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Tuesday, April 29, 2014

A bunch of British people drew a suspiciously accurate map of U.S. stereotypes.

Happy Place




A bunch of British people drew a suspiciously accurate map of U.S. stereotypes.
MAPS

Who should really be offended is Mexico. (via)
Recently, the folks at Buzzfeed asked the blokes in their British offices to put down their tea, turn down the Beatles and stop obsessing about the Royal Family for long enough to fill in a map of the United States based purely on stereotypes. They obliged, which isn't surprising, considering that the assignment sounds a whole lot more interesting than writing another article about a potential Spice Girls reunion or how they'll manage to not win the World Cup this time around.
Based on the map's accuracy and the detail of the stereotypes, we might want to add "cheating" to the list of British stereotypes, because accusing them of using Google is preferable to admitting that they're better informed about the United States than our own citizens. They almost got away with it, too, except they got a little too greedy. Pegging Florida for "fucked-up shit," "old people" and "alligators" is one thing, but "Slipknot" for Iowa? "Musicals" for Oklahoma? Not buying it.
America might be filled with stoners, rednecks, fake-Irish, and hillbillies, but we're not easily fooled.
Unless, of course, they didn't cheat and they're just really knowledgable about the United States. In which case, they can add "paranoid" and "overly-sensitive" in bold letters across the entire map.
See the map in detail at Buzzfeed.

Why Right-Wingers Think the Way They Do: The Fascinating Psychological Origins of Political Ideology



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Why Right-Wingers Think the Way They Do: The Fascinating Psychological Origins of Political Ideology

Are left and right a feature (or bug) of evolution?





The following story first appeared in the Washington Monthly. 


