Contents

• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Why write a book about capital?
  • Capitalism without capital
  • This book is not about economics
  • How and why
  • What’s wrong with capital theory?
  • Toward a new theory of capital
  • A brief synopsis
  • Part I: dilemmas of political economy
  • Part II: the enigma of capital
  • Part III: capitalization
  • Lineages
  • Part IV: bringing power back in
  • Part V: accumulation of power
  • The capitalist creorder and humane society
• Part I: Dilemmas of political economy
• 2 The dual worlds
  • The bifurcations
  • Politics versus economics
    • The liberal view
    • The Marxist perspective
    • Capitalism from below, capitalism from above
  • Real and nominal
    • The classical dichotomy
    • The Marxist mismatch
    • Quantitative equivalence?
• 3 Power
  • The pre-capitalist backdrop
  • The new cosmology
  • The new science of capitalism
  • Separating economics from politics?
  • Enter power
• 4 Deflections of power
  • Liberal withdrawal and concessions
  • Neo-Marxism
  • The three fractures
  • Neo-Marxian economics: monopoly capital
    • Kalecki’s degree of monopoly
    • From surplus value to economic surplus
    • Realization and institutionalized waste
    • The limits of neo-Marxian economics
  • The culturalists: from criticism to postism
  • Statism
  • The techno-bureaucratic state
  • The autonomous state
  • The capitalist state
    • The state imperative
    • The flat approach
    • The hierarchical approach
    • Political Marxism
  • The capitalist totality
• Part II: The enigma of capital
• 5 Neoclassical parables
  • The material basis of capital
  • The production function
    • The two assumptions
    • Where does profit come from?
    • The birth of ‘economics’
  • Marginal productivity theory in historical context
    • The end of equilibrium
    • Public management
    • The best investment I ever made
  • Some very unsettling questions
    • The quantity of capital
    • Circularity
    • Reswitching
    • The Cambridge Controversy
    • Resuscitating capital
    • The measure of our ignorance
    • The victory of faith
• 6 The Marxist entanglement I: Values and prices
  • Content and form
  • The labour theory of value
  • Three challenges
    • Socially necessary abstract labour
    • Production
    • Transformation
    • The road ahead
  • The second transformation
    • Why only labour?
    • Excluding power
    • Omitting capitalization
    • What does the labour theory of value theorize?
  • Testing the labour theory of value
    • The price of what?
    • Absence of value
    • Recap
  • The first transformation
  • Inconsistency, redundancy, impossibility
    • The dual system
    • The complicating detour
    • Joint production
    • Capitalism sans values?
    • The transformation so far
  • New solutions, new interpretations
    • Changing the assumptions
    • Complexity
    • Changing the definitions
    • Recounting costs
    • Prices as values
• 7 The Marxist entanglement II: Who is productive, who is not?
  • Productive and unproductive labour
  • Production versus circulation
    • Financial intermediation, advertising and insurance
    • Disaggregates in the aggregate
  • Objective exchange values?
    • Eating the cake and having it too
    • Capitalist answers, pre-capitalist questions
    • The product itself and the amount of wealth
    • The transformation of nature
    • Human needs
  • Non-capitalist production
    • Reproducing the social order
    • Social services
    • What is non-capitalist?
  • A qualitative value theory?
    • The retreat
    • Marx’s science
    • Quality without quantity?
• 8 Accumulation of what?
  • What gets accumulated?
  • Separating quantity from price
  • Quantifying utility
    • Let the price tell all
    • Finding equilibrium
    • Quantity without equilibrium
    • Hedonic regression
  • Quantifying labour values
    • Concrete versus abstract labour
    • A world of unskilled automatons?
    • Reducing skilled to unskilled labour
  • A clean slate
• Part III: Capitalization
• 9 Capitalization: A brief anthropology
  • Utility, abstract labour, or the nomos?
  • The unit of capitalist order
  • The pattern of capitalist order
    • Formulae
    • First steps
    • Coming of age
  • The capitalization of every thing
    • Human beings
    • Organizations, institutions, processes
    • The future of humanity
  • Capitalization and the qualitative–quantitative nomos of capitalism
• 10 Capitalization: Fiction, mirror or distortion?
