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Una teoría de la acumulación realmente existente
Get PDFLos autores se han tomado el salomónico cuidado de rivalizar por partes iguales con las dos tradiciones que compiten por la última palabra en el viejo debate sobre la acumulación de capital: la economía neoclásica y la teoría marxista. Semejante desatino autopublicitario puede disminuir la predisposición del auditorio hacia sus ideas, y en el peor de los casos granjearse cierta animadversión a manera de acto reflejo. Y sin embargo, estimo que El capital como poder (Eccp) de Shimshon Bichler y Jonathan Nitzan, puede sobrevivir a su deliberado exilio del mundo de los marcos teóricos célebres y, con la complicidad del lector proclive a la heterodoxias, ofrecer una novedosa interpretación del objeto en cuestión. En una era de publicaciones dominadas por el formato del paper y el género de la exégesis, pocos libros se imponen el desafío de realizar una contribución original a un debate sobre el que han corrido ríos de tinta. Mucho menos poseen consistencia suficiente para llevar a buen puerto una empresa de tal envergadura. En las líneas siguientes expongo algunas razones que, a mi juicio, colocan a Eccp en esta selecta minoría de textos
The Nordhaus Racket: How to Use Capitalization to Minimize the Cost of Climate Change and Win a Nobel for ‘Sustainable Growth’
Get PDFThe LA Times called the bluff: William D. Nordhaus won the Nobel prize in economics for a climate model that minimized the cost of rising global temperatures and undermined the need for urgent action. Unfortunately, though, the article missed the nugget in the racket
2018 Capital as Power Essay Prize
Get PDFThe Review of Capital as Power (RECASP) announces an annual essay prize on the subject of capital as power. The best paper will receive a prize of 500 will be awarded to the second best contribution, while a $300 prize will be given to the third best article.
Submitted articles should not have been published in a refereed journal or book before. The particular topic is open. The paper can be theoretical, historical or empirical, and it may support or critique the capital as power framework. Winning essays will be published (with revisions, if necessary) in the Review of Capital as Power.
DEADLINE: January 31, 201
La théorie du capital humain, c’est du baratin!
No full textMême si vous n’êtes pas économiste, vous avez entendu parler de la théorie du capital humain: plus on fait des études, plus on est productif et mieux on est payé. Dans une contribution décapante, l’économiste Blair Fix remet en cause ces liens de causalité et invite à se débarrasser de cette théorie
With Their Back to the Future: Will Past Earnings Trigger the Next Crisis?
Get PDFThe U.S. stock market is again in turmoil. After a two-year bull run in which share prices soared by nearly 50 per cent, the market is suddenly dropping. Since the beginning of 2018, it lost nearly 10 per cent of its value, threatening investors with an official ‘correction’ or worse.
As always, there is no shortage of explanations. Politically inclined analysts emphasize Trump’s recently announced trade wars, sprawling scandals and threatening investigations, as well as the broader turn toward ‘populism’; interest-rate forecasters point to central-bank tightening and china’s negative credit impulse; quants speak of breached support lines and death crosses; bottom-up analysts highlight the negative implications of the Face-book/Cambridge Analytica debacle for the ‘free-data’ business model; and top-down fundamentalists indicate that, at near-record valuations, the stock market is a giant bubble ready to be punctured.
And on the face of it, these explanations all ring true. They articulate various threats to future profits, interest rates and risk perceptions, and since equity prices discount expected risk-adjusted future earnings, these threats imply lower prices.
But there is one little problem. Unlike their pundits, capitalists nowadays tend to look not forward, but backward: instead of matching asset prices to the distant future, they fit them to the immediate past
Energy, Hierarchy and the Origin of Inequality
Get PDFWhere should we look to understand the origin of inequality? Most research focuses on three windows of evidence: (1) the archaeological record; (2) existing traditional societies; and (3) the historical record. I propose a fourth window of evidence — modern society itself. I hypothesize that we can infer the origin of inequality from the modern relation between energy use, hierarchy, and in- equality. To do this, I create a large-scale numerical model that is informed by modern evidence. I then use this model to project modern trends into the past. The results are promising. The model predicts an explosion of inequality with the transition to agrarian levels of energy use. Subsequent increases in energy use are predicted to have little effect on inequality. The results are broadly consistent with the available evidence. This suggests that the hierarchical structure of modern societies may provide a window into the origin of inequality
Capital as Power @ Historical Materialism 2018: Panel Series at The Great Transition Conference, Montreal, May 17-20, 2018
Get PDFThe Forum on Capital as Power presents a panel series at the Montreal 2018 Great Transition Conference, May 17-20. The panels include the following papers:
1. ‘What is Capital as Power?’