If you want one experiment that perfectly captures what science is learning about the deep-seated differences between liberals and conservatives, you need go no further than BeanFest. It’s a simple learning video game in which the player is presented with a variety of cartoon beans in different shapes and sizes, with different numbers of dots on them. When each new type of bean is presented, the player must choose whether or not to accept it—without knowing, in advance, what will happen. You see, some beans give you points, while others take them away. But you can’t know until you try them.
In a recent experiment by psychologists Russell Fazio and Natalie Shook, a group of self-identified liberals and conservatives played BeanFest. And their strategies of play tended to be quite different. Liberals tried out all sorts of beans. They racked up big point gains as a result, but also big point losses—and they learned a lot about different kinds of beans and what they did. Conservatives, though, tended to play more defensively. They tested out fewer beans. They were risk averse, losing less but also gathering less information.
One reason this is a telling experiment is that it’s very hard to argue that playing BeanFest has anything directly to do with politics. It’s difficult to imagine, for example, that results like these are confounded or contaminated by subtle cues or extraneous factors that push liberals and conservatives to play the game differently. In the experiment, they simply sit down in front of a game—an incredibly simple game—and play. So the ensuing differences in strategy very likely reflect differences in who’s playing.
The BeanFest experiment is just one of dozens summarized in two new additions to the growing science-of-politics book genre: Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences, by political scientists John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith, and John R. Alford, and Our Political Nature, by evolutionary anthropologist Avi Tuschman. The two books agree almost perfectly on what science is now finding about the psychological, biological, and even genetic differences between those who opt for the political left and those who tilt toward the right. However, what they’re willing to make of these differences, and how far they are willing to run with it, varies greatly.
Hibbing, Smith, and Alford, a team of researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Rice University who have published some of the most penetrating research on left-right differences in recent years, provide a lively and amusing tour of the landscape. But they mostly just walk up to and peer at the overriding question of why these apparently systematic left-right differences exist in the first place. Their explanation for the “origin of subspecies,” as they put it, is tentative at best. Tuschman, by contrast, has written a vast and often difficult book that attempts nothing less than a broad evolutionary explanation of the origins of left-right differences across countries and time—and does so by synthesizing such a huge body of anthropological and biological evidence that it’ll almost bury you. Whether the account deserves to be called merely thought-provoking or actually correct, though, will be up for other scholars to evaluate—scholars like Hibbing, Smith, and Alford.
Let’s begin with the large body of shared ground. Surveying the evidence with a fair mind, it is hard to deny that science is revealing a very inconvenient truth about left and right: long before they become members of different parties, liberals and conservatives appear to start out as different people. “Bedrock political orientations just naturally mesh with a broader set of orientations, tastes, and preferences because they are all part of the same biologically rooted inner self,” write Hibbing et al. The research demonstrating this is so diverse, comes from so many fields, and shows so many points of overlap and consistency that you either have to accept that there’s really something going on here or else start spinning a conspiracy theory to explain it all away.
The most rock-solid finding, simply because it has been shown so many times in so many different studies, is that liberals and conservatives have different personalities. Again and again, when they take the widely accepted Big Five personality traits test, liberals tend to score higher on one of the five major dimensions—openness: the desire to explore, to try new things, to meet new people—and conservatives score higher on conscientiousness: the desire for order, structure, and stability. Research samples in many countries, not just the U.S., show as much. And this finding is highly consequential, because as both Hibbing et al. and Tuschman note, people tend to mate and have offspring with those who are similar to them on the openness measure—and therefore, with those who share their deeply rooted political outlook. It’s a process called “assortative mating,” and it will almost certainly exacerbate our current political divide.
But that’s just the beginning of the research on left-right differences. An interlocking and supporting body of evidence can be found in moral psychology, genetics, cognitive neuroscience, and Hibbing’s and Smith’s preferred realm, physiology and cognition. At their Political Physiology Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the researchers put liberals and conservatives in a variety of devices that measure responses like skin conductance (the moistening of the sweat glands) and eye gaze patterns when we’re exposed to different types of images. In doing so, Hibbing and his colleagues have been able to detect involuntary physiological response differences between the two groups of political protagonists when they encounter a variety of stimuli. Once again, it’s hard to see how results like these could mean anything other than what they mean: those on the left and right tend to be different people.
Indeed, here is where perhaps some of the most stunning science-of-politics results arise. Several research groups have shown that compared with liberals, conservatives have a greater focus on negative stimuli or a “negativity bias”: they pay more attention to the alarming, the threatening, and the disgusting in life. In one experiment that captured this, Hibbing and his colleagues showed liberals and conservatives a series of collages, each comprised of a mixture of positive images (cute bunnies, smiling children) and negative ones (wounds, a person eating worms). Test subjects were fitted with eye-tracker devices that measured where they looked, and for how long. The results were stark: conservatives fixed their eyes on the negative images much more rapidly, and dwelled on them much longer, than did the liberals.
Liberals and conservatives, conclude Hibbing et al., “experience and process different worlds.” No wonder, then, that they often cannot agree. These experiments suggest that conservatives actually do live in a world that is more scary and threatening, at least as they perceive it. Trying to argue them out of it is pointless and naive. It’s like trying to argue them out of their skin.
Perhaps the main reason that scientists don’t think these psychological and attentional differences simply reflect learned behaviors—or the influence of cultural assumptions—is the genetic research. As Hibbing et al. explain, the evidence suggests that around 40 percent of the variation in political beliefs is ultimately rooted in DNA. The studies that form the basis for this conclusion use a simple but powerful paradigm: they examine the differences between pairs of monozygotic (“identical”) twins and pairs of dizygotic (“fraternal”) twins when it comes to political views. Again and again, the identical twins, who share 100 percent of their DNA, also share much more of their politics.
In other words, politics runs in families and is passed on to offspring. Hibbing and his coauthors suspect that what is ultimately being inherited is a set of core dispositions about how societies should resolve recurring problems: how to distribute resources (should we be individualistic or collectivist?); how to deal with outsiders and out-groups (are they threatening or enticing?); how to structure power relationships (should we be hierarchical or egalitarian?); and so on. These are, of course, problems that all human societies have had to grapple with; they are ancient. And inheriting a core disposition on how to resolve them would naturally predispose one to a variety of specific issue stances in a given political context.
All of which brings us to the really big question. It is difficult to believe that systematic psychological and biological differences between those who opt for the left and the right in different countries—differences that are likely reflected in the genetic code—arose purely by chance. And yet, providing an evolutionary explanation for what we see is fraught with peril: to put it bluntly, we weren’t there. We didn’t see it happen.
Moreover, in evolution, some things happen for an explicitly Darwinian “reason”—traits become more prevalent or fixed in populations because they advanced organisms’ chances of survival and reproduction in a particular environment—while others happen more accidentally. Some complex social traits may emerge, for instance, because they are a fortuitous by-product of other, more fundamental traits laid down by Darwinian evolution.
A good example of such a trait may be religion. It’s pretty clear that evolution laid down a series of attributes that predispose us toward religiosity, such as “agency detection,” which refers to the human tendency to detect minds and intentions everywhere around us in the environment, even when they aren’t necessarily there. The evolutionary reason for such a trait seems obvious: after all, better to be safe than sorry when you’re out in the woods and hear a noise. But start thinking that there are intentions behind the wind blowing, or the hunt failing, and you are well on your way to constructing gods. And indeed, religion seems to be a cross-cultural human universal. But does that mean that evolution selected for religion itself, or just for simpler precursors like agency detection?
