Re: [PEN-L] Jonathan Nitzan on Against the Grain

[Jonathan Nitzan]

TOM WALKER: Jonathan, What is Power? ==================== BILL LEAR: The use of the capacity to alter moral relationships from the universal to the unidirectional. I think that works. ==================== JONATHAN NITZAN: No, I don’t think it does work, even it is "true.".   You cannot simply “define” power, just as you cannot simply “define” capital. Marx’s attempt to understand capitalist power required a 2,000+ pages opus, and that too was riddled with difficulties. (Note for instance Marx’s struggles to start his analysis of capital from a particular category – for instance, in the Introduction to the Grundrisse, sections 1 [Production] and section 3 [The Method of Political Economy]).   For various reasons, this attempt to understand capitalist power eventually degenerated into a bifurcation between “economic” power (exploitation) and “political” power (oppression). On the one hand there is the alienated economic sphere of individuals (utility / self interest / business firms / the wealthy / production lines / technology market structure); on the other hand there is the political world of organized collectives (power coalitions / state organs / state officials / political parties / pressure groups state alliances). Since these 1970s, Marxists have concentrated on the “interaction” of these two spheres. This “interaction” can take various forms (a la Miliband, Poulantzas or otherwise). It could be unidirectional, bi-directional or fully interactive; it could be based on exchange, self interest, power, coercion, or influence. It could be open and brutal, or stealth and subtle. But in the final analysis, it rests on the fundamental bifurcation of “economics” and “politics”. We reject this bifurcation. From the viewpoint of capital, there is no distinction between “economics” and “politics.” Marx understood the fallacy of this distinction, but his attempt to anchor value in the so-called “process of production” forced him to accept it nonetheless. In our view, this fracture between the unified view of capitalist power and the bifurcated theory that explains it has become a serious fetter. This fracture prevents us from understanding capitalism, and therefore from being able to change it. (Those who speak of “overthrowing capitalism” should know first WHAT aspects of the social organization/ideology/techniques they want to overthrow. Changing a social system is not the same as rebooting a computer, or replacing your software.) When such a fracture develops – in society, as in the natural sciences – there is a need for a major revision, for recategorization, for new concepts. Our theory eliminates the fracture by rejecting, from the beginning, the ”substantialist” bases of accumulation. Instead of equating capital with commodified labor values, or with commodified utils, our initial tautology states (metaphorically) that: Capital = Commodified Power. More specifically, we argue that the QUANTITATIVE process of differential capitalization (the right hand side of the “equation”) represents or “discounts” the QUALITATIVE processes of social power (the left hand side of the “equation”). In this sense, capital “is” power. The accumulation of capital is the power architecture of capitalism. It is the method through which social reproduction is organized. Contrary to the conventional approaches, both Marxist and liberal, we argue that this reproduction itself does not contain the “code” of accumulation, whether counted in labor values or utility. On the contrary, it is the quantitative code of accumulation, created by the capitalist nomos, that imposes itself on the process of reproduction. Jonathan "New Imperialism or New Capitalism?" http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/archive/00000124/