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Global Capital: Political Economy of Capitalist Power (YorkU, GS/POLS 6285 3.0, Graduate, Fall Term, 2013-14)
No full textWhat is capital?
Despite centuries of debate, there is no clear answer to this question – and for a good reason. Capital is a polemic term. The way we define it attests our theoretical biases, ideological disposition, view of politics, class consciousness, social position, and more.
Is capital the same as machines, or is it merely a financial asset? Is it a material article or a social process? Is it a static substance or a dynamic entity? The form of capital, its existence as monetary wealth, is hardly in doubt. The problem is with the content, the stuff that makes capital grow – and on this issue there is no agreement whatsoever. For example, does capital accumulate because it is productive, or due to the exploitation of workers? Does capital expand from within capitalism, or does it need non-capitalist institutions like the state and other ‘external’ forces? Is accumulation synonymous with economic growth, or can capital expand by damaging production and undermining efficiency? What exactly is being accumulated? Does the value of capital represent utility, abstract labour – or perhaps something totally different, such as power or force? What units should we use to measure its accumulation?
Surprisingly, these questions remain unanswered; in fact, with the victory of liberalism, most of them are no longer being asked. But the silence cannot last for long. As crisis and social strife intensify, the questions are bound to resurface. The accumulation of capital is the central process of capitalism, and unless we can clarify what that process means, we’ll remain unable to understand our world, let alone to change it.
The seminar has two related goals: substantive and pedagogical. The substantive purpose is to tackle the question of capital head on. The course explores a spectrum of liberal and Marxist theories, ideologies and dogmas – as well as a radical alternative to these views. The argument is developed theoretically, historically and empirically. The first part of the seminar provides a critical overview of political economy, examining its historical emergence, triumph and eventual demise. The second part deals with the two ‘materialistic’ schools of capital – the liberal theory of utility and the Marxist theory of labour time – dissecting their structure, strengths and limitations. The third part brings power back in: it analyses the relation between accumulation and sabotage, studies the institutions of the corporation and the state and introduces a new framework – the capitalist mode of power. The final part offers an alternative approach – the theory of capital as power – and illustrates how this approach can shed light on conflict-ridden processes such as corporate merger, stagflation, imperialism and Middle East wars.
Pedagogically, the seminar seeks to prepare students toward conducting their own independent re-search. Students are introduced to various electronic data sources, instructed in different methods of analysis and tutored in developing their empirical research skills. As the seminar progresses, these skills are used both to assess various theories and to develop the students’ own theoretical/empirical research projects
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
Review of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler's "Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder"
No full textFROM THE REVIEW: "Any economist will benefit from following their journey into the labyrinth of economic doctrine. The critical economist may be disappointed, however, to find that N&B have in effect dynamited the exit. . . .
Dominant Capital and the Transformation of Korean Capitalism: From Cold War to Globalization
No full textAfter the 1997 financial crisis, the neo-liberal restructuring of the Korean political economy accelerated dramatically. While there is a general consensus that the reform has had negative consequences for Korean society, heated debates continue over the culprits of the 1997 crisis and the changes that followed in its wake. Major opinions have largely coalesced into two opposing camps: one, finding the cause in cronyism and the anachronistic management of the Korean chaebols, advocates market-centred economic reforms; the other, attributing the cause to the ‘unproductive’ nature of foreign financial capital, suggests that the restoration of statist development model, in which the economy is led by the state-chaebol nexus, is a better way for Korean society.
The main reason for the asymmetry between the ‘progressive’ critiques and ‘conservative’ solutions of these two theoretical camps lies in their misunderstanding of the way in which power evolves in capitalist society. Their theories, which are premised on the dichotomy between ‘politics’ and ‘economics,’ are blind to the mutual transformation of capital and the state—to the historical changes in the nature of these institutions through the commodification of power.
The central assumption of this dissertation is that it is necessary to understand the mutual transformation of capital and the state and the evolution of the capitalist ruling class in order to grasp the nature of the post-1997 social restructuring. For this purpose, it adopts Nitzan and Bichler’s perspective of capital as power. From this perspective, situating our understanding of the 1997 crisis and the post-crisis restructuring in the context of the half-century-long evolution of capitalist power in Korea and the transformation of the regimes of differential capital accumulation, this dissertation makes three interrelated arguments.
It argues, first, that the post-1997 restructuring firmly entrenched capitalization as the creorder of Korean society. Second, it argues that globalization has incorporated Korea’s dominant capital into the global structure of absentee owners through the trans-nationalization of ownership and accumulation. Lastly, it argues that the reduction of green-field investment, relative to the pre-1997 period, is to be explained by the shift of the regime of differential accumulation
Six Integrated Panels on "Capital as Power": Timetable and Program
No full textTimetable and abstracts of an integrated panel series on the subject of "Capital as Power", to be held at the Rethinking Marxism Conference, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, September 19-22. The series comprises 10 presentations and a roundtable, grouped into six panels
The Buy-to-Build Indicator: New Estimates for Britain and the United States and a 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 end of the 19th century. The second part offers commentary by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan
Call for papers on the subject of "Capital as Power"
No full textA call for papers for the "Capital as Power" section of the Eighth Rethinking Marxism Conference, UMASS Amherst, September 19-22, 2013.
Internal deadline for abstract submission: May 15, 201
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
What Happened to the Bondholding Class? Public Debt, Power and the Top One Per Cent (Preprint)
No full textIn 1887 Henry Carter Adams produced a study demonstrating that the ownership of government bonds was heavily concentrated in the hands of a 'bondholding class' that lent to and, in Adams's view, controlled the government like dominant shareholders control a corporation. The interests of this bondholding class clashed with the interests of the masses, whose burdensome taxes financed the interest payments on government bonds. Since the late nineteenth century there has been plenty of debate about the ownership of the public debt. But the empirical evidence offered to support the various arguments has been scant. As a result, political economists have few answers to questions first raised by Adams over a century ago: how has the pattern of public debt ownership changed? Can we still speak of a powerful 'bondholding class'? Does public debt redistribute income from taxpayers to public creditors? This article develops a new framework to address these questions. Anchored within a 'capital as power' approach, the research indicates a staggering pattern of concentration in the ownership of US public debt in the hands of the top one per cent of US households over the past three decades. Accordingly, the bondholding class is still alive and well in contemporary US capitalism