The Bichler and Nitzan Archives
Not a member yet
759 research outputs found
Sort by
Notes on the State of Capital (Reprint)
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
Capital as Power: Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism (Reprint)
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
From the Economic Crisis to Fanaticism, Three New Publications Explore the Meaning of Capital (Review of Nitzan and Bichler's "Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder")
Get PDFFROM THE REVIEW: "Capital as Power is as bold in its thesis-making as it is detailed in its argument: the book has both a fine-grain engagement with economic theory and a broad historical sweep, which touches upon topics as diverse as the development of credit and the evolution of systems of power.
Systemic Fear, Modern Finance and the Future of Capitalism (체제적 공포, 현대 금융과 자본주의의 미래)
No full textExisting 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.
[The original English version of this paper was posted in July 2010
Open Letters
No full textOn October 29-31, the Forum on Capital as Power held a three-day conference at York University, dedicated to the subject of “Crisis of Capital, Crisis of Theory.” Below is an open letter from Stefanos Kourkoulakos. It was sent a day before the conference to Professors George Comninel, David McNally, Leo Pantich and Jonathan Nitzan who were to participate as Faculty Guest Speakers at the event. The letter is followed by a reply from Leo Panitch. Both texts are posted with the permission of their authors
Testing the Labour Theory of Value: An Exchange
No full textPolitical economists have been testing the empirical validity of Marx's labour theory of value for several decades now. Do these tests corroborate the theory? Do they actually test it? Can they test it
To the New Readers Innocent of the Undeconstructed Past: On the Second Edition of "Peace, Peace, and No Peace" (אל הקוראים החדשים אשר לא ידעו את העבר הלא-משופץ)
Get PDFשלום, שלום, ואין שלום נראה כיום ספר מיושן, שחוזר על טיעונים ישנים הידועים לכל האינטליגנציה בעולם מאז ומעולם. הספר לא רק שאינו 'מחדש' הרבה בנושא הסכסוך הפלסטיני-ישראלי, אלא שהוא מעלה טיעונים שכיום אינם אופנתיים, בוודאי שלא לעין הרדיקלית. דרך כתיבת הספר אינה מקובלת. הוא אינו מבריק בסגנונו – מכל מקום, יחסית לברק של מאות ואלפי כתבים אקדמיים, עיתונאיים ופוליטיים – הוא נראה אפור, ולעתים בעל תיאוריות ועמדות מיושנות. אפילו חלק מן ה'מיינסטרים' האקדמי של היום נראה 'אלגנטי' יותר, 'רלבנטי' יותר, מאשר הספר העתיק הזה. אבל כדאי לציין למען ההיסטוריה הלא-נעימה לעתים, כי הספר הזה היה הראשון בתולדות המזרח-התיכון, אשר בנה היסטוריוסופיה אובייקטיבית חדשה של הסכסוך הערבי-ישראל
The Capitalist Mode of Power: A Research Seminar(YorkU, GS/POLS 6260 6.0, Graduate, Fall Term, 2010-2011)
Get PDFCapitalism is often understood as a mode of production and consumption. The seminar critiques this view and offers an alternative perspective of capitalism as a mode of power.
Thematically, the course consists of five parts: (1) Dilemmas of Political Economy: the two basic bifurcations separating 'politics' from 'economics' and the 'real' from the ‘nominal’, and how these dualities have gradually fractured political economy; (2) The Enigma of Capital: the liberal and Marxists conceptions of value and capital and why political economists still try to sort them out; (3) Capitalization: how discounting conquered the world while political economists looked the other way; (4) Bringing Power Back In: the history and theory of the capitalist mode of power; and (5) Capital as Power: a radical alternative to liberal and Marxists theories of accumulation.
Pedagogically, the seminar seeks to prepare students toward conducting their own independent research. 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 project
Contours of Crisis: Plus ça change, plus c'est pareil? (Reprint)
Get PDFThis is the first in a series of short articles we plan to write on the current crisis. Our aim in this series is threefold: to outline some of the important contours of the crisis; to situate these patterns in historical context; and to reflect on their possible causes and implications.
This paper sets the stage for the series. It outlines the conventional wisdom about the cause of crisis; it describes the chronology of events; and it contrasts the pattern and magnitude of the current downturn with those of earlier episodes. The overall picture painted by this analysis is highly stylized: crises appear to come and go with remarkable regularity, their oscillations are fairly similar and they share the same order of magnitude. The whole process seems almost ‘automatic’, and automaticity is reassuring: it suggests that the current crisis has run much of its course and that doom and gloom will soon give way to a new upswing.
But what if this automaticity is a mirage
Contours of Crisis II: Fiction and Reality
Get PDFEconomists tell us that the current crisis is our punishment for letting the fiction of finance distort the real economy. But what exactly is this “real” economy and how does finance distort it? Do the economists have a clue