You see the difficulty. In this context, Hibbing and his colleagues consider a variety of potential explanations for the stubborn fact that there is large, politically relevant psychological and biological diversity among members of the human species, and ultimately settle on a tentative combination of two ideas. First, they assert, conservatism is probably more basic and fundamental, because it is more suited to a world in which life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Being defensive, risk aversive, hierarchical, and tribal makes sense when the threats around you are very real and immediate. As many of these threats have relaxed in modern times, however, this may have unleashed more variability among the human species, simply because now we can afford it. Under this scenario, liberals are the Johnny-come-latelys to the politico-evolutionary pageant; the Enlightenment itself is less than 300 years old, less than an eyeblink in evolutionary time. “Liberalism may thus be viewed as an evolutionary luxury afforded by negative stimuli becoming less prevalent and deadly,” write Hibbing et al.
However, Hibbing and his colleagues also consider a more controversial “group selection” scenario, in which evolution built some measure of variability in our political typologies because sometimes, diversity is strength (for the group, anyway, if not for the individual). The trouble is, it is still fairly novel for evolutionary explanations to focus on the reproductive fitness of a group of individuals, rather than on the fitness of a single individual or even that individual’s DNA. Nonetheless, it’s easy to see why a group of early humans comprised of both conservative and liberal psychologies might have fared better than a more homogenous group. Such a society would have forces in it that want to hunker down and defend, but also forces that push it to explore and change. This would surely make for better adaptation to more diverse environments. It just might enhance the group’s chance of survival.
Yet it would be going much too far to suggest that Hibbing et al. have a strong or highly developed theory for why biopolitical diversity exists among humans. Avi Tuschman does, though. “Political orientations are natural dispositions that have been molded by evolutionary forces,” he asserts. If he’s right, a dramatic new window opens on who we are and why we behave as we do.
One of the most stunning revelations of recent genetic anthropology is the finding that Homo sapiens, our ancestors, occasionally bred with Homo neanderthalensis in Europe or the Middle East some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. These encounters may have been quite rare: just one offspring produced every thirty years, according to one estimate. But it was enough to shape who humans are today. Recent genetic analyses suggest that some modern humans have a small but measurable percentage of Neanderthal DNA in our genomes—particularly those of us living in Europe and Asia.
The more you think about it, the more mind-boggling it is that this cross-species mating actually occurred. Imagine how strange it must have been, as a member ofHomo sapiens, to encounter another being so closely related to us (much more closely than chimpanzees), and yet still so different. J. R. R. Tolkien buffs can probably visualize it the best, because it would indeed have been something like humans encountering dwarves. Neanderthals were shorter and stronger, with outjutting brows. There is some evidence suggesting that they had high-pitched voices and red hair.
Knowing how prevalent racism and xenophobia are today among members of the same human species, we can assume that many of our ancestors would have behaved even worse toward Neanderthals. And yet some Homo sapiens bred with them, produced offspring with them, and (presumably) cared for those offspring. Which ones were the lovers, not the haters?
The answer, hints Tuschman in Our Political Nature, is that it may have been the liberals. For one core of the apparently universal left-right difference, he argues, is that the two groups pursue different reproductive strategies, different ways of ensuring offspring and fitness in the next generation.
And thus we enter the realm of full-blown, and inevitably highly controversial, evolutionary explanations. Tuschman doesn’t hold back. Conservatives, he suggests in one of three interrelated evolutionary accounts of the origins of politics, are a modern reflection of an evolutionary impulse that leads some of us to seek to control sexual reproduction and keep it within a relatively homogenous group. This naturally makes today’s conservatives more tribal and in-group oriented; if tribalism does anything, it makes it clear who you are and aren’t supposed to mate with.
Tuschman’s liberals, in contrast, are a modern reflection of an evolutionary impulse to take risks, and thereby pull in more genetic diversity through outbreeding. This naturally makes today’s liberals more exploratory and cosmopolitan, just as the personality tests always suggest. Ultimately, Tuschman bluntly writes, it all comes down to “different attitudes toward the transmission of DNA.” And if you want to set these two groups at absolute war with one another, all you need is something like the 1960s.
According to Tuschman, these competing reproductive strategies arise from the fact that there are advantages to keeping mating close within the group, but also advantages to mixing in more genetic diversity. Moreover, there is a continuum from extreme inbreeding to extreme outbreeding, featuring many different reproductive strategies along the way. Thus, we see in other species, such as birds like the great tit, a range in mating behavior, from a high level of breeding with more closely related birds to a high level of outbreeding.
Outbreeding brings in diversity, which is vital. For instance, diversity in the genes that create the proteins that ultimately come to comprise our immune systems has obvious benefits. But outbreeding also has risks—like encountering deadly new pathogens when you encounter new human groups—even as a moderate degree of inbreeding appears to have its own advantages: perpetuating genetically based survival strategies that are proven to work, increasing altruism that arises in kin relationships, and also, it appears, having more total offspring.
Extreme inbreeding, to be sure, is deleterious. But Tuschman presents evidence suggesting that there is an optimum—at around third-cousin or fourth-cousin mating—for producing the largest number of healthy offspring. He also shows related evidence in Danish women suggesting that a moderate degree of geographic dispersal to find a mate (measured by the distance between a woman’s birthplace and her husband’s) is related to having a high number of children, but too much dispersal and too little are both related to less overall fertility.
Returning to the present, Tuschman emphasizes that conservatives, and especially religious conservatives, always want to seem to control and restrict reproduction (and other sexual activities) more than liberals do. It’s understandably hard for an evolutionary biologist not to see behaviors that systematically affect patterns of reproduction in a Darwinian light.
And it’s not just reproductive patterns: Tuschman also suggests that other aspects of the liberal-conservative divide reflect other evolutionary challenges and differential strategies of responding to them. He traces different left-right views on hierarchy and equality to the structure of families (a move that cognitive linguist George Lakoff has in effect already made) and the effect of birth order on the personalities and political outlooks of siblings. And Tuschman traces more positive and negative (or, risk-aversive) views of human nature on the left and the right to different types of evolutionarily based altruism: altruism toward kin on the conservative side, and reciprocal altruism (which can be toward anyone) on the liberal side.
But is all of this really … true? Tuschman’s book is difficult to evaluate on this score. It says so much more about evolution than Hibbing, Smith, and Alford do, and yet manages to do so without leaving the same impression about the importance of caveats and nuances. Is Tuschman advancing a group selection theory, or not? It sometimes sounds like it, but it isn’t clear. And most importantly, is the variation among humans of politically relevant traits just part of the natural order of things, or does it itself reflect something about evolution? Again, it isn’t clear. This is not to suggest that Tuschman lacks a view on such questions; it’s just that he synthesizes so much scientific evidence that this kind of hand-holding seems less of a priority.
In the end, Tuschman’s book attempts a feat that those of us monitoring the emerging science of politics have long been waiting for—explaining the now well-documented psychological, biological, and genetic differences between liberals and conservatives with reference to human evolution and the differential strategies of mate choice and resource allocation that have been forced on us by the pressures of surviving and reproducing on a quite dangerous planet. It may or may not stand the test of time, but it certainly forces the issue.
In the end, what’s so stunning about all of this is the tremendous gap between what scholars are learning about politics and politics itself. We run around shutting down governments and occupying city centers—behaviors that can only be driven by a combination of intense belief and equally intense emotion—with almost zero perspective on why we can be so passionate one way, even as our opponents are passionate in the other.
To see politics as Hibbing, Smith, Alford, and Tuschman see it, by contrast, is inevitably to want to stop fighting so much and strive for some form of acceptance of political difference. That’s why, even though not all of the answers are in place yet, we need their line of thinking to catch on. Ideological diversity is clearly real, deeply rooted, and probably a core facet of human nature. Given this, we simply have no choice but to come up with a much better way to live with it.
Buy these books from Amazon and support Washington Monthly: Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences
Chris Mooney is the author of four books, including "The Republican War on Science" (2005). His next book, "The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality," is due out in April.

