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Political Economy of Capital Accumulation (YorkU, LAPS/POLS 4292 6.0, Undergraduate, Fall Term, 2019-20)
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
Capitalism's Deniers
Get PDFA new, capitalism-denying book is on the shelves, and it makes a stunning discovery: ‘Capitalism without competition is not capitalism’! Capitalist crisis, like climate change, tends to breed ‘capitalism deniers’. The problem, argue the deniers, lies not in capitalism but in its ‘distortions’. In its pure form, they maintain, capitalism is the best of all possible worlds. But to the deniers’ chagrin, contemporary capitalism is no longer pristine. Unlike its original, once-upon-a-time version, its current one is subject to distorting ‘imperfections’, ‘shocks’ and ‘exogenous’ events. And it is these aberrations – rather than capitalism itself – that should be blamed for the system’s misfortunes
Ecological Limits and Hierarchical Power
Get PDFNowadays, it is commonplace to claim that the economy overuses our limited material and energy resources and that this overuse threatens both human society and the biosphere. Other than anti-science cranks, the only ones who seem to deny this claim are mainstream economists. In our view, though, this conventional condemnation of the economy is somewhat misleading. As we see it, the root of our ecological problems lies not in the ‘economy’, but in the hierarchical power structure of capitalism
On the Power Theory of Capitalism
Get PDFFROM THE REVIEW: Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan are Israeli political economists. Together they’ve created a thought-provoking power theory of capitalism and theory of differential accumulation. The theory is not “pie-in-the-sky,” but is based in their analysis of the political economy of wars, globalization, etc. The theory is not something new, however. It reflects the works of Thorstein Veblen, Karl Marx, Michał Kalecki, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Lewis Mumford. Considering the foci of their research and the works they use as a starting point, neither Bichler nor Nitzan can be called economists, in the way that identifier is used today...
Real GDP: The Flawed Metric at the Heart of Macroeconomics
Get PDFThe study of economic growth is central to macroeconomics. More than anything else, macroecon-omists are concerned with finding policies that encourage growth. And by ‘growth’, they mean the growth of real GDP. This measure has become so central to macroeconomics that few economists question its validity. Our intention here is to do just that. We argue that real GDP is a deeply flawed metric. It is presented as an objective measure of economic scale. But when we look under the surface, we find crippling subjectivity. Moreover, few economists seem to realize that real GDP is based on a non-existent quantum – utility. In light of these problems, it seems to us that much of macroeconomics needs to be rethought
Wars Have Become Too Cheap to Boost Growth
Get PDFFROM THE NOTE: This week, with the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Atlanta anticipating sharply lower GDP growth for 2019:Q1, President Trump presented a ‘Budget for A Better America’, calling for a smaller government and a bigger military. Forty years ago, the very same call was hailed as the best recipe for renewed growth. The U.S. ruling class was getting ready to install Ronald Reagan as President, abandon the Cold War and embark on neoliberalism, and it argued that, for that shift to succeed, the country needed a leaner government in order to unleash its entrepreneurial spirit and crowd-in private investment, and that it required a strong military in order to boost its global muscle and open world markets for its products and capital. Ideology aside, one key reason for the growth optimism of the time was rising military spending. . .
Ecological Limits and Hierarchical Power
No full textNowadays, it is commonplace to claim that the economy overuses our limited material and energy resources and that this overuse threatens both human society and the biosphere. Other than anti-science cranks, the only ones who seem to deny this claim are mainstream economists. In our view, though, this conventional condemnation of the economy is somewhat misleading. As we see it, the root of our ecological problems lies not in the ‘economy’, but in the hierarchical power structure of capitalism
Making America Great Again
Get PDFTrump has promised to Make America Great Again. As a self-proclaimed expert on everything of import, he knows exactly how to increase domestic investment and consumption, boost exports, reduce the country’s trade deficit, expand employment and bolster wages. And as America’s leader-and-policymaker-in-chief, he has taken the necessary steps to achieve every one of these goals. He has lowered taxes on corporations and the rich to induce greater investment, relaxed environmental standards and de-socialized medical care to cut red tape and eliminate waste, curtailed civilian government spending and raised military expenditures to make government lean and mean, warned corporations and individuals to remain economically patriotic and undermined the Fed’s “independence” to prevent interest rates from rising and the stock market from tanking. And if that wasn’t enough, he has also launched a so-called trade war to prevent America from being ripped off by other countries, especially China.
Capitalists and pundits follow him like imprinted ducks. His tweets rattle markets, his announcements are dissected by academics and his utterances are analysed to exhaustion by various media. A visiting alien might infer that he actually runs the world.
And the alien wouldn’t be alone. The earthly population too, conditioned by ivory-tower academics and popular opinion makers, tends to think of political figureheads as “leaders” and “policymakers”. Situated at the “commanding heights” of their respective nation states and international organizations, these “leaders” supposedly set the rules, make policies, steer their societies and determine the course of history. Or at least that’s the common belief.
The reality, though, is quite different
Personal Income and Hierarchical Power
Get PDFAbstract: This article examines the relation between personal income and hierarchical power. In the context of a firm hierarchy, I define hierarchical power as the number of subordinates under an individual’s control. Using the available case-study evidence, I find that relative income within firms scales strongly with hierarchical power. I also find that hierarchical power affects income more strongly than any other factor for which data is available. I conclude that this is preliminary evidence for a hierarchical-power theory of personal income distribution
CasP's 'Differential Accumulation' versus Veblen's 'Differential Advantage' (Revised and Expanded)
Get PDFThis paper clarifies a common misrepresentation of our theory of capital as power, or CasP. Many observers tend to box CasP as an ‘institutionalist’ theory, tracing its central process of ‘differential accumulation’ to Thorstein Veblen’s notion of ‘differential advantage’. This view, we argue, betrays a misunderstanding of CasP, Veblen or both. First, we are not Veblenians and certainly not institutionalists: Veblen’s theory was evolutionary, while CasP is deeply dialectical, and institutionalism, particularly its ‘new’ varieties, emphasizes and often promotes what holds capitalism together, whereas CasP critically examines both the underpinnings of capitalized power as well as the forces that threaten and undermine it. Second, CasP’s notion of differential accumulation is not only different from, but also diametrically opposed to Veblen’s differential advantage. Veblen, who wrote at the turn of the twentieth century, before the appearance of business indices and financial benchmarks, emphasized the absolute drive for ‘maximum profit’ and saw strategic sabotage merely as a power means to an economic end. By contrast, CasP, which was developed at the end of the twentieth century, sees power not only as a means of accumulation, but also – and perhaps more importantly – as its ultimate purpose. Accumulators, it argues, are conditioned and driven to augment not their profits and assets as such, but their relative power, and this means that, as symbolic bearers of power, these profits and assets should be measured not absolutely, but relatively to those of others – hence the imperative of differential accumulation