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El Capital Como Poder. Hacia Una Nueva Cosmología del Capitalismo (2002)
No full textLas teorías convencionales del capitalismo están sumidas en una profunda crisis: tras siglos de debate, siguen siendo incapaces de decirnos qué es el capital. Liberales y marxistas conciben el capital como una entidad económica que miden con dos cantidades universales: la utilidad o el trabajo abstracto, respectivamente. Pero estas unidades son totalmente ficticias: no se pueden observar ni medir. No existen. Y como el liberalismo y el marxismo necesitan estas unidades inexistentes, sus teorías flotan en el vacío. No pueden explicar el proceso que más importa: la acumulación de capital.
Este fallo no es casual. Cada modo de poder evoluciona en concierto con sus teorías e ideologías dominantes. En el capitalismo, estas teorías e ideologías pertenecían inicialmente al estudio de la economía política, la primera ciencia mecánica de la sociedad. Pero el modo de poder capitalista siguió cambiando, y a medida que el poder detrás del capital se hizo más y más visible, la ciencia de la economía política se desintegró. A finales del siglo XIX, con el dominio del capital, la economía política se había dividido en dos ámbitos distintos: la economía y la política. Y en el siglo XX, cuando la lógica del poder del capital ya había penetrado en todos los rincones de la sociedad, las diversas ciencias sociales arrebataron lo que quedaba de la economía política. Hoy en día, el capital reina, pero los teóricos carecen de un marco coherente para explicarlo.
La teoría del capital como poder ofrece una alternativa unificada a esta dispersión. Sostiene que el capital no es una mera entidad económica, sino una cuantificación simbólica del poder. El capital tiene poco que ver con la utilidad o el trabajo abstracto, y va mucho más allá de las máquinas y las líneas de producción. En términos más generales, representa el poder organizado de los grupos de capital dominantes para remodelar -o crear- su sociedad.
Esta concepción conduce a otra cosmología del capitalismo. Ofrece un nuevo marco teórico del capital, basado en las nociones gemelas de capital dominante y acumulación diferencial, una nueva concepción del Estado capital y una nueva historia del modo de poder capitalista. También introduce nuevos métodos de investigación empírica, como nuevas categorías; nuevas formas de concebir, relacionar y presentar los datos; nuevas estimaciones y medidas; y, por último, las premisas de una nueva contabilidad desagregada que revela las dinámicas conflictivas de la sociedad
Why Scorsese is Right About Corporate Power
Full text linkIn the March 2021 issue of Harper’s, Scorsese wrote an essay to pay tribute to Federico Fellini, the Italian director who directed such great films as La Strada, 8 1/2, La Dolce Vita, Nights of Cabiria and Satyricon. Scorsese writing on Fellini is definitely newsworthy for cinephiles who want to know about Fellini’s beginnings in Italian neo-realism (for example, he worked with Rosselini on Rome, Open City), or who simply want to be reminded of why his filmography is so great. However, the news of this essay’s arrival went well beyond film studies and had very little to do with Fellini. People were talking about the essay because Scorcese framed his tribute to Fellini – which was both personal and knowledgeable – with an argument about the decline of cinema as an art form.
This paper explains why Scorsese is right about the differences that exist between himself and a director like Fellini. In fact, we can use Scorsese’s argument as a platform to widen our perspective on the political economy of Hollywood. The story Scorsese is telling about the business of Hollywood is a story about business interests wanting to reduce risk. The ambiguity of risk in this story – is it financial risk or is it aesthetic risk? – is a helpful shortcut to understanding what reducing risk means for those who have control over the industrial art of filmmaking. When the Hollywood film business is estimating its future earnings, risk perceptions account for the possibility that the future of culture will be different–and perhaps radically different–from what capitalists expect it to be. This logic of capitalist accounting, while quantitative in expression (prices, income, volatility, etc.), is social in essence. For this reason, the capitalization of cinema cannot overlook any social dimension of cinema, be it aesthetic, political or cultural. The eye of capitalization searches for any social condition that could have an impact on “the level and pattern of capitalist earnings” (Nitzan & Bichler, 2009, p. 166).
This paper is a lightly edited compilation of a two-part series originally published by Notes on Cinema in June and July, 2021. It has been re-published here with permission of the author
Book Review: Steve Keen (2021) The New Economics: A Manifesto
Full text linkSteve Keen’s book, The New Economics: A Manifesto (2021), offers a new path for economics, and for good reason. In his view, neoclassicism, the paradigm that rules modern-day economics, has become a serious menace: "I regard Neoclassical economics as not merely a bad methodology for economic analysis, but as an existential threat to the continued existence of capitalism – and human civilization in general. It has to go. (155). "
Strong words? Of course, but they are wholly warranted. Neoclassical economics is the official scientific underpinning of capitalism as well as its main ideological defence, and according to Keen, it fails in both tasks.2 Contrary to received opinion, neoclassicism cannot explain capitalism – either in detail or in the aggregate – and the policies it prescribes do not support but undermine the very system it defends. It must be scrapped, says Keen, and the purpose of his book is to explain why and outline what should come in its stead.
