The Bichler and Nitzan Archives
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Review of Nitzan and Bichler's "Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder"
Get PDFFROM THE REVIEW: "The authors of Capital As Power wish, as they said in their own words at a recent Rethinking Marxism conference, to perform a ‘ctrl-alt-del’ on current political economy. The basis for this extreme assertion is the sorry state of value theory and the concepts that depend upon that theory, including capital. In place of the two standard theories of value (the neoclassical ‘utility theory of value’ and the Marxist ‘labor theory of value’), both of which have serious analytical and ontological problems, Nitzan and Bichler offer a theory that capital is nothing but quantified power.
Imperialism and Financialism: An Exchange
Get PDFAn exchange of letters between Joe Francis and Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan. The exchange concerns ‘Imperialism and Financialism: A Story of a Nexus’, an article that Bichler and Nitzan posted in September 2009
Systemic Fear, Modern Finance and the Future of Capitalism (Reprint)
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
Political Economy of Capital Accumulation (YorkU, AP/POLS 4292 6.0, Undergraduate, Fall Term, 2010-11)
Get PDFCapital is the central power institution of capitalism: it is the main force underlying the relentless transformation of power relations in capitalist societies. The course explores the accumulation of capital from three interrelated perspectives: conceptual, historical and empirical. At the conceptual level, the course examines the evolution of different orthodox and critical theories of value and how these theories serve to explain and justify contending notions of accumulation. At the historical level, it traces the development of capital from its humble pre-capitalist origins to its present world dominance. At the empirical level, it studies and juxtaposes the qualitative and quantitative aspects of capital accumulation and study what they mean for the contemporary political economy. In parallel to these explorations, the course introduces students to the art and science of empirical research. By the end of the course, students are expected to be able to develop and integrate theoretical arguments with their own empirical work
Capital as Power: An Audio Interview with Jonathan Nitzan
No full textTHE QUESTIONS:
1. Why do we need a theory of capital at all? (00:51 minutes)
2. Why do we need a new theory of capital? (10:28 minutes)
3. What does your theory of capital do that the other problematic theories do not? (21:57 minutes)
4. Where do other power institutions such as the military or the police and other government organs fit within this cosmology? (06:32 minutes)
5. You have described capital as "finance, and only finance." This would seem to be an explicit inversion of Marx who considered finance to be fictitious capital. Can you describe the role of finance in capitalism? (19:30 minutes)
6. Marx's system of thought was a total system. What consequences, if any, does your theory have for other important Marxian concepts, such as alienation? (23:25 minutes)
7. Marx’s emphasis on production and labour gave workers a central role in both capitalist society and the communist society to come. What are the consequences for your understanding of the worker’s role in accumulation on the one hand and a humane post-capitalist society on the other? (20:57 minutes)
8. What, if anything, does your theory tell us about either resistance against capitalism today or the creation of a humane post-capitalist society? (06:20 minutes)
Duration of the complete interview: 1:51 hour
Systemic Fear, Modern Finance and the Future of Capitalism (체제적 공포, 현대 금융과 자본주의의 미래) -- VIDEO
No full textIs 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.
The Presentation is in English, with Korean Translation by Gibin Hong.
VIDEO DURATION 2:15 hour
Seven Integrated Panels on "Capital as Power": Timetable and Program
Get PDFTimetable and abstracts of an integrated panel series on the subject of "Capital as Power", to be held at the 36th Annual Conference of the Eastern Economic Association, Philadelphia, February 26-28, 2010. The series comprises 14 presentations, grouped into 7 panels
Call for Papers: "Crisis of Capital, Crisis of Theory"
Get PDFThis is the first in a series of conferences in heterodox political economy, seeking to develop new ways of understanding capitalism and power. The conference will be held at York University in Toronto on October 29-31, 2010. The deadline for abstract submission is July 31, 2010
Capital as Power: Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism
Get PDFConventional 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
The Global Capital Market Under “Systemic Fear” ('체제적 공포' 엄습한 자본시장)
No full text2008년 패닉이 아무리 요란하고 극적인 것이었다고 해도, 자본 시장의 심장 박동이 극히 약해진 것은 이미 2000년 ‘닷컴’ 거품의 붕괴 이후 10년간 지속되어온 현상이며, 2008년의 사태는 단지 그것에 치명적 타격을 안겨줬을 뿐이다. 지난 10년간 이미 지구적 자본 시장은 1930년대의 그것과 마찬가지로 미래지향적 성격을 상실한 셈이다.
The crankiness of the 2008 global financial panic notwithstanding, global capital markets have lost their forward-looking posture already in 2000. In a replay of the 1930s, global investors betray an inability to “see the future” and a lack of confidence in the future of the capitalist system