Friday, April 25, 2014

The Future Of How We Watch Television Is In The Hands Of The Supreme Court




The Future Of How We Watch Television Is In The Hands Of The Supreme Court


By Lauren C. Williams  


aereo_antenna_array1

CREDIT: Aereo

Television — or, at least, the experience of watching broadcast shows on a television — is not the wave of the future. The television ratings company Nielsen classifies nearly 5 million households as “Zero-TV,” meaning that they either have no television or that they use it only for DVDs, games and other activities unlike traditional TV watching — and this is a 150 percent increase in the number of Zero-TV households since 2007. TV ownership is steadily declining, while more and more Americans are seeking entertainment on the Internet.

Yet, because of a loophole in federal law, television programs broadcast over the Internet can be treated very differently than programs broadcast via cable or satellite. While cable and satellite companies must pay a fee to broadcast copyrighted material that they ultimately transfer to consumers, a company known as Aereo has found a workaround to this fee. Under federal law, broadcast programs are free as long as the consumer owns and controls the antenna used to catch the broadcast signals. As Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia tells ThinkProgress, his company uses an antenna array that it uses tap into the “over-the-air” signals. Customers pay $8 a month to “rent” their own mini antenna that works like the rabbit-ear antenna you plop on top of your TV. Customers also get their own DVR cloud space to save shows as part of their rental package.

On Tuesday, however the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, Inc., a case that could potentially shut down Aereo’s ability to take advantage of this loophole. The case pits Aereo against major broadcast companies such as ABC, CBS, NBC and Telemundo. If Aereo wins, it could expand TV on the internet, opening up the market for online-only cable and satellite TV alternatives. But if the broadcasters win — and even if they don’t — consumers may have to pay for content that was once free, regardless of whether they actually watch it on TV or online.

“Ultimately, this is a fight about how do we stop getting programming delivered to us via [traditional] broadcast and move it onto the Internet. This is the beginning of the initiation of how and when that’s going to happen,” Michael Carroll, a law professor at American University in Washington, D.C., tells ThinkProgress.

Broadcasters say Aereo should be shut down because it’s stealing copyrighted content and transmitting it through their site. To avoid trampling on copyright laws, broadcasters say Aereo should pay the same fee cable and satellite companies pay to transmit network TV programming, such as live sporting events.

“Broadcasters are freaking out because Aereo represents the complete disruption between the cable systems and the broadcasters,” Carroll says. “Cable [companies] don’t want to pay the fee, but they also don’t want to lose subscribers to Aereo, which pays nothing for the broadcasts.”

Two lower courts ruled that Aereo’s unique brand of transmission was legal. But with so much money on the line — broadcasters make billions of dollars each year collecting the fee — the Supreme Court will now weigh in.

It should be noted that a very similar fight occurred when cable TV came around. Community access television redistributed content to rural areas that couldn’t receive reliable broadcast signals because they were far from the towers, Carroll says. The Supreme Court ruled in the Cablevision case that cable companies weren’t infringing on the broadcasters’ right to make content available to the public and, therefore, not entitled to redistribution fees. In the 1970s, however, Congress made it so that cable companies had to pay a licensing fee when re-airing copyrighted content such as the Super Bowl. All cable companies must pay the fee and transmit all broadcast channels, even smaller ones with little funding.

This history could repeat itself if Aereo wins its case. Even if the Supreme Court rules in Aereo’s favor, Congress could step in and make them pay the fee anyway. “If Aereo wins, we will almost certainly see Congress respond,” Carroll says. “There’s a huge influence from the media industry in Congress. I can see it going the way that the cable verdict went. Everyone who has come along with a new technology for broadcast has gotten the right to do that if they pay the fee.” If that happens, consumers may still have to share some of the costs for the new fee.

Broadcasters and groups such as the NFL have also threatened to take their shows and programming off the networks — and make them available only on cable — if the justices side with Aereo. That will likely force consumers, especially sports enthusiasts, who primarily watch TV online to get a cable subscription to watch programs such as the TV-drama Scandal or even the Olympics.

Nevertheless, going against Aereo would set a precedent against technological development, according to Kanojia. “There are so many creators out there; [keeping] the platform for them to create other types of programming” for consumers is crucial, Kanojia says. A ruling in the broadcasters’ favor could make it so that Google and other tech companies wouldn’t be able to improve on older technology, he says. For example, Google Drive brought a different means of storing and streaming data. “If you don’t allow a consumer to take media wherever they want, with taxes, levies and fees, you risk losing them,” he says. 

