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Can Capitalists Afford Recovery? A 2018 Update
No full text. . . Looking forward, the prognosis for capitalists seems negative. Over the last few years, unemployment has fallen sharply, and if the predictive power of our chart remains intact, the capitalist income-share-read-power is bound to contract further, raising the ante for a prolonged accumulation crisis. Eventually, though, capitalists are likely the resolve their CasP crisis, as they have done repeatedly for nearly a century, by offloading it onto the underlying population in the form of rising unemployment
트럼프의 무역 전쟁이 미국의 해외 투자를 위협하고 있다 (Trump’s Trade Wars Threaten US Foreign Investment)
Get PDF최근 트럼프가 시작한 무역전쟁에 관해 말들이 무성하지만, 이 말잔치에 중요한 포인트가 빠졌다. 여기서의 핵심이슈는 해외 무역이 아니라 해외 투자다
Theory and Praxis, Theory and Practice, Practical Theory
Get PDFIn their paper ‘The CasP Project: Past, Present and Future’, Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan invite readers to engage critically with their theoretical framework, known as capital as power (CasP). This call for further research, reactions and critiques is the perfect occasion to raise a few questions that have grown in my mind in reading Nitzan and Bichler’s work
El capital como poder. Un estudio del orden y el creorden
Get PDFLas teorías convencionales del capitalismo están sumidas en una profunda crisis: tras siglos de debates todavía son incapaces de decirnos qué es el capital. Tanto liberales como marxistas se refieren al capital como una entidad ‘económica’ que puede ser contabilizada en unidades universales de ‘utilidad’ o de ‘trabajo abstracto’. Pero estas unidades son totalmente ficticias. Nadie ha sido capaz de observarlas ni medirlas, y esto por una buena razón: no existen. Y dado que liberalismo y marxismo dependen de estas unidades inexistentes, sus teorías están suspendidas en el aire. No pueden explicar el proceso que más importa: la acumulación de capital.
Este libro ofrece una alternativa radical. De acuerdo con los autores, el capital no es una entidad económica estrechamente identificable, sino una cuantificación simbólica del poder. Tiene poco que ver con la utilidad o el trabajo abstracto, y se extiende más allá de las máquinas y las líneas de producción. El capital, afirman Bichler y Nitzan, representa el poder organizado de los grupos del capital dominante para reconfigurar –o creordenar– su sociedad.
Escrito en un lenguaje simple, accesible a lectores neófitos y expertos, este libro desarrolla una economía política novedosa. Conduce al lector a través de la historia, los supuestos y las limitaciones de la economía dominante y sus teorías políticas asociadas, examina la evolución del pensamiento marxista sobre la acumulación y el Estado, y articula una innovadora teoría del ‘capital como poder’, así como una nueva historia del ‘modo de poder capitalista’
Remembering Allen Fenichel, 1936-2018
Get PDFI met Allen in September of 1980. He was 44, I was 24. I had just arrived in Montreal to begin my economics degree at McGill and was ready to ‘take on’ the economists. It was the first session of the first course of the program ‘Introduction to Economics’, which was to be taught by Professor Fenichel to an audience of 300 students. Although I didn’t know much economics, I considered myself ‘critical’. I walked into the auditorium fully expecting McGill’s Economics faculty to be gatekeepers of capitalism and conservative apostles of ‘neoclassical economics’ – and I had made it my mission to debunk their dogma. But I was quickly disappointed
The Aggregation Problem: Implications for Ecological Economics
Get PDFThis article discusses the aggregation problem and its implications for ecological economics. The aggregation problem consists of a simple dilemma: when adding heterogeneous phenomena together, the observer must choose the unit of analysis. The dilemma is that this choice affects the resulting measurement. This means that aggregate measurements are dependent on one’s goals, and on underlying theory. Using simple examples, this article shows how the aggregation problem complicates tasks such as calculating indexes of aggregate quantity, and how it undermines attempts to find a singular metric for complex issues such as sustainability
Hierarchy and the Power-Law Income Distribution Tail
Get PDFWhat explains the power-law distribution of top incomes? This paper tests the hypothesis that it is firm hierarchy that creates the power-law income distribution tail. Using the available case-study evidence on firm hierarchy, I create the first large-scale simulation of the hierarchical structure of the US private sector. Although not tuned to do so, this model reproduces the power-law scaling of top US incomes. I show that this is purely an effect of firm hierarchy. This raises the possibility that the ubiquity of power-law income distribution tails is due to the ubiquity of hierarchical organization in human societies
Can Capitalists Afford Recovery? A 2018 Update
Get PDF. . . Looking forward, the prognosis for capitalists seems negative. Over the last few years, unemployment has fallen sharply, and if the predictive power of our chart remains intact, the capitalist income-share-read-power is bound to contract further, raising the ante for a prolonged accumulation crisis. Eventually, though, capitalists are likely the resolve their CasP crisis, as they have done repeatedly for nearly a century, by offloading it onto the underlying population in the form of rising unemployment
CasP's 'Differential Accumulation' versus Veblen's 'Differential Advantage'
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. As we show, 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
이윤의 경고: 피를 부를 것이다 (Profit Warning: There Will Be Blood)
Get PDF우리는 2014년 RWER에 게재한 논문 ‘여전히 석유 문제인가Still About Oil?’의 차트들을 업 데이트 해 보았는데, 그 차트들이 제시하는 그림은 자본이 무력을 요구하고 있는 것으로 해석 된다.
1980년대 말부터 우리는 중동이 1960년대 말 이래로 무기 달러-석유 달러 동맹 (Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition)의 자본화된 권력에 의해 크게 좌우되어 왔다 고 주장했다. 이 동맹은 주요 석유 기업들, OPEC 카르텔, 무기 하청기업체들, 건설기 업들, 거대 금융기관들로 이루어진 느슨한 연합체이다. 이들의 차등적 축적은 한편으 로 중동의 ‘에너지 분쟁’으로부터 수혜를 입었으며, 다른 한편으로는 그러한 분쟁을 부채질 하고 지속되도록 조력했다. 우리는 이러한 분쟁들이 지역을 넘어서 지구적 차 원에서 성장의 성쇠, 인플레이션 소용돌이, 그리고 일부 중요한 부문에서는 자본주의 적 권력 양식의 진화 그 자체에 영향을 미치며 엄청난 파장을 일으켰다고 주장했다. 그리고 우리가 보기에, 지금 다시 이러한 충격에 관해 문제의식을 던져야 한다