Half a century worth of research and writing on the subject has made Keen one of the world’s foremost critics of neoclassical economics. His previous bestseller, the rigorous-yet-accessible Debunking Economics (2011), dismantled neoclassical microeconomics. His new volume hammers its macro framework.
The book focuses on three key issues: (1) the bizarre neoclassical perspective that money, credit and debt do not matter for the macroeconomy; (2) the neoclassical insistence that the economy’s complex, nonlinear turbulences are best explained in linear, self-equilibrating terms; and (3) the fact that neoclassicists have hijacked the economics of climate change, using patently false assumptions to justify do-nothing policies with untold future consequences
Inflation: Everywhere and Always Differential
Full text linkIn November 2021, I wrote a post called ‘The Truth About Inflation’. At the time, inflation fears were heating up. And as usual, mainstream economists were missing the bus.
Sure, economists pointed to the consumer price index and said, “Look, it’s going up!” But they didn’t look under the hood of this index to see the big picture. Despite what economists proclaim, inflation is not a uniform increase in prices. It is an instability in the whole price system.
It’s now been a year since that post was published, so I thought I’d update the analysis. While much has changed in the global political landscape, the underlying picture of inflation remains the same: it is everywhere and always differential
Hype: The Capitalist Degree of Induced Participation
Full text link* Winner of the 2022 RECASP Second Essay Prize *
Power is usually considered as either a ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ construct, as in the power to force action versus the power to forbid it. This paper explores a hybridized approach to power based on the idea of ‘induced participation’. Building on Bichler and Nitzan’s theory of ‘capital as power’, I argue that capitalism reinforces its hold on society through the strategic use of ‘hype’. The idea is that capitalists counteract resistance by boosting confidence in the promise of reward, a process that can be better understood using the concept of hype
The Billionaire Boom: Capital as Power and the Distribution of Wealth
Full text linkFROM THE CHAPTER: During the pandemic, the world’s billionaires increased their net worth to unprecedented historical heights. This was an impressive feat for the world’s richest, who took to celebrations by launching themselves into outer space, hosted factory mega-raves, and perhaps more prudently sailed away from the virus on their mega-yachts during the mass suffering caused by the global health crisis. Whether billionaires have profited during the pandemic, or whether billionaires have profited from the pandemic may be difficult to detect with any certainty. However, we know that the accumulation of billionaire wealth has transcended previous orders of magnitude set before the crisis.
In this chapter, I use the capital as power framework to argue that ownership and exclusion (institutional power) rather than individual productivity or the exploitation of workers can help us account for the rise of the billionaire class and its increase in wealth throughout the pandemic. However, although ownership and exclusion are key factors in the rapid accumulation of wealth, so too have the unprecedented fiscal stimulus and loose monetary policy of governments and central banks during the pandemic. At least in the United States, there is some survey evidence to suggest that a considerable amount of stimulus checks given by the Biden administration ended up in financial markets, boosting share prices, and thus the wealth of billionaire shareholders like Elon Musk of Tesla. This chapter considers two additional main factors: The turn to neoliberalism and rapid technological change. To demonstrate my argument, I have divided this chapter in the following manner. First, I consider the rise of the billionaire class before and during the pandemic. Second, I consider the neoclassical and Marxist understandings of the distribution of wealth and contrast this with the capital as a power perspective before discussing some of the reasons for the rise in billionaire wealth. In the third section, I briefly consider whether billionaires should exist and canvass some recent proposals to address the divide between billionaires and the vast majority of citizens. The chapter then ends with a short conclusion
The Political Economy of Hollywood. Capitalist Power and Cultural Production
Full text linkIn Hollywood, the goals of art and business are entangled. Directors, writers, actors, and idealistic producers aspire to make the best films possible. These aspirations often interact with the dominant firms that control Hollywood film distribution. This control of distribution is crucial as it enables the firms and other large businesses involved, such as banks that offer financing, to effectively stand between film production and the market. This book analyses the power structure of the Hollywood film business and its general modes of behaviour. More specifically, the work analyses how the largest Hollywood firms attempt to control social creativity such that they can mitigate the financial risks inherent in the art of filmmaking.
Controlling the ways people make or watch films, the book argues, is a key element of Hollywood’s capitalist power. Capitalist power—the ability to control, modify, and, sometimes, limit social creation through the rights of ownership—is the foundation of capital accumulation. For the Hollywood film business, capitalist power is about the ability of business concerns to set the terms that will shape the future of cinema. For the major film distributors of Hollywood, these terms include the types of films that will be distributed, the number of films that will be distributed, and the cinematic alternatives that will be made available to the individual moviegoer. Combining theoretical analysis with detailed empirical research on the financial performance of the major Hollywood film companies, the book details how Hollywood’s capitalist goals have clashed with the aesthetic potentials of cinema and ultimately stymied creativity in the pursuit of limiting risk.
