• Creative Commons
  • Capital as Power
  • Copyright
  • Dedication
  • Epigraph
  • Contents
  • Illustrations
    • Figures
    • Tables
  • 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
  • The Bichler & Nitzan Archives

CAPITAL AS POWER

First published 2009
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Creative Commons e-book typeset by Blair Fix, 2020

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

© 2009 Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler

All rights reserved. No part of the print version of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Nitzan, Jonathan.
Capital as power: a study or order and creorder / Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler.
   p. cm.—(RIPE series in global political economy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Capitalism. 2. Power (Social sciences) I. Bichler, Shimshon. II. Title.

HB501.N58 2009
332′.04—dc22        2008052891

ISBN 0-203-87632-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 10: 0–415–47719–0 (hbk)
ISBN 10: 0–415–49680–2 (pbk)
ISBN 10: 0–203–87632–6 (ebk)

ISBN 13: 978–0–415–47719–2 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978–0–415–49680–3 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978–0–203–87632–9 (ebk)