Sunday, April 20, 2014

The Obscenity of War in a World of Need and Suffering

Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice


The Obscenity of War in a World of Need and Suffering

A study by professor Linda J. Blimes of Harvard University concludes that the cost to the US of the Iraq and Afghan wars, taken together, will be between $4 and $6 trillion. This includes long-term medical care and disability compensation for service members, veterans and families, military replenishment and social and economic costs. The cost so far is $2 trillion.
In order to get our head round the colossal figure of $6 trillion, this is equivalent to $75,000 for every household in the US. Deaths of Iraqis and Afghans taken together are estimated from 600,000 to a million, coalition troop deaths around 8,000, over 7,000 of whom are Americans. The suffering and the sheer misery of widows, orphans and families behind these statistics are unimaginable.
Our propensity to dehumanize the ‘other’ makes it all too easy for the demagogue, the charlatan and the power hungry to exploit. We are too readily manipulated and outraged into diverting our resources into wars that cause death, injury and destruction. The suffering to millions of fellow human beings is kept from us by mainstream media too ready to play its role. In any case, the dehumanization of our ‘enemies’ dulls our compassion to the point of not seeing their pain and suffering as real.
Leaders and those who would profit from these wars would package their language in distortions and omissions to hide the truth. George Orwell summed it up: “Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Let us for a moment put aside the human cost of these wars and concentrate on the economic cost. This obscene spending on death and destruction is done by a country, the US, where 15% of its citizens, 46 million, live below the poverty threshold of $23,492 and 1.5 million of its children become homeless every year.
Worldwide, 3 billion people live on less than $2.50 a day, 360 million of whom live on less than $1 a day. Grinding poverty, hunger and lack of clean water and effective sanitation blight their lives and their future. 22,000 children die every day due to poverty.
Families are trapped in a cycle of misery and deprivation that cascades through generations with no escape route. Yet in this world of need and suffering, the world military spending stood at over $1.7 trillion in 2012.
The vast majority of us individually can see that there is something seriously wrong with the way our priorities are perceived. It is beyond comprehension that with so much poverty and need worldwide, that so much wealth is spent on wars and weapons of death and destruction. However, this rationality and our sense of fairness could so easily be overcome when called upon to dehumanize our perceived ‘enemies’.
As a species we have tremendous talents. Our scientific achievements are incredible; our advances in medicine and technology are stunning. Our social development however is still almost at Stone Age level.
Adnan Al-Daini (PhD, Birmingham University, UK) is a retired University Engineering lecturer. He is a British citizen born in Iraq. He writes regularly on issues of social justice and the Middle East. Read other articles by Adnan.

