalization as the creorder of Korean society. Second, that globalization has incorporated Korea's dominant capital into the global structure of absentee owners through the transnationalization of ownership and accumulation. And, third, that the reduction of green-field investment relative to the pre-1997 period is part of the country's changing regime of differential accumulation
Human Activity, Energy & Money in the United States: Connecting the Biophysical Economy with its Pecuniary Image
Get PDFThere is no consensus, in political economy, about the exact relationship between the biophysical and the pecuniary spheres. This paper enters into the debate by asking the following question: how can a biophysical approach to political economy be used to gain insight into the complex interrelationship between the biophysical sphere of economic activity and its monetary image? After reviewing and critiquing land, labour, utlitarian, and energy theories of value, this paper abandons the search for a direct, causal connection (between the biophysical and the pecuniary) in favor of an impredicative, co-evolutionary approach. Using a synthesis of the work of Giampietro & Mayumi and Nitzan & Bichler, an empirical investigation is conducted that looks for linkages between monetary indicators, the inter-sectoral movement of human activity, and increases in energy consumption. Although the findings are complex, dynamic linkages between the biophysical and pecuniary spheres are consistently found
The Rise of a Confident Hollywood: Risk and the Capitalization of Cinema
No full textThis paper investigates the historical development of risk in the Hollywood film business. Using opening theatres as a proxy for future expectations, the paper demonstrates how, from 1981 to 2011, Hollywood has improved its ability to predict the financial rankings of its films. More specifically, the Hollywood film business has become better at predicting which films will earn a greater-than average share of all US box-office gross revenues through a wide release strategy. This greater predictability suggests that confidence in film earnings projections has increased