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Book Review: Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, "Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder"
No full textFROM THE REVIEW: "Amidst the social sciences scholarship that is dominated by either neoclassical economics or Marxist views, Capital as Power presents a thought-provoking and erudite argumentation of an alternative understanding of the nature of capital. . . . The quintessential strength of this volume is its extensive historicisation of the major problems that haunt political economy, followed by a clear presentation of key paradigms in understanding capital; before eventually presenting their ambitious goal of reintroducing power dynamics as the ultimate working principle behind capital and its accompanying processes. . . . I suspect that this work will be an eventual classic in political economy for its deeply impressive challenge to the orthodoxy of the discipline, as well as its remarkable survey of the state of the scholarship on capital.
The Asymptotes of Power
No full textThis is the latest in a series of articles we have been writing on the current crisis. The purpose of our previous papers was to characterize the crisis. We claimed that it was a 'systemic crisis', and that capitalists were gripped by 'systemic fear'. In this article, we seek to explain why. The problem that capitalists face today, we argue, is not that their power has withered, but, on the contrary, that their power has increased. Indeed, not only has their power increased, it has increased by so much that it might be approaching its asymptote. And since capitalists look not backward to the past but forward to the future, they have good reason to fear that, from now on, the most likely trajectory of this power will be not up, but down. The paper begins by setting up our general framework and key concepts. It continues with a step-by-step deconstruction of key power processes in the United States, attempting to assess how close these processes are to their asymptotes. And it concludes with brief observations about what may lie ahead
Capital as Power: Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism
No full textConventional 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 labour, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious: they can be neither observed nor measured. In this sense, they do not 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. Capitalism, we argue, is not a mode of production but a mode of power, and every mode of power evolves together with its dominant theories, dogmas and ideologies. In capitalism, these theories and ideologies originally belonged to the study of political economy – the first mechanical science of society. But as the capitalist mode of power kept changing and the quantitative revolution made it less and less opaque, the power underpinnings of capital grew increasingly visible and 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. Capital was completely monopolized by economists, leaving other social scientists with little or no say in its analysis. And nowadays, when the reign of capital is all but universal, social scientists find that they have 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 is not absolute, it is relative. It has little to do with utility or abstract labour, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Most broadly, it represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to create the order of – 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 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 non-equilibrium disaggregate accounting that reveals the conflictual dynamics of society
No Way Out: Crime, Punishment and the Limits to Power (Reprint)
No full textThe 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
Messing with the Normal Rate of Return: A Discussion
No full textThoughts on 'objective value', power and the normal rate of return
Le capital comme pouvoir : une étude de l'ordre et du créordre
No full textLa quatrième de couverture :
Les théories orthodoxes du capitalisme sont en crise: après des siècles de débat, elles sont toujours incapables de nous dire ce qu'est le capital. Libéraux et marxistes tiennent le capital pour une entité "économique" qu'on peut comptabiliser en unités universelles d'"utils" ou de "travail abstrait". Mais ces unités sont fictives: personne n'a jamais été en mesure de les observer ou de les mesurer. Parce que le libéralisme et le marxisme reposent sur ces unités qui n'existent pas, leurs théories flottent dans le vide. Elles ne peuvent pas expliquer le processus qui importe le plus - l'accumulation du capital.
Écrit dans une langue claire et aussi accessible aux profanes qu'aux experts, ce livre propose une alternative radicale : une théorie originale du "capital comme pouvoir" et une histoire inédite du "mode capitaliste du pouvoir". Pour les auteurs, le capital n'est pas une simple entité économique, mais bien une quantification symbolique du pouvoir. Le capital, affirment les auteurs, représente le pouvoir organisé dont disposent les groupes du capital dominant pour remodeler - ou créordonner - leur société
The 1%, Exploitation and Wealth: Tim Di Muzio interviews Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan
No full textRethinking resistance, power and production
Imperialism and Financialism. A Story of a Nexus
No full textOver the past century, the nexus of imperialism and financialism has become a major axis of Marxist theory and praxis. Many Marxists consider this nexus to be a prime cause of our worldly ills, but the historical role they ascribe to it has changed dramatically over time. The key change concerns the nature and direction of surplus and liquidity flows. The first incarnation of the nexus, articulated at the turn of the twentieth century, explained the imperialist scramble for colonies to which finance capital could export its excessive surplus. The next version posited a neo-imperial world of monopoly capitalism where the core's surplus is absorbed domestically, sucked into a black hole of military spending and financial intermediation. The third script postulated a World System where surplus is imported from the dependent periphery into the financial core. And the most recent edition explains the hollowing out of the U.S. core, a red giant that has already burned much of its own productive fuel and is now trying to financialize the rest of the world in order to use the system's external liquidity. The paper outlines this chameleon-like transformation, assesses what is left of the nexus and asks whether it is worth keeping
Profit by Fiat (Reprint)
No full textIf there is no objective value, how can fraud ‘distort’ prices, profit and the normal rate of return
No Way Out: Crime, Punishment and the Limits to Power (Transcript and Video)
No full textThe 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