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Speaker Series on the Capitalist Mode of Power -- Programme and Videos
No full textOVERVIEW: Existing theories of capitalism, mainstream as well as heterodox, view capitalism as a mode of production and consumption. The purpose of this speaker series is to interrogate capitalism as a mode of power. The talks are organized by The Forum on Capital as Power (www.capitalaspower.com) and sponsored by the York Department of Political Science and the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought. There will be refreshments and all are welcome.
WHERE: York Lanes, Room 305, York University, Keele Campus
PRESENTATION SCHEDULE:
Jonathan Nitzan -- Can Capitalists Afford Recovery? Economic Policy When Capital Is Power (Tuesday, Oct 29, 2013, 2:30-4:30)
Jordan Brennan -- A Shrinking Universe: How Corporate Power Shapes Inequality (Tuesday, Nov 5, 2013, 2:30-4:30)
James McMahon -- I've Seen This Movie A Thousand Times: Risk and the Hollywood Film Business (Wednesday, Nov 13, 2013, 2:30-4:30)
D.T. Cochrane -- The Power of Love: Diamonds and the Accumulation of De Beers (Tuesday, Nov 19, 2013, 2:30-4:30
An Interview with Joseph Baines on Food Price Inflation as Redistribution
No full textARNIE ARNESEN: "If the names Kraft, Monsanto, Cargill, Nestle, ADM and Walmart get you furious, this interview with Joseph Baines, doctoral student from York University in Toronto, is for you"
Can Capitalists Afford Recovery? Economic Policy When Capital is Power
No full textEconomic, financial and social commentators from all directions and persuasion 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
Review of the Global Political Economy of Israel
Get PDFFROM THE REVIEW: This book is quite incredible given that most scholarly books develop at best one original idea, and sometimes only the appearance of one. . . . On top of that incredible level of originality, the book is well written in an accessible and wry style that is in itself delightful. It's a radical book that is a trailblazer based on serious research. What a pleasure
Global Capital: Political Economy of Capitalist Power (YorkU, GS/POLS 6285 3.0, Graduate, Fall Term, 2012-13)
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
"Capitalizing Power: The Qualities and Quantities of Accumulation": Conference Programme and Videos
No full textThis is the third in a conference series organized by the Forum on Capital as Power. The present meetings explore the capitalization of power. There are 24 presentations, including keynote addresses and guest presentations by Jeffrey Harrod, Herman Schwartz, Justin Podur, J.J. McMurtry and Jonathan Nitzan. The conference is sponsored by a SSHRC Connection Grant and York University.
Attendance is free and all are welcome
Walmart’s Contested Expansion in the Retail Business: Differential Accumulation, Institutional Restructuring and Social Resistance
No full text*** Winner of the Eighth ANNUAL STUDENT SCHOLARS AWARD of The Association for Institutional Thought ***
This paper offers an analysis of Walmart's contested expansion in the retail business. It draws on, and develops, some aspects of the capital as power framework so as to provide the first quantitative explication of the company's power trajectory to date. After rapid growth in the first four decades of its existence, the power of Walmart appears to be flat-lining relative to dominant capital as a whole. The major problems for Walmart 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 paper contends that these problems are in part born out of resistance that Walmart is experiencing at multiple social scales. This resistance helps to explain why Walmart is nearing what appears to be an 'asymptote' – a distributional limit that the company might not be able to pass. Walmart’s power trajectory may give us clues about the future limits on the power of dominant capital as a whole
Tainted Love: Art's Ethos and Capitalization
No full textThe commercial methods and transactional processes of the art market contravene in almost every way the free market principles and investment assumptions and patterns core to modern global finance. What Noah Horowitz calls the art market’s "anti-speculative vehemence" is intimately allied to its protagonist’s amorous-erotic investment in art, widely flaunted in the highly visible acquisition of blue-chip art by capitalist elites as much as in the cloying discourses in public and private art sectors supporting and relying upon such expenditure. The centrality of this amorous ethos to the concentration of social and capital power in art relies upon and maintains the belief that while art is indeed traded on a market it is rather that market’s obstruction of liberal free-market principles and practices that accords with an involvement in art itself. Simultaneously, the domination of capital power in art means that art’s audiences are now obliged to share in the capriciousness of the subjective love of art allied to the corporatism of capital power rather than a previously assumed statist 'care' for public culture, providing in the process an ersatz-public legitimization for such power.
This paper seeks to remove the support for the decontamination of capitalized power through art’s amorous ethos. Since art-prices are explicitly financially generated without reference to production or consumption, they make manifest the condition of all price-setting—or what could be called capital’s procedural and operational “financiality”, the term designating finance as the primary condition for, rather than consequence of, capitalization and price-setting. As such, the art market embodies the truth of finance, and it does so precisely in its failure or limitations of art as a kind of free-market investment. It is not then that art pricing is a puzzle compared to other, productive or consuming, sectors of the economy, but that the art market dispels their obscuring of capitalization as the primary determinant of price. The convergence of interests and operations of art (in particular contemporary art) and capital elites can then be apprehended not as paradox but as consistent, reconfiguring in the process the significance of the love of art as the condition and satisfaction of its protagonists’ involvement in it
No Way Out: Crime, Punishment and the Limits to Power
Get PDFThe 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
Capital as Power
No full text[THIS ARTICLE APPEARED PREVIOUSLY AS TWO SEPARATE PAPERS: "CAPITAL AS POWER: TOWARD A NEW COSMOLOGY OF CAPITALISM" (2010) AND "DIFFERENTIAL ACCUMULATION" (2011)]
Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists think of capital as an economic entity that they count in universal units of utils and abstract labor, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious: they can be neither observed nor measured. They don’t exist. And since liberalism and Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters most – the accumulation of capital.
This breakdown is no accident. Every mode of power evolves together with its dominant theories and ideologies. In capitalism, these theories and ideologies originally belonged to the study of political economy -- the first mechanical science of society. But the capitalist mode of power kept changing, and as the power underpinnings of capital became increasingly visible, the science of political economy disintegrated. By the late nineteenth century, with dominant capital having taken command, political economy was bifurcated into two distinct spheres: economics and politics. And in the twentieth century, when the power logic of capital had already penetrated every corner of society, the remnants of political economy were further fractured into mutually distinct social sciences. Nowadays, capital reigns supreme – yet social scientists have been left with no coherent framework to account for it.
The theory of Capital as Power offers a unified alternative to this fracture. It argues that capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. Capital has little to do with utility or abstract labor, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Most broadly, it represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape -- or creorder -- their society.
This view leads to a different cosmology of capitalism. It offers a new theoretical framework for capital based on the twin notions of dominant capital and differential accumulation, a new conception of the state of capital and a new history of the capitalist mode of power. It also introduces new empirical research methods – including new categories; new ways of thinking about, relating and presenting data; new estimates and measurements; and, finally, the beginning of a new, disaggregate accounting that reveals the conflictual dynamics of society