This sharp critique of the Hollywood machine provides vital reading for students and scholars of political economy, political theory, film studies, and cinema
The Voldemort Index
No full textFor centuries, philosophers have sought to understand concepts such as ‘equity’, ‘fairness’, and ‘justice’. The result has been widespread confusion. Fortunately, Lord Voldemort has rescued us from this moral daze by uncovering the truth. There is only one ethic — the pursuit of power. This is the ‘Voldemort principle’.
Although it seems hard to believe (for the modern reader), the rulers of old spoke openly of following the Voldemort principle. For instance, the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser bragged of imposing a ‘heavy yoke of empire’ onto his enemies. Sadly, in the centuries that followed, tyrants grew more timid. During the Middle Ages, the masses began to demand ‘rights’ and sought to ‘limit’ the power of elites. Rulers responded by concealing talk of power inside a code called ‘Latin’. It’s a trick that the privileged have used ever since.
Today, elites prefer to speak in a code called ‘economics’. Although it has the appearance of English, ‘economics’ redefines key words to aid the accumulation of power. Specifically, the word ‘power’ is coded into the word ‘free’. Thus, when economists speak of a ‘free market’, they mean a place where the rich get what they want.
Regrettably, after articulating this utopia, economists tend to get lost within it. They forget that the real world can be quite different from the one they envision. The purpose of this essay is to explore the real world — to see how close it comes to the Voldemort principle.
The key question is this: to what degree do the rich get their way? To answer this question, I construct a metric that I call the ‘Voldemort index’. The index measures the degree to which income buys access to resources.
When we apply this index to the real world, the results are alarming. Far from getting their way, it seems that the rich are increasingly left wanting. Although the evidence that follows is disturbing, it should not be ignored. For it is only by understanding the world that we can once again rule it
Covid-19 and the Global Political Economy. Crises in the 21st Century
No full textCovid-19 and the Global Political Economy investigates and explores how far and in what ways the Covid-19 pandemic is challenging, restructuring, and perhaps remaking aspects of the global political economy.
Since the 1970s, neoliberal capitalism has been the guiding principle of global development: fiscal discipline, privatisations, deregulation, the liberalisation of trade and investment regimes, and lower corporate and wealth taxation. But, after Covid-19, will these trends continue, particularly when states are continuing to struggle with overcoming the pandemic and violating one of neoliberalism’s key principles: balanced budgets? The pandemic has exposed the fragility of the global political economy, and it can be argued that the intensification of global trade, tourism, and finance over the past 30 years has facilitated the spread of infectious diseases such as Covid-19. Therefore, economies in lockdown, jittery markets, and massive government spending have sparked interest in potentially re-evaluating certain features of the global political economy. This volume brings together leading and upcoming critical scholars in international relations and international political economy to provide novel, timely, and innovative research on how the Covid-19 pandemic is impacting (and will continue to impact) the global economy in important dimensions, including state fiscal policy, monetary policy, the accumulation of debt, health and social reproduction, and the future of austerity and the fate of neoliberalism.
This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and experts in international relations and international political economy, as well as history, anthropology, political science, sociology, cultural studies, economics, development studies, and human geography
Star Power and Risk. A Political Economic Study of Casting Trends in Hollywood
Full text linkThis paper builds an empirical and theoretical model to analyze how the financial goal of risk reduction changed the insides of Hollywood’s star system. For the moviegoer looking at Hollywood cinema from the outside, the function of the star system has remained the same since the 1920s: to have recognizable actors attract large audiences to Hollywood’s biggest and most expensive productions. The composition of this system is, however, sensitive to many historical changes in the business and culture of cinema.
If the evolution of Hollywood’s star system is shaped by broader social factors, risk reduction would be a key factor after 1980. This paper uses Internet Movie Database (IMDb) casting data to analyze how the star system was a factor in this period of risk reduction. Film casting assists risk reduction when a star system is built on controlled repetition. Repetitive casting — choosing the same people to star in a series of films — is a form of control because repetitive selection is the inequality of opportunity by another name: if an in-group is internally repetitive when alternatives exist, an out-group is repeatedly excluded.
There are two key conclusions to the analysis of the IMDb dataset. First, casting repetitiveness/inequality in the blockbuster era of Hollywood (1980-present) is low compared to Hollywood’s “classical” studio system (1930-1948). Second, the historically low repetitiveness/inequality can be misleading if we ignore sector characteristics such as firm size and level of theatrical distribution. Within the top-tier, whether measured by size of distributor or number of opening theatres in theatrical release, Hollywood relies on repetitive casting.
The theoretical part of this paper will identify the role of capitalist power in the formation of a star system. Capitalist power, in this case, is defined as the ability of Hollywood to control everything from the industrial production of films to the broader social relations of cinema. This control is never absolute, but the role of capitalist power in the star system has a key purpose: to make sure that casting decisions are complementary to business interests