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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 (Jin, 2011). 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 also nurtured a Chinese film business that has 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
Can Capitalists Afford Economic Growth? An Animation
No full textDespite the global dominance of capitalism, economic growth continues to weaken. Mainstream economists blame the slowdown on various ‘distortions’, but as this animation shows, the reality is quite different. Capitalists seek not more income per se, but greater power-through-redistribution, which they achieve by stymying growth.
Duration: 10:26 minutes
The Autocatalytic Sprawl of Pseudorational Mastery
Get PDF* Winner of the 2018 RECASP Essay Prize *
According to Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler (2009), capital is not an economic quantity, but a mode of power. Their fundamental thesis could be summarized as follows: capital is power quantified in monetary terms. But what do we do when we quantify? What is the nature of money in a capitalist society? Indeed, what is power? In the following, we try to develop a concept of power as the ability of persons to create particular formations against resistance. The kinds of formations persons can think of depend on the society they live in, which can be identified by what Cornelius Castoriadis called its social imaginary significations (SIS). The core SIS of capitalism is rational mastery operating with computational rationality. Computational rationality in turn rests on a particular understanding of how signification works: it works through operational symbolism, as theorized by Sybille Krämer in analyzing the philosophy of Leibniz. When the concept of the SIS of modern rationality was developed in the 1950s and 1960s, bureaucracy was seen as the main organizational mode of rational mastery. We argue that there are two modes of rational mastery, capitalization and bureaucratization, that interact with each other in capitalist society. The paper concludes with deliberations on the future of rational mastery and possible ways out.
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FRONT PICTURE: International Space Station Expedition 26 Crew (24 Dec 2010), Montreal at Night. Astronaut photograph ISS026-E-12474 (https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/48471/montreal-at-night). Image courtesy of the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center (https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/)
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BIO: The author studied physics and informatics, along with a lot of philosophy, but is also interested in many other subjects. He came across Bichler and Nitzan’s Capital as Power in the first decade of the twenty-first century when he was politically active in various ways. He rediscovered Castoriadis through one of Bichler and Nitzans’s works. Since then, he has tried to understand what Bichler and Nitzan actually mean by power. As there is no concrete answer to this question, he has been trying to develop one by (con)fusing concepts developed by Castoriadis and other thinkers with some of his own
Review of 'Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder'
Get PDFFROM THE REVIEW: It would be interesting to read a response to the CasP claims by some well-read economist. Because the claims made are extraordinary. Taken as it is however I find the book both compelling and convincing. Potentially holding a great deal of explanatory power and a theoretical basis for challenging the present capitalist "Creorder"
Review of 'The Global Political Economy of Israel'
Get PDFFROM THE REVIEW: Chapter 5, "The Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition," is absolutely stunning, a tour de force of applied political economy. Even those of us already inclined to view US foreign policy cynically, even committed anti-imperialists, will find they have yet more innocence to lose
The Harder They Fall
No full textUntil a few months ago, the stock market narrative in the United States could have been summarized by the popular acronym BTFD – or ‘buy the fucking dip’. Analysts and strategists, emboldened by the world’s synchronized recovery, Trump’s pro-business policies and ample liquidity, predicted that equities would continue rising and recommended that investors take advantage of any temporary weakness to augment their stock holdings in anticipation of further upside. But the atmosphere of boom has since given way to doom and gloom. With equity markets having entered ‘correction’ territory, many observers, including some of the world’s richest investors, now warn of a coming crash and a protracted ‘bear market’.
On the face of it, this shifting sentiment has much to do with investors anticipating an earnings reversal. Corporate earnings growth has reached extreme levels from which a downturntrend in profits – and therefore in equity prices – seems imminent. But then, why should forward-looking stock prices be dependent on current earnings in the first place?
Our ‘CasP model of the stock market’ (2016) quantifies the changing importance of current earnings for US stock prices. This importance scales with the power of stock owners relative to workers: the higher the power, the greater the importance of current earnings. Now presently, this power is at record highs, which makes equity prices hypersensitive to changes in current earnings, and current earning are about to tank. Buckle your seatbelts for a hard fall
Design & Capital
Get PDFWhy should designers, who would be far happier claiming to be in their jobs for the sake of creativity, to help people live happy lives, to be cool and different and make cool and different things, be better at capital accumulation than the rest of the FTSE100? Why would a focus on the ‘fit’ between problems, users, ideas and institutions have anything to do with capitalisation? Is there a fundamental connection between the theories and processes of design and capital accumulation
Real GDP: The Flawed Metric at the Heart of Macroeconomics
Get PDFThe study of economic growth is central to macroeconomics. More than anything else, macroeconomists 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
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, or so he says.
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 belief.
The reality, though, is quite different
Comments on Bichler and Nitzan’s 2012 Paper ‘Capital as Power: Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism’
Get PDFFROM THE REVIEW:
Here is a quote from their paper:
“Political economy, liberal as well as Marxist, stands on three key foundations: (I) a separation between economics and politics; (II) a Galilean/Cartesian/Newtonian mechanical understanding of the economy; and (III) a value theory that breaks the economy into two spheres – real and nominal – and that uses the quantities of the real sphere to explain the appearances of the nominal one.”
I think Bichler and Nitzan are on the right track in a number of ways but I still do have some key disagreements with them. To illustrate these disagreements I will re-write the statement above in what I regard as the more correct form.
“Conventional economics stands on three key foundations: (I) a separation between economics and politics; (II) a Cartesian/Newtonian mechanical understanding of the economy; and (III) a value theory that breaks the economy into two spheres – real and nominal – that uses the quantities of the real sphere to explain the appearances of the nominal one (ideological justification) and that then uses the quantities of the nominal sphere to manage those of the real sphere (as an instrumental, formalised reason system for the purpose of deriving, in a sense, quantised values for the real).”
To explain these changes. . .