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Have Predatory Means Advanced in Global Finance? (야수적금융업이 선진금융인가?)
No full textG20 서울회의를 앞두고, 9월30일-10월1 일 ‘지구적 금융 재정 위기와 한국 시민사회의 과제’ 토론회가 열혔다. 토론 참석자들은현 금융 시스템의 근본 개혁 등을 강하게 주장했다
The conference on "The Global Financial/Fiscal Crisis and the Task of Korean Civil Society" was held on September 30th and October 1st. Participants strongly urged a fundamental reform of the existing financial system
Kapital als Macht und imaginäre Institution: Eine Einführung in die Kapitalmachttheorie von Jonathan Nitzan und Shimshon Bichler
Get PDFMit ihrem Buch Capital as Power (2009) haben Jonathan Nitzan und
Shimshon Bichler eine radikale Alternative zu neoklassischen und marxistischen Wirtschaftstheorien vorgelegt. „Kapital“ begreifen sie im Rahmen ihres neuen Ansatzes nicht im engeren Sinn als ökonomische Größe, die - wie in der Neoklassik - in Nutzen-Einheiten oder - wie in der marxistischen Werttheorie - in abstrakter Arbeit gemessen werden kann, sondern als symbolische Quantifizierung gesellschaftlicher Macht. Diese Konzeption verspricht nicht nur, einen wichtigen Beitrag zum besseren Verständnis der aktuellen Krisenentwicklungen der Weltwirtschaft zu liefern, sondern sie hat auch interessante Berührungspunkte zum Konzept der imaginären Institution bei Cornelius Castoriadis.
Der diesjährige VSFA-Workshop soll die Möglichkeit bieten, den Ansatz von Nitzan und Bichler kennenzulernen, über seine kapitalismus - und krisentheoretischen Implikationen nachzudenken sowie nach den Verbindungen zum Denken von Castoriadis zu fragen
Is Global Financial Capitalism Following the Path of Communism? (금융 자본주의는 소련 공산주의의 뒤를 밟을 것인가?: 자본 시장의 심장 박동이 멈추었다)
Get PDF지구적 자본 시장은 자본주의 경제에서 인적 물적 자원의 미래의 재구조화를 지시할 뿐만 아니라 전체 사회적 질서를 창조하고 재창조한다. 이 점에서 이는 공산주의 경제에서의 중앙 계획 기구의 자리에 비견될만한 위치에 있다고 할 수 있다. 그 힘은 자본 시장 특유의 알고리즘 즉 미래 지향적 자본화에서 나온다. 하지만 닛잔과 비클러가 발표한 최근의 논문에 따르면, 그 알고리듬은 2000년대의 10년간 계속 멈추어 있었던 것으로 보인다. 이는 곧 지구적 금융 자본주의가 1930년대에서나 볼 수 있었던 것과 같은, 지구적 투자가들과 자본가들의 "체제적 공포"로 마비된 상태일 수 있음을 암시하고 있다.
The global capital market occupies the supreme position in capitalism, directing the restructuring of human and material resources as well as creating and re-creating the social order as a whole. This position parallels that of the central planning apparatus in a communist economy. The power of the global capital market resides in its specific algorithm: forward-looking capitalization. However, according to a recent article by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, this algorithm has been dormant throughout the 2000s. The lull suggests that global financial capitalism is paralysed by "systemic fear": global investors and the capitalist ruling class are gripped by anxiety parallelled only by the fears of the 1930s
Death Grip: Scapegoating the Subprime Loser
No full textCapitalizing morality and accumulating through crisis
Systemic Fear, Modern Finance and the Future of Capitalism
Get PDFExisting theories of political economy, liberal as well as Marxist, see capital as a dual entity. According to these theories, the "real" essence of capital consists of material/productive commodities, while the "financial" appearance of capital either accurately mirrors or fictitiously distorts this underlying reality. We reject this duality. Capital, we argue, is finance, and only finance. In its modern incarnation, capital exists as forward-looking capitalization, a universal financial ritual that discounts expected future earnings to a singular present value.
The universality of this reduction makes capitalization the most supple power instrument ever known to humanity. Previously, distributive power was associated with clear socio-ecological distinctions -- differences between king and subject, owner and slave, tiller and landlord, field and citadel, village and town. Capitalization flattens these qualitative features to the point of irrelevance. In principle, anyone can be a capitalist, and what distinguishes one capitalist from another is the quantity of their capitalization: the most powerful are those with the greatest capitalization (dominant capital), and those that hold that power achieve and augment it by increasing their capitalization faster than others (differential accumulation). In this way, capitalization crystallizes the power of capitalists to shape their world, as well as the resistance of those that oppose this power. It gauges the capitalists' success in directing production and consumption, in shaping ideology and culture, in affecting the law, public policy, conflict, war and even the environment. It is the all-encompassing algorithm that creorders -- or creates the order -- of the capitalist mode of power.
The purpose of our paper is to examine the breakdown of this algorithm. To be sure, this type of inquiry is hardly novel. Marxists have long searched for objective signs of capitalist collapse, preliminary omens that would foretell the system’s imminent disintegration. However, because of their dual conception of capital, they've tended to look for such signs in the so-called real sphere of production and consumption, while paying far less attention to finance, which, in their view, is merely a distorted mirror of that reality. But finance isn’t a mirror of real capital; it is real capital – and indeed the only real capital. So if we want to look for signs of systemic crisis and possible disintegration, our search should begin here, in the very ritual of capitalization.
