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Corporate Power and the Future of U.S. Capitalism
Get PDFCorporate power in the United States has risen to unprecedented levels, but the rate at which this power has grown is decelerating. Both facts have important implications for the future of U.S. capitalism
The Capital As Power Approach. An Invited-then-Rejected Interview with Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan
Get PDFThis interview was commissioned in October 2019 for a special issue on ‘Accumulation and Politics: Approaches and Concepts’ to be published by the Revue de la régulation. We submitted the text in March 2020, only to learn two months later that it won’t be published.
The problem, we were informed, wasn’t the content, which everyone agreed was ‘highly interesting and stimulating’. It was the format. To begin with, the text was suddenly deemed ‘too long’. Although the length was agreed on beforehand, the special-issue editors – or maybe it was their bosses on the Editorial Board – now insisted that we cut it by no less than two-thirds. They also instructed us to make our answers more ‘interview-like’ and ‘personal’. Finally and perhaps most tellingly, they demanded that we change our ‘tone’, which they found ‘unfair’ and ‘one-sided’. Translation: we should take a hike.
This encounter with two-minded editors wasn’t our first. The added epilogue at the end of this interview, titled ‘Manuscripts Don’t Burn’, sketches our history with Jekyll & Hyde editors who have often used ‘length’ and ‘tone’ to reject articles they’ve invited but can’t stomach.
But first, the original interview, in full
Death Anxiety and the Political Economy of Power
Get PDFReflections on the work of Ernest Becker and Terror Management Theory and how they might relate to CasP analyses of concepts and modes of power
Free Capital as Power Ebook
No full textBlair Fix reflects on Nitzan and Bichler's book 'Capital as Power' and how he came to render it as a CreativeCommons Ebook
Varieties of Top Incomes
Get PDFFocusing on the advanced political economies, this article critically reviews the recent scholarship on the evolution of top incomes over the past few decades. The existing literature shows that the determination of top incomes is complex, multifaceted and bound up with factors associated with both politics and economics. Technological change and globalization are vital sources of change in contemporary capitalism, but the continued diversity in top income shares across the advanced capitalist world suggests that these forces alone cannot account for the empirical patterns. Instead, there is compelling evidence that power and politics, including government policy, trade union and left party strength, institutions and financialization, all play a pivotal role in regulating distributive outcomes. It is argued that future research will require a plurality of methodological approaches in order to clarify the complex causal process that drives top-end income concentration
The Limits of Capitalized Power. A 2020 U.S. Update
Get PDFUntil the late 2000s, our work focused primarily on why capitalism should be understood as a mode of power. We argued that capital itself is a form of organized power and researched how capitalists sustain, defend and augment their capitalized power. We called our approach ‘capital as power’ – or CasP, for short. But that’s only one side of the picture. Power is never unbounded. It is always resisted, opposed and constrained by those on whom it is imposed. And so, in the early 2010s, we started to examine more closely the limits of capitalized power and of the capitalist mode of power more generally. We called this research ‘the asymptotes of power’. In this paper, we revisit and update some of our work on these asymptotes in the United States and think about what they might mean for the future
Economic Development and the Death of the Free Market
Get PDFFree markets are, according to neoclassical economic theory, the most efficient way of organizing human activity. The claim is that individuals can benefit society by acting only in their self interest. In contrast, the evolutionary theory of multilevel selection proposes that groups must suppress the self interest of individuals. They often do so, the evidence suggests, by using hierarchical organization. To test these conflicting theories, I investigate how the ‘degree of hierarchy’ in societies changes with industrial development. I find that as energy use increases, governments tend to get larger and the relative number of managers tends to grow. Using a numerical model, I infer from this evidence that societies tend to become more hierarchical as energy use grows. This result is inconsistent with the neoclassical theory that individual self-interest is what benefits society. But it is consistent with the theory of multilevel selection, in which groups suppress the self-interest of their members
Selling Hollywood to China
Get PDFFrom the 1980s to the present, Hollywood’s major distributors have been able to redistribute U.S. theatrical attendance to the advantage of their biggest blockbusters and franchises. At the global scale and during the same period, Hollywood has been leveraging U.S. foreign power to break ground in countries that have historically protected and supported their domestic film culture. For example, Hollywood’s major distributors have increased their power in such countries as Mexico, Canada, Australia and South Korea. This paper will analyze a pertinent test case’ for Hollywood’s global power: China and its film market. Not only does China have a film-quota policy that restricts the number of theatrical releases that have a foreign distributor (∼ 20 to 34 films per year), the Communist Party has helped the Chinese film business grow to have steady film releases and its own movie star system. Theoretically, China would be a prime example of a film market that would need to be opened with the assistance of the U.S. government. Empirically, however, the case of Chinese cinema might be a curious exception; we can investigate how a political economic strategy rooted in explicit power is reaching a limit. Hollywood is, potentially without any other option, taking a more friendly, collaborative approach with China’s censorship rules and its quota and film-production laws
How the History of Class Struggle is Written on the Stock Market
No full text[Second of a two-paper series]
Class struggle, Bichler and Nitzan observe, is a part of all hierarchical societies. But capitalism is the first social order to quantify this struggle. It does so through prices, which Bichler and Nitzan propose indicate power. Stock prices, Bichler and Nitzan argue, indicate the power of owners to earn income. If we’re interested in class struggle, we want to compare this capitalist power to the power of workers. Here’s a simple way to do so. We compare the price of stocks to the price of wage labor. Bichler and Nitzan call this ratio the ‘power index’.
My goal here is to test Bichler and Nitzan’s thesis. Does the power index quantify US class struggle? Although a simple ratio of two prices, the power index, Bichler and Nitzan claim, tells us about class conflict at large. When the power index falls, workers are winning the struggle. When the power index rises, capitalists are winning.
Is Bichler and Nitzan’s claim true? In this post, I look at the evidence. I test how three different indicators of class struggle relate to the power index. Here’s what I find. When workers strike more, win a living minimum wage, and get government to progressively tax the rich, the stock market declines relative to wages. My conclusion is that Bichler and Nitzan are onto something. The history of class struggle does seem to be written on the stock market.
[The first paper, 'Stocks are Up. Wages are Down. What Does it Mean?' (September 4,, 2020), is here: http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/657/
Financial Crisis, Inequality, and Capitalist Diversity: A Critique of the Capital as Power Model of the Stock Market
Get PDFThe relationship between inequality and financial instability has become a thriving topic of research in heterodox political economy. This article offers the first critical engagement with one framework within this wider literature: the Capital as Power (CasP) model of the stock market developed by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan. Specifically, we extend the CasP model to other advanced capitalist countries, including Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Our findings affirm the core prediction of the CasP model, showing that unequal power relations reliably predict future stock market performance. Yet when it comes to the CasP model’s explanation of why power relations predict stock market returns, our findings are more ambiguous. We find little empirical support for the claims that capitalist power is dialectically intertwined with systemic fear, and that systemic fear and capitalised power are mediated through strategic sabotage. The main lesson of our analysis is that any model of the stock market must be attentive to the geographical unevenness and continued national diversity in capitalist development