Capital as Power

Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice

Capital as Power

Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism
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 labor, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious: they can be neither observed nor measured. They don’t 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. Every mode of power evolves together with its dominant theories and ideologies. In capitalism, these theories and ideologies originally belonged to the study of political economy – the first mechanical science of society. But the capitalist mode of power kept changing, and as the power underpinnings of capital became increasingly visible, 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. Nowadays, capital reigns supreme – yet social scientists have been left with 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 has little to do with utility or abstract labor, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Most broadly, it represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape – 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 of capital 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 new, disaggregate accounting that reveals the conflictual dynamics of society.
The Capitalist Cosmology
As Marx and Engels tell us at the beginning of The German Ideology (1970), the capitalist regime is inextricably bound up with its theories and ideologies. These theories and ideologies, first articulated by classical political economy, are much more than a passive attempt to explain, justify and critique the so-called economic system. Instead, they constitute an entire cosmology – a system of thinking that is both active and totalizing.
In ancient Greek, Kosmeo has an active connotation: it means “to order” and “to organize,” and political economy does precisely that. It explains, justifies and critiques the world ­– but it also actively makes this world in the first place. Moreover, political economy pertains not to the narrow economy as such, but to the entire social order as well as to the natural universe in which this social order is embedded.
The purpose of this paper is to outline an alternative cosmology, one that offers the beginning of a totally different framework for understanding capitalism.
Of course, to suggest an alternative, we first need to know the thing that we contest and seek to replace. To lay out the groundwork, we begin by spelling out what we think are the hallmarks of the present capitalist cosmology. Following this initial step, we enumerate the reasons why, over the past century, this cosmology has gradually disintegrated – to the point of being unable to make sense of and recreate its world. And then, in closing, we articulate some of the key themes of our own theory – the theory of capital as power.
Foundation I: Separating Economics from Politics
Political economy, liberal as well as Marxist, stands on three key foundations: (I) a separation between economics and politics; (II) a Galilean/Cartesian/Newtonian mechanical understanding of the economy; and (III) a value theory that breaks the economy into two spheres – real and nominal – and that uses the quantities of the real sphere to explain the appearances of the nominal one. This and the following two sections examine these foundations, beginning with the separation between politics and economics.
During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there emerged in the city states of Italy and the Low Countries an alternative to the rural feudal state. This alternative was the urban order of the capitalist Bourg. The rulers of the Bourg were the capitalists. They were the owners of money, trading houses and ships; they were the managers of industry; they were the enterprising pursuers of new social technologies, the seekers of innovative methods of production.
These early capitalists offered an entirely new way of organizing society. Instead of the vertical feudal order in which privilege and income were obtained by force and sanctified by religion, they brought a flat civil order where privilege and income came from rational productivity. Instead of the closed loop of agricultural redistribution by confiscation, they promised open-ended industrial growth. Instead of ignorance, they brought progress and knowledge. Instead of subservience, they offered opportunity.1
Theirs was the future regime of capital, an explicitly “economic” order based on an endless cycle of production and consumption and the ever-growing accumulation of money.
Initially, the Bourg was subservient to the feudal order in which it emerged, but that status gradually changed. The Bourgs began to demand and obtain libertates – that is, differential exceptions from feudal penalties, taxes and levies. The bourgeoisie recognized the legitimacy of feudal politics, particularly in matters of religion and war. But it demanded that this politics not impinge on its urban economy. This early class struggle, the power conflict between the declining nobility and the rising bourgeoisie, is the origin of what we now consider as the separation of economics and politics.
The features of this separation are worth summarizing, beginning with the liberal view. Over the past half millennium, liberals have grown accustomed to classifying production, technology, trade, income and profit as aspects of the economy. By contrast, entities like state, law, army and violence are classified as belonging to politics.
The economy is taken to be the productive source. It is the realm of individual freedom, rationality, frugality and dynamism. It creates output, raises consumption and moves society forward. By contrast, politics is conceived as coercive-collective. It is corrupt, wasteful and conservative. It is a parasitical sphere that latches onto the economy, taxing it and intervening in its operations.
Ideally, the economy should be left on its own. Laissez faire politics would produce the optimal economic outcome. But in practice, we are told, this is never the case: political intervention, constantly distorts economics, undermines its efficient operation and hampers the production of individual well-being. The liberal equation, then, is simple: the best society is one with the most economics and the least politics.
The Marxist view of this separation is different, but not entirely. For Marx, the liberal project of severing civil society from state is a misleading ideal, if not outright self-deception. The legal act of setting the private economy apart from public politics alienates property; and that very alienation, he says, serves to defend the private interests of capitalists against the collective pursuit of a just society. From this perspective, a seemingly independent political-legal structure is not antithetical but essential to the material economy: it allows the organs and bureaucracy of the state to legitimize capital, give accumulation a universal form and help maintain the capitalist system as a whole.
In other words, Marx readily accepts the liberal duality – but with a big twist. Where liberals see an inconsistency between economic well-being and political power, Marx sees two complementary forms of power: a material-economic base of exploitation and a supporting legal-state structure of oppression.
Historically, the coercive institutions and organs of the state evolve as necessarycomplements to the economic mechanism of surplus extraction: together, they constitute the totality that Marxists refer to as a “mode of production.” But the relationship between these two aspects isn’t symmetric: in any particular historical epoch, the nature and extent of state intervention are predicated on the concrete requirements of surplus extraction. To illustrate, during the nineteenth century, these requirements dictated the hands-off methods of laissez faire; toward the middle of the twentieth century, they called for the macro-management of Keynesianism; and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, they mandate the multifaceted regulations of financialized neoliberalism.
In other words, unlike in the liberal cosmology, where society consists of utility-seeking individuals for whom the state is a specialized service provider at best and a distortion at worst, in the Marxist cosmology the state is necessary to the very possibility of capitalism. But that necessity is conditioned on the state being distinct from – and ultimately subjugated to – the economy.
Following the footsteps of his classical predecessors, particularly Smith and Ricardo, Marx, too, prioritized economics over politics. Enthralled by the methods and triumphs of bourgeois science, he looked for latent reasons, for the ultimate mechanical forces that lie behind and move the social appearances. And just like his bourgeois counterparts, he, too, found the locus of these forces in the “economy.”
