"Capital as Power: Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism"
by Shimshon Bichlerand Jonathan Nitzan
Real-World Economics Review/, /No. 61, September. pp. 65-84
ABSTRACT
Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after
centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is.
Liberals and Marxists think of capital as an economic entity that they
count in universal units of utils and abstract labour, respectively. But
these units are totally fictitious: they can be neither observed nor
measured. In this sense, they do not exist. And since liberalism and
Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in
suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters most -- the
accumulation of capital.
This breakdown is no accident. Capitalism, we argue, is not a mode of
production but a mode of power, and every mode of power evolves together
with its dominant theories, dogmas and ideologies. In capitalism, these
theories and ideologies originally belonged to the study of political
economy -- the first mechanical science of society. But as the
capitalist mode of power kept changing and the quantitative revolution
made it less and less opaque, the power underpinnings of capital grew
increasingly visible and the science of political economy disintegrated.
By the late nineteenth century, with dominant capital having taken
command, political economy was bifurcated into two distinct spheres:
economics and politics. And in the twentieth century, when the power
logic of capital had already penetrated every corner of society, the
remnants of political economy were further fractured into mutually
distinct social sciences. Capital was completely monopolized by
economists, leaving other social scientists with little or no say in its
analysis. And nowadays, when the reign of capital is all but universal,
social scientists find that they have no coherent framework to account
for it.
The theory of capital as power offers a unified alternative to this
fracture. It argues that capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a
symbolic quantification of power. Capital is not absolute, it is
relative. It has little to do with utility or abstract labour, and it
extends far beyond machines and production lines. Most broadly, it
represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to create the
order of -- or creorder -- their society.
This view leads to a different cosmology of capitalism. It offers a new
theoretical framework for capital based on the twin notions of dominant
capital and differential accumulation, a new conception of the state and
a new history of the capitalist mode of power. It also introduces new
empirical research methods -- including new categories; new ways of
thinking about, relating and presenting data; new estimates and
measurements; and, finally, the beginning of a non-equilibrium
disaggregate accounting that reveals the conflictual dynamics of society.
FULL TEXT: http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/343/
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Jonathan Nitzan
Political Science || Social and Political Thought
York University
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Toronto, Ontario, M3J-1P3
Canada
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