The specific focus of the article is two historical ruptures of modern finance – the periods of 1929-1939 and 2000-2010. During both periods, capitalists abandoned the conventional forward-looking ritual of capitalization, resorting instead to the backward-looking posture of pre-modern finance. In our view, these rare episodes are of great importance for understanding the nature of capitalist confidence and the capitalists’ ability to rule – as well as the possibility that this system of rule will collapse. Our inquiry seeks, first, to characterize key features of these episodes; second, to speculate on their causes; and third, to assess, however speculatively, what they might imply for the future of capitalism
Left Unattended, the Capitalist Crisis Could Culminate in the Collapse of Global Civilization (자본주의 위기 방치하면 세계대전 일어난다)
No full text현대 금융의 핵심은 그 "미래 지향적" 능력을 갖고 있다는 주장에 있다. 하지만 조나단 닛잔과 심숀 비클러의 최근 연구에 의하면 이러한 현대 금융의 특징은 이미 2000년대 들어서 존재하지 않게 되었으며, 이는 지구적 자본가 및 투자가들 사이에 "체제 붕괴의 공포"가 만연해 있음을 암시하고 있다. 조나단 닛잔으로부터 어째서 이런 일이 벌어지게 되었을까와 이 위기의 국면 이후에 펼쳐질 일들에 대해서 들어본다.
Modern finance rests on its alleged ability to "look forward”. According to recent research by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, modern finance lost this ability in the early 2000s, suggesting that global investors and capitalists have been struck by "systemic fear.” We hear from Jonathan Nitzan where this fear comes from and what it may imply for the future
"Crisis of Capital, Crisis of Theory": Conference Program and Videos
Get PDFThis is the first in a conference series organized by the Forum on Capital as Power and sponsored by Routledge and Springer. The present meetings explore the dual crisis of capital and theory. There are 21 scheduled presentations, including keynote addresses by Herman Scwhartz and Randall Germain and guest presentations by George Comninel, Leo Panitch, David McNally and Jonathan Nitzan. The conference closes with a roundtable interrogation of capital, power and the future of political economy. Attendance is free and all are welcome.
DATE/TIME/PLACE:
October 29-31, 2010 || York Lanes, Rooms 280N & 280A || Keele Campus of York University.
VIDEOS:
To watch the panels, click the link to the video podcasts above
York University Guest Lecture: Systemic Fear, Modern Finance and the Future of Capitalism (Video)
Get PDFIs capitalism about to collapse? Like every other mode of power, capitalism rests on confidence in obedience: the confidence of the rulers in the obedience of the ruled. Emperors are sure of their rule over obedient subjects and slaves; lords are certain they can rule their obedient vassals and serfs; and capitalists trust the obedience of their underlying masses. The confidence of rulers is mediated through their dominant dogma: when the dogma holds, the rulers are hubristic, steadfast and ruthless; when the dogma disintegrates, the rulers, gripped by systemic fear, become hesitant and lose their ability to rule.
Systemic fear often culminates in systemic collapse. The downfall of the last Babylonian emperor, Belshazzar, the collapse of Easter Island, the French Revolution against the ancien régime, the fall of Soviet Union and many more such episodes were all preceded by systemic fear: for whatever reason, the rulers lost faith in their dogma and confidence in their subjects’ obedience. But their systemic fear remained elusive: we know of it only anecdotally, subjectively, and always retrospectively – after their mode of power lies in ruins.
Modern finance has made systemic fear transparent. For the first time in history, we have an objective, numerical measure of the rulers’ confidence in obedience – and this measure is available not in retrospect, but here and now. The indicator in question is forward-looking capitalization: the financial ritual with which capitalists discount to present value their expected future profit. This ritual stands at the heart of the modern capitalist dogma, and it is currently broken: for the past decade, capitalists have been looking not forward to the future, but backward to the past. In other words, capitalists no longer trust their own dogma: they are no longer confident in the obedience of the ruled or in their own ability to rule.
DATE/TIME/PLACE: Friday, October 29, 2010, 3:00–5:00 pm || York Lanes, Room 280N || Keele Campus of York University
VIDEO DURATION (Presentation and Q&A): 2:04 hour
Notes on the State of Capital
Get PDFThese notes are transcribed from a commentary on a paper by Sean Starrs, titled 'State and Capital: False Dichotomy But Still Inter-Related'. Both the paper and the commentary were presented as part of an integrated panel series on 'Capital as Power', held at the 36th Annual Conference of the Eastern Economic Association in Philadelphia, February 26-28, 2010.
Sean Starrs claims that we need to discard our notion of the 'state of capital'. The gist of his argument is simple enough. Capitalist societies, he says, involve a myriad of power relations, many of them very important. These relationships, although often linked to the logic of capital, are distinct from that logic and therefore cannot be reduced to it. And since we are talking about separate social processes, we cannot encompass them all under the same rubric. His conclusion: the notion of a totalizing mode of power – which we call the state of capital – must be dispensed with.
The notes attempt to clarify. They seek to explain, first, what we mean by a 'mode of power', and, second, why we use this concept in the first place. The sequence of our presentation is as follows. We begin by contrasting two spatial conceptions of the state. We then explain the notion of capitalization, which in our view represents the logic of the state of capital. And, finally, we flesh out the argument with a series of historical examples
Eyes Wide Shut: The Ruling Class and the Future of Capitalism
Get PDFWhat does modern finance tell us about systemic fear and the future of capitalism?
WHEN AND WHERE: November 19, 2010, 6:00-7:30pm || Bell Hall, Harvard Kennedy School of Government || 79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge, M