The productive sphere, and especially the labor process, he argued, is the engine of social development. This is where use value is created, where surplus value is generated, where capital is accumulated. Production is the fountainhead. It is the ultimate “source” from which the other spheres of society draw their energy – energy that they in turn use to help shape and sustain the sphere of production on which they so depend. And so, although for Marx capitalist economics and politics are deeply intertwined, their interaction is that of two conceptually distinct and asymmetric entities.2
Foundation II: The Galilean/Cartesian/Newtonian Model of the Economy
The new capitalist order emerged hand in hand with a political-scientific revolution – a revolution that was marked by the mechanical worldview of Machiavelli, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Leibnitz and, most importantly, Newton.3
It is common to argue that political economists have borrowed their metaphors and methods from the natural sciences. But we should note that the opposite is equally true, if not more so: in other words, the worldview of the scientists reflected their society.
Consider the following examples.
Galileo and Newton were deeply inspired by Machiavelli’s Prince. The Prince relentlessly pursues secular power for the sake of secular power. His concern is not the general good, but order and stability. And he achieves his goals not with divine help, but through the systematic application of calculated rationality.
Hobbes’ “mechanical human being” was modeled after Galileo’s pendulum, swinging between the quest for power on the one hand and the fear of death on the other – but, then, Galileo’s own mechanical cosmos was itself a reflection of a society increasingly pervaded by machines.
Newton could make up a world of independent bodies because he lived in a society that began to critique hierarchical power and praise and glorify individualism. He envisaged a liberal word in which every body was a lonely soul in the cosmos, inter-acting with but never dictating its will to other bodies. There is no ultimate cause in Newton, only inter-dependence.
Descartes could emphasize the immediacy of cause and effect – the leaves move only if the wind touches them – because he lived in a world that increasingly contested religious, church-invoked miracles that operated at a distance.
Lavoisier invented his law of conservation of matter while he was building a wall around Paris, turning the city into a sealed container in order to capture the mass of its taxable income.
Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” was based on Malthus’ population theory. And so on.
These relatively recent examples shouldn’t surprise us. Human beings tend to impose on the cosmos the power structure that governs their own society. In other words, they tend to politicize nature.
In archaic societies the gods are usually numerous, relatively equal and hardly omnipotent. Hierarchical, statist societies tend to impose a pantheon of gods. And absolute rule tends to insist on a single god and a monotheistic religion. In each case, the forces that make up nature reflect, and in turn are reflected in, the forces that shape society.4
Capitalism is no exception to this historical rule. Consider the mechanical worldview. The liberal God is nothing but absolute rationality, or natural law. The language of God is mathematical, and therefore the structure of the universe is numerical. The universe that God created is flat, filled with numerous bodies that are not subservient and dependent, but free and interdependent. These bodies are propelled not by differential obligations, but by the universal force of gravity. They are attracted and repelled to one another not by the will of the Almighty, but through the interaction of force and counterforce. And, finally, they are ordered not by decree, but by the invisible power of equilibrating inertia.
This flat universe mirrors the flat ideals of liberal society. A liberal society consists of equally small actors, or particles, none of which is large enough to significantly affect the other particles/actors. These particles/actors are energized not by patriarchal responsibilities, but by scarcity – the gravitational force of the social universe. They are attracted to and repelled from one another not by feudal obligations, but through the universal-utilitarian functions of demand and supply. And they obey not a hierarchical rule, but the equilibrating force of the invisible hand of perfect competition.
Foundation III: Value Theory and the Duality of Real and Nominal
Capitalism is a system of commodities and therefore denominated in the universal units of price. To understand the nature and dynamics of this architecture, we need to understand prices, and that is why both liberal and Marxian political economies are founded on theories of value – the utility theory of value and the labor theory of value, respectively.
Value theories begin by splitting the economy itself into two parallel, quantitative spheres: real and nominal. The key is the real sphere. This is where production and consumption take place, where supply and demand interact, where utility and productivity are determined, where power and equilibrium compete, where well-being and exploitation take place, where surplus value and profit are generated.
Now, on the face of it, it seems difficult if not impossible to quantify the real sphere: the entities of this sphere are qualitatively different, and that qualitative difference makes them quantitatively incommensurate.
For the economists, though, this problem is more apparent the real. Physicists and chemists express all measurements in terms of five fundamental quantities: distance, time, mass, electrical charge and heat. In this way, velocity can be defined as distance divided by time; acceleration is the time derivative of velocity; force is mass times acceleration, etc. And economists, according to themselves, are able to do the very same thing.
Economics, they say, has its own fundamental quantities: the fundamental quantity of the liberal universe is the util, and the fundamental quantity of the Marxist universe is socially necessary abstract labor.5 With these fundamental quantities, every real entity – from concrete labor, to commodities, to the capital stock – can be reduced to and expressed in the very same unit.
Parallel to the real sphere stands the nominal world of money and prices. This sphere constitutes the immediate appearance of the commodity system. But that is merely a derived appearance. In fact, the nominal sphere is nothing but a giant, symbolic mirror. It is a parallel domain whose universal dollar magnitudes merely reflect – sometimes accurately, sometimes not – the underlying real util and abstract labor quantities of production and consumption.
So we have a quantitative correspondence. The nominal sphere of prices reflects the real sphere of production and consumption. And the purpose of value theory is to explain this reflection/correspondence.
How does value theory sort out this correspondence? In the liberal version, the double-sided economy is assumed to be contained in a Newtonian-like space – a container that comes complete with its own invisible laws, or functions, whose role is to equilibrate quantities and prices. The Marxist version is very different, in that it emphasizes not equilibrium and harmony, but the conflictual/dialectical engine of the economy. However, here, too, there is a clear bifurcation between the real and the nominal. And here, too, there is an assumed set of rules – the historical laws of motion – that governs the long-term interaction of the two spheres.
Now, since these principles, or laws, are immutable, the role of the political economist, just like the role of the natural scientist, is simply to “discover” them.6The method of discovery builds on the research paradigm of Galileo, Descartes and Newton on the one hand, and on the application of analytical probability and empirical statistics on the other. In this method, discovery takes place through the fusion of experimentation and generalization – a method that liberals apply through testing and prediction (albeit mostly of past events), and that Marxists apply through the dialectics of theory and praxis.
Finally, unlike economics, politics doesn’t have its own intrinsic rules. This difference has two important consequences. In the liberal case, the notion of a self-optimizing economy means that, with the exception of “externalities,” political intervention can only lead to sub-optimal outcomes. In the Marxist case, politics and state are inextricably bound up with production and the economy. However, since politics and state have no intrinsic rules of their own, they have to derive their logic from the economy – either strictly, as stipulated by structuralists, or loosely, as argued by instrumentalists.