Shimshon Bichler, Israel and Jonathan Nitzan, Canada
2. ‘Capitalization, Capital Goods and the State of Capital: The Boundaries of Accumulation’
DT Cochrane, Ryerson University
3. ‘Financial Derivatives or the Autocatalytic Sprawl of Pseudorational Capitalist Power’
Ulf Martin, Germany
4. ‘Uneven and Combined Confusion: On the Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism and the Rise of the West’
Tim Di Muzio, University of Wollongong and Matthew Dow, York University
5. ‘Energy and Institution Size’
Blair Fix, York University
6. ‘Growing through Sabotage: Energizing Hierarchical Power’
Shimshon Bichler, Israel and Jonathan Nitzan, Canada
7. ‘Is the Power of Mass Culture Profitable?’
James McMahon, University of Toronto
8. ‘Trump's Corporate Tax Reform: What's Power Got to Do with It?’
Sandy Hager, City, University of London
9. ‘Theorizing Income-Wealth Inequality Data – a CasP Approach’
Max Grubman, Tel Aviv Universit
Can Capitalists Afford Recovery? A Closer Look
No full textOur RWER blog post, ‘Can capitalists afford recovery: A 2018 update’, showed U.S. unemployment to be a highly reliable leading indicator for the capitalist share of domestic income three years later.
An observant commentator, though, suggested otherwise (first comment by jayarava). Although true for much of the postwar period, this association no longer holds, s/he argued. ‘Something changed after the global financial crisis to decouple unemployment from income shares’, s/he posited, pointing to the ‘new power of globalized capital to force down wages even in times of [low] unemployment’ (or rather, that during an expansion, capitalists can raise prices faster than wages, thereby augmenting their income share, which is the conventional view.
This post assesses this claim more closely, by examining the correlation between (1) absolute levels of unemployment and the capitalist share of income, and (2) their respective rates of change
Capitalist Income and Hierarchical Power: A Gradient Hypothesis
Get PDFThis paper offers a new approach to the study of capitalist income. Building on the ‘capital as power’ framework, I propose that capitalists earn their income not from any productive asset, but from the legal right to command a corporate hierarchy. In short, I hypothesize that capitalist income stems from hierarchical power. Based on this thinking, I hypothesize that the capitalist fraction of an individual’s income is a gradient function of hierarchical power (which I define as the number of subordinates under one’s control). Using data from US CEOs, I find evidence that this is true. Furthermore, a hierarchical model of the United States that generalizes this data accurately reproduces many aspects of the US distribution of capitalist income, including the relation between income size and capitalist income fraction. This evidence suggests that the ownership structure of US society is closely linked to the hierarchical structure of firms. This has important implications for the study of income distribution
Arms and Oil in the Middle East: A Biography of Research
Get PDFThis essay interweaves two stories—one theoretical and empirical, the other autobiographical. The first story embeds the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the broader political economy of the Middle East and the global accumulation of “capital as power.” The second story narrates the authors’ personal journey to uncover, theorize, and research this enfoldment. The essay explores and contextualizes the misleading duality of politics and economics; the link between military spending, finance, and stagflation; the concepts of “dominant capital” and “differential accumulation” and their evolution through “breadth” and “depth”; the manner in which these concepts and processes inform the political economy of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and the ways in which they help identify the key role of the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition and predict the periodic eruption of Middle East “energy conflicts.” In their explorations, the authors have encountered numerous gatekeepers who tried to derail their research as well as a few open-minded editors who sought to promote it, and it is probably fair to say that, dialectically, they have benefited from both.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2018.153443