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The Tragedy of Human Development. A Genealogy of Capital as Power
Get PDFFROM THE BACK COVER: How might an objective observer conceive of what humans have accomplished as a species over its brief history? Benjamin argues that history can be judged as one giant catastrophe. Liberals suggest that this is to sombre an assessment and that human history can be read as a story of greater and greater progress in human rights, prosperity and the decrease of arbitrary and extra-judicial violence. But is there a third reading of history, one that neither interprets human history as a giant catastrophe or endless progress? Could we not say that human development has been a tragedy?
This book explores the idea of human development as a tragedy from the perspective of capitalist power. Although the argument of this book draws heavily on critical political economy, the analysis considers interdisciplinary literature in an effort to explore how major revolutions have transformed human social relations of power and created certain path dependencies that may ultimately lead to our downfall as a species. Intellectually sophisticated and readable, this book offers a provocative genealogy of capitalist power and the tragedy of human development
The Need to Rid the World of Inequality. Review of The 1% and the Rest of Us
No full textFROM THE REVIEW: Tim Di Muzio, a senior lecturer in international relations and political economy at Wollongong University in Australia, has written a book – ‘The 1% and the Rest of Us: A Political Economy of Dominant Ownership’ (Zed Books, 2015) – that answers so many questions and provides so much relevant background to readily understand wealth and its maldistribution [. . .] ‘The 1% and the Rest of Us’ distills the concepts of capitalism, political economy, finance, inequality, the profligacy of the 1%-ers, and much more in morally coherent chunks of need-to-know information. It is a superb book
A Podcast Interview with Sandy Hager on Public Debt and Inequality
No full textWho owns the U.S. public debt? Why is it such an important commodity in global capitalism? Why does public debt provoke such intense political debate? And how can the quantitative data on the ownership structure of public debt provide insights into these topics? Our guest today, Sandy Hager, reveals answers to all of these questions and more.
Duration: 41 minute
Financialization or Capitalization? Debating Capitalist Power in South Korea in the Context of Neoliberal Globalization
No full textThe article reviews debates concerning financialization in South Korea, with a focus on ongoing arguments between liberal, post-Keynesian, institutionalist and Marxist economists. It argues that post-Keynesian and institutionalist perspectives in particular neglect important class processes through which the financial circuit operates within the Korean economy, especially the power of Korea’s large, family-led conglomerates, or chaebol. In order to build upon Marxist approaches to Korean finance, we argue that Nitzen and Bichler’s approach to the ‘capitalization’ of capitalist class power provides a useful heuristic for understanding the differential power of Korean chaebol and their integration into global capital
Disobedient Things. The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Accounting for Disaster
No full textAnalysis of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the accumulatory decline of BP demonstrates both the analytical efficacy of the capital-as-power (CasP) approach to value theory, and the irreducible role of objects in the process of accumulation. Rather than productivity per se, accumulation depends on control of productivity. Owners’ control is over both the human and non-human components of systems of production, which transcend the standard categories of culture/politics/economics/technology. Capitalization translates the irreducible social order, things and all, that bear on accumulation into commensurable units of capital. The decline of BP in the wake of the disaster expressed the market’s falling confidence in the obedience of the entities that bear on its profits, including the things that comprise its productive capacity
Miksi Kapitalistit Eivät Halua Talouden Elpyvän (Why Capitalists Don't Want Recovery)
No full textMotiivinsa onkin kasvattaa valtaansa suhteessa muihin? Tällöin kapitalisteilla on hyvä syy rakastaa kriisiä ja jämähtää paikoilleen.
Suomennos: Matias Kaupp
A CasP Model of the Stock Market -- Video and Chartbook
No full textMost explanations of stock market booms and busts are based on contrasting the underlying, ‘fundamental’ logic of the economy with the exogenous, non-economic factors that presumably distort it. Our paper offers a radically different model, examining the stock market not from the mechanical viewpoint of a distorted economy, but from the dialectical perspective of capitalized power. The model demonstrates that (1) the valuation of equities represents capitalized power; (2) capitalized power is dialectically intertwined with systemic fear; and (3) the connection between capitalized power and systemic fear is mediated by strategic sabotage. This triangular model, we posit, can offer a basis for examining the asymptotes, or limits, of capitalized power and the ways in which these asymptotes relate to the historical and ongoing transformation of the capitalist mode of power.
Video duration: 1:53 hours
WHERE: Room 280N in York Lanes, Keele Campus, York University
WHEN: Thursday, September 29, 2016, 2:15-4:00 p
Reading Notes on the Book Capital as Power
No full textThere are many similarities between the theses of Nitzan and Bichler and those of Temps Critiques so we deemed it appropriate to examine their book further
Korea’s Post-1997 Restructuring: An Analysis of Capital as Power
No full text*** WINNER OF THE RRPE ANNUAL BEST PAPER AWARD FOR 2016 ***
This paper aims to transcend current debates on Korea’s post-1997 restructuring, which rely on a dichotomy between domestic industrial capital and foreign financial capital, by adopting Nitzan and Bichler’s capital-as-power perspective. Based on this approach, the paper analyzes Korea’s recent political economic restructuring as the latest phase in the evolution of capitalist power and its transformative regimes of capital accumulation.
[The full text PDF is a postprint of an article published by the Review of Radical Political Economics (0486613415594147, first posted on August 20, 2015 as doi:10.1177/0486613415594147, and later published in Volume 42, Number 2, May, pp. 287-309).
Energy, Capital as Power and World Order
No full textUntil late, the subject of energy and its importance for capitalism and the constitution and reconstitution of world order has been sorely overlooked in the international political economy (IPE) literature. Indeed, only two of the major textbooks in IPE have chapters on energy. This is also true of the literature known as classical political economy. With few exceptions, the main questions that animated the classics such as the origins of the wealth of nations and the distribution of wealth are somehow disconnected from the production and consumption of energy. Marginal exceptions granted, there is little acknowledgement that the last three centuries of uneven and combined “progress” and “development” have anything to do with the exploitation of coal, oil and natural gas. However, if recent scholarship is any indication, this appears to be changing both within IPE and within other academic fields such as geography, sociology and environmental studies. In this emergent literature, we can find an argument that energy should not be treated as auxiliary to our analysis of the global political economy but essential to understanding and interpreting its emergence, transformations and future trajectories. Since fossil fuels make up an overwhelming share of global energy production and consumption I will mainly concentrate of non-renewable fossil fuels and aim to provide a critical political economy approach to energy, capitalism and world order by using the capital as power perspective.
This is certainly not the only approach that we could take, but it is the one I find most revealing and convincing. To make this argument, I have divided the article in the following way. First, I concisely survey why energy is important for our theorizations of the global political economy as well as for understanding the practices of everyday life. With this background information in place, I briefly review how mainstream and critical accounts have approached the question of energy and the global political economy and demonstrate how the capital as power approach is distinctive for its focus on capitalization and social reproduction. In the second section, I will consider the power of the oil and gas firms in shaping and reshaping social reproduction and how there are strong indicators to suggest that renewable forms of energy cannot presently -- and likely never will -- replace fossil fuels and perpetuate energy intensive modes of living centuries into the future. Moreover, because of the entrenched power of oil and gas firms and their connection with affluent social reproduction, transitioning to less carbon intensive modes of social reproduction are being stalled. I conclude the article by discussing the relationship between energy, violence and world order