  • From fiction to distortion: Marx’s view
  • From mirror to distortion: the neoclassical view
    • Microsoft vs General Motors
  • Tobin’s Q: adding intangibles
    • Boom and bust: adding irrationality
  • The gods must be crazy
• 11 Capitalization: Elementary particles
  • Earnings
  • Hype
    • Decomposition
    • Movers and shakers of hype
    • Random noise
    • Flocks of experts and the inefficiency of markets
    • Let there be hype
  • The discount rate
  • The normal and the risky
    • Probability and statistics
    • Averting risk: the Bernoullian grip
    • The unknowable
  • The capital asset pricing model
    • Portfolio selection
    • CAPM
    • Circularity
  • Risk and power
    • The degree of confidence
    • Toward a political economy of risk
  • Summing up
  • Appendix to Chapter 11: strategists’ estimates of S&P earnings per share
• Part IV: Bringing power back in
• 12 Accumulation and sabotage
  • The categories of power
  • Veblen’s world
    • Industry and business
    • The two languages
    • The immaterial equipment
    • The hand of power
  • The social hologram
    • The whole picture
    • Resonance and dissonance
  • Absentee ownership and strategic sabotage
    • The natural right of investment
    • Private ownership and institutionalized exclusion
    • The right to property
    • The absentee ownership of power
    • Strategic sabotage
    • The direction of industry
    • The pace of industry
    • Business as usual
  • Taking stock and looking ahead
  • Pricing for power
    • From price taking to price making
    • The markup and the target rate of return
    • Pricing and incapacitating
    • Is free competition free of power?
  • The capitalist norm
    • The normal rate of return and the natural rate of unemployment
    • Antecedents: return and sabotage in antiquity
    • Pecuniary power: ancient versus capitalist
    • The differential underpinnings of universal sabotage
    • In sum
  • Capital and the corporation
    • Capital as negation
    • The rise of the modern corporation
  • Productive wealth and corporate finance
    • Equity versus debt
    • Immaterial assets
    • Material assets
    • The maturity of capitalism
  • Fractions of capital
    • Severing accumulation from circulation
    • Where have all the fractions gone?
    • Toward fractions of power
• 13 The capitalist mode of power
  • Material and symbolic drives
    • The invisible technology
    • The two archetypes
    • Neolithic culture
    • Power civilization
  • The mega-machine
  • The mega-machine resurrected: capital
  • Owners and technocrats
  • State and capital
    • Metamorphosis
    • Reordering
    • Contradictory interdependency
  • Notions of space
    • Cosmic space
    • Social space
  • State as a mode of power
  • The feudal mode of power
    • The feudal state
    • The limits of feudal power
    • The capitalization of feudal power
  • Faubourg, bourg, bourgeoisie
    • The dual economy
    • Private and public
    • Liberty as differential power
  • War and inflation
  • War and credit
    • Bypassing power: private instruments
    • Absorbing power: state finance
  • The genesis of capital as power
    • The government bond
    • Primitive accumulation?
  • Government capitalized
  • The state of capital
    • Who are the regulators?
    • Sovereign owners?
    • Whose policy?
    • Whose interests?
  • What is to be done?
• Part V: Accumulation of power
• 14 Differential accumulation and dominant capital
  • Creorder
  • Creating order
  • The power role of the market
  • How to measure accumulation?
    • ‘Real’ benchmarking?
    • It’s all relative
  • Differential capitalization and differential accumulation
    • The capitalist creorder
    • The figurative identity
  • The universe of owners
  • Dominant capital
  • Aggregate concentration
  • Differential measures
  • Accumulation crisis or differential accumulation boom?
  • Historical paths
    • The boundaries of novelty
    • Spread, integration, oscillation
  • Regimes of differential accumulation
  • Some implications
• 15 Breadth
  • Green-field
    • Running ahead of the pack
    • Running with the pack
  • Mergers and acquisitions
    • A mystery of finance
    • The efficiency spin
    • From efficiency to power
  • Patterns of amalgamation
    • Merger waves
  • Tobin’s Q
    • From classical Marxism to monopoly capitalism
    • Differential advantage
    • Three transformations
    • Breaking the envelope
  • Globalization
    • Capital movements and the unholy trinity
    • Global production or global ownership?
    • Net or gross?
    • Capital flow and the creorder of global power
  • Foreign investment and differential accumulation
  • Appendix to Chapter 15: data on mergers and acquisitions
• 16 Depth
  • Depth: internal and external
  • Cost cutting
    • ‘Productivity’ gains
    • Input prices
  • Stagflation
  • The historical backdrop
  • Neutrality?
    • Aggregates
    • Disaggregates
    • Redistribution
  • Winners and losers
    • Workers and capitalists
    • Small and large firms
    • Patterns
  • Accumulating through crisis
    • Business as usual
    • The imperative of crisis
    • Varieties of stagflation
    • The stagflation norm
  • The hazards of inflation
    • Capitalization risk
    • The politics of inflation
    • Stop-gap
  • Policy autonomy and the capitalist creorder
• 17 Differential accumulation: Past and future
  • Amalgamation versus stagflation
  • The pattern of conflict
    • A new type of cycle
    • Oscillating regimes: a bird’s eye view
    • The role of the Middle East
  • Coalitions
  • Unrepeatable since time immemorial?
    • The retreat of breadth
    • The boundaries of differential accumulation
    • Out of bounds
  • Postscript, January 2009
• References