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Accumulating through Food Crisis? Farmers, Commodity Traders and the Distributional Politics of Financialization
No full textThis paper considers the domestic and international ramifications of financialization and grain price instability in the US agri-food sector. It finds that during the recent period of high and volatile prices, the average income of large-scale farms reached the earnings threshold of the top percentile of US households, and agricultural commodity traders markedly outperformed other corporate groups. In contrast, small-scale farms, particularly those involved in cattle and wheat production, have struggled to manage the uncertainty brought by price tumult. The paper goes on to examine the role that these uneven distributional dynamics play in debates around how hedging and speculation should be defined and regulated in the wake of the food crisis of 2007–08. It shows that a coalition of small-scale farmers has actively pushed for a far-reaching definition of speculation and concomitantly wide-ranging curbs on what they deem to be speculative activity. Conversely, the major commodity traders and a plurality of organizations representing large-scale grain producers have called for a narrower interpretation of speculation which leaves the extant regulatory regime largely in place. With these insights, I suggest that financialization and associated price volatility tend to reinforce inequality in rural America while possibly exacerbating social instability and hardship abroad
Is the Power of Mass Culture Profitable? - Video
No full textThis presentation will examine how and why political economic theories of mass culture have accumulated, but not settled, methodological issues about the meaning of value and the nature of productivity. Labour is certainly an important factor to any comprehensive study of capitalist mass culture, but it is our assumptions about economic productivity and not the ubiquity of wage labour that tells us we have to look at the latter in terms of productive output. Therefore, if we use entirely different assumptions, we might be able to create stronger links between profitability and the ideological aspects of mass culture.
Inspired by Fix’s (2017) and Nitzan and Bichler’s (2017) recent writings on growth and hierarchy, this presentation will focus on the ability of firms to, individually or collectively, negate the potential of creativity. Investment will still involve some type of production, but it can now also depend on the ability of alternative forms of human ingenuity to be neglected, marginalized or repressed by the authority of others. Labour and the costs of production still matter, but the strategies of business enterprise have an authoritative element when large firms can also set the terms of social creativity. Furthermore, this power can be specifically characterized as capitalist power the more we pull away from the assumption that institutional power is secondary or external to the “real” story of economic productivity, however measured.
Refreshment will be served and everyone is welcome.
WHERE: Verney Room, South 674 Ross Building, Keele Campus, York University
WHEN: 2:30 - 5:30 pm, Wednesday, 1 November 201
Energy and Institution Size
No full textWhy do institutions grow? Despite nearly a century of scientific effort, there remains little consensus on this topic. This paper offers a new approach that focuses on energy consumption. A systematic relation exists between institution size and energy consumption per capita: as energy consumption increases, institutions become larger. I hypothesize that this relation results from the interplay between technological scale and human biological limitations. I also show how a simple stochastic model can be used to link energy consumption with firm dynamics
Pricing Time: Outline and Discussion on Suhail Malik's 'The Ontology of Finance'
Get PDFThe following is an outline of Suhail Malik, 'The Ontology of Finance', Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development, Vol. VIII (2014), 629¬813, prepared by Ray Brassier, followed by a discussion after his lecture on June 28 at the School for Politics and Critique 2017 in Ohrid, Macedonia
2017 Capital as Power Essay Prize
No full textThe 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 cri-tique the capital as power framework. Winning essays will be pub-lished (with revisions, if necessary) in the Review of Capital as Power.
DEADLINE: January 31, 201
A Power Theory of Personal Income Distribution - Video and Working Paper
No full textDue in no small part to the work of Thomas Piketty, the empirical study of income inequality has flourished in the last decade. But this plethora of new data has not led to a corresponding theoretical revolution. Why? The problem, I believe, is an unwillingness to question and test the basic assumptions on which current theory rests. Most theories of personal income distribution are deeply wedded to the assumption that income is proportional to productivity. However, this approach has a simple, but little discussed problem: income is distributed far more unequally than documented differentials in human labor productivity. But if not productivity, then what explains income? I propose that income is explained most strongly by social power, as manifested by one’s rank in an institutional hierarchy. Using a novel array of evidence, I show (for the first time) that there is a strong quantitative relation between income and hierarchical power. Moreover, I show that hierarchical power affects income more strongly than any other factor. I conclude that this is evidence for a power theory of personal income distribution.
Refreshment will be served and everyone is welcome.
WHERE: Verney Room, South 674 Ross Building, Keele Campus, York University
WHEN: 2:30 - 5:30 pm, Tuesday, 17 October 201
Can Capitalists Afford a Trumped Recovery?
No full textThe presidential election of Donald Trump has rekindled hopes for a U.S. recovery. The new president promises to ‘make America great again’, partly by creating many millions of new jobs for U.S. workers, and judging by the rising stock market, capitalists seem to love his narrative. But if Trump actually delivers on his promise, their attitude is likely to change radically. In our 2016 paper, ‘A CasP Model of the Stock Market’, we developed the concept of a ‘CasP policy cycle’, the idea that government policy, insofar as it caters to the imperative of capitalized power, favours low employment growth in order to enable low rates of interest and sustain the capitalist share of income. Should Trump proceeds with and succeeds in reversing this CasP policy cycle, his authoritarianism may end up undermining rather than boosting capitalized power. In this sense, his regime could well mark the beginning of the next major bear market
Review of 'Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder'
Get PDFFROM THE REVIEW: I don't think there is a more valuable book in my collection. While many economists have criticized the entirety of neo-classical economics, and many have offered various adjustments, none have offered an alternative theory of value which is a fundamental block of economics. Everything is built around it and [the book] is the first to offer a new theory in over 50 years
Third Speaker Series on the Capitalist Mode of Power - Videos and Program
No full textExisting theories of capitalism, mainstream as well as heterodox, view capitalism as a mode of production and consumption. The purpose of this ongoing speaker series is to interrogate capitalism as a mode of power. The presentations offer a power theory of personal income distribution (Blair Fix, 2:30-5:30pm, October 17, 2017), explore the power to externalize (DT Cochrane, 2:30-5:30pm, October 24, 2017), and interrogate the link between the power of mass culture and corporate profit (James McMahon, 2:30-5:30pm, November 1, 2017).
The presentations are organized by the Forum on Capital as Power and sponsored by the York Department of Politics.
Refreshments will be served and all are welcome.
WHERE: Verney Room, 674 South Ross, Keele Campus of York University
WHEN: October 17; October 24, November 1, 201
Blood and Oil in the Orient, Redux
No full textThis research note updates selected charts from three previous papers. The new data present a rather startling picture, suggesting that the Middle East – and the global political economy more generally – might face an important crossroads. Our assessment here rests on the analysis of capital as power, or CasP. Beginning in the late 1980s, we suggested that, since the late 1960s, the Middle East was greatly influenced by the capitalized power of a Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition – a loose coalition comprising the leading oil companies, the OPEC cartel, armament contractors, engineering firms and large financial institutions – whose differential accumulation benefitted from and in turn helped fuel and sustain Middle East ‘energy conflicts’. These conflicts, we argued, reverberated far beyond the region: they affected the ups and downs of global growth, the gyrations of inflation and, in some important respects, the very evolution of the capitalist mode of power. And this impact, it seems to us, is now being called into question