To sum up, then, the cosmology of capitalism is built on three key foundations. The first foundation is the separation between economics and politics. The economy is governed by its own laws, whereas politics either is derived from these economic laws or distorts them. The second foundation is a mechanical view of the economy itself – a view that is based on action and reaction, flat functions and the self-regulating forces of motion and equilibrium, and in which the role of the political economist is merely to discover these mechanical laws. The third foundation is the bifurcation of the economy itself into two quantitative spheres – real and nominal. The real sphere is enumerated in material units of consumption and production (utils or socially necessary abstract labor), while the nominal sphere is counted in money prices. But the two spheres are parallel: nominal prices merely mirror real quantities, and the mission of value theory is to explain their correspondence.
The Rise of Power and the Demise of Political Economy
These foundations of the capitalist cosmology started to disintegrate in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the key reason being the very victory of capitalism. Note that political economy differed from all earlier cosmologies in that it was the first to substitute secular for religious force. But, like the gods, this secular force was still assumed to be heteronomous; i.e., it was an objective entity, external to society.
The victory of capitalism changed this perception. With the feudal order finally giving way to a full-fledged capitalist regime, it became increasingly apparent that force is imposed not from without, but from within. Instead of heteronomous force, there emerged autonomous power, and that shift changed everything.7 With autonomous power, the dualities of economics/politics, the separation of real/nominal and the mechanical worldview of political economy were all seriously undermined. With these categories undermined, the presumed automaticity of political economy no longer held true. And with automaticity gone, political economy ceased being an objective science.
The recognition of power was affected by four important developments. The first development was the emergence of totally new units. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the notion of atomistic interdependent actors had been replaced by large hierarchical organizations – from big business and large unions to big government and large NGOs – organizations that were big enough to alter their own circumstances as well as to affect one another.
The second development was the emergence of new phenomena, unknown to the classical political economists. By the beginning of the twentieth century, total war and a seemingly permanent war economy had been established as salient features of modern capitalism, features that appeared no less important than production and consumption. Governments started to actively engage in massive industrial and macro stabilization policies, policies that completely upset the presumed automaticity of the so-called economic sphere. Capitalists incorporated their businesses, and in the process they bureaucratized and socialized the very process of private accumulation. The singular act of labor grew not simpler and more homogenous, but ever more complex, and workers no longer lived at subsistence. There emerged a labor aristocracy, the workers’ standard of living in the main capitalist countries soared, and, with rising disposable income, issues of culture grew in importance relative to work. Finally, the nominal processes of inflation and finance assumed a life of their own, a life whose trajectory no longer seemed to reflect the so-called real sector.
The third development was the emergence of totally new concepts. With the rise of fascism and Nazism, the primacy of class and production was challenged by a new emphasis on masses, power, state, bureaucracy, elites and systems.
Fourth and finally, the objective/mechanical cosmology of the first political-scientific revolution was undermined by uncertainty, relativity and the entanglement of subject and object. Science was increasingly challenged by anti-scientific vitalism and postism.
The combined result of these developments was a growing divergence between universality and fracture. On the one hand, the regime of capital has become the most universal system ever to organize society: its rule has spread to every corner of the world and incorporated more and more aspects of human life. On the other hand, political economy – the cosmology of that order – has been fatally fractured: instead of what once was an integrated science of society, there emerged a collection of partial and exclusionary social disciplines.
The mainstream liberal study of society was split into numerous social sciences. These social sciences – economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and now also culture, communication, gender and other such offshoots – are each treated as a “discipline,” a closed system guarded by proprietary jargon, unique principles and a bureaucratic-academic hierarchy.
But this progressive fracturing didn’t save economics. Although most economists refuse to know it and few would ever admit it, the rise of autonomous power destroyed their fundamental quantities. With autonomous power, it became patently clear that both utils and abstract labor were logically impossible and empirically unknowable. And, sure enough, no liberal economist has ever been able to measure the util contents of commodities, and no Marxist has ever been able to calculate their abstract labor contents – because neither can be done. This inability is existential: with no fundamental quantities, value theory becomes impossible, and with no value theory, economics disintegrates.
The Neoclassical Golem
The neoclassicists responded by trying to shield their utils from the destructive touch of power. The process was two-pronged. First, they created a heavily subsidized fantasy world, titled General Equilibrium, where, buttressed by a slew of highly restrictive assumptions, everything still works (almost) as it should.8 To achieve this end, though, they had to turn their economy into a null domain. They excluded from it almost every meaningful power phenomenon – and they did it so thoroughly that their perfectly competitive model now perfectly explains next to nothing.
The second step was to brand the excluded power phenomena “deviant,” and then hand them over to the practitioners of two newly-created sub-disciplines: micro “distortions” and “imperfections” were given to Game Theorists, while government “interventions” and “shocks” were passed on to the macroeconomists. The problem is that, over the past half century, Game Theory and macroeconomics have grown into a theoretical Golem. They’ve expanded tremendously, both bureaucratically and academically – and that expansion, instead of bolstering liberal cosmology, has seriously undermined it.
Although Game Theorists and macroeconomists rarely advertize it and many conveniently ignore it, their models, whether good or bad, are all affected by – and in many cases are exclusively concerned with – power. This is a crucial fact, because, once power is brought into the picture, all prices, income flows and asset stocks become “contaminated.” And when prices and distribution are infected with power, the utility theory of value becomes irrelevant.
Now, until the 1950s and 1960s, neoclassicists could still pretend that the extra-economic “distortions” and “shocks” were local, or at least temporary, and therefore redundant for the grander purpose of value analysis. But nowadays, with Game Theory increasingly taking over the micro analysis of distribution, and with governments directly determining 20 to 40 percent of economic activity and price setting and indirectly involved in much of the rest, power seems everywhere. And if power is now the rule rather than the exception, what then is left of the utility-productivity foundations of liberal value theory?
The Neo-Marxist Fracture
Unlike the neoclassicists, Marxists chose not to evade and hide power but to tackle it head on – although the end result was pretty much the same. To recognize power meant to abandon the labor theory of value. And since Marxists have never come up with another theory of value, their worldview has lost its main unifying force. Instead of the original Marxist totality, there emerged a neo-Marxist fracture.
Marxism today consists of three sub-disciplines, each with its own categories, logic and bureaucratic demarcations. The first sub-discipline is neo-Marxist economics, based on a mixture of monopoly capital and permanent government intervention. The second sub-discipline comprises neo-Marxist critiques of capitalist cultural. And the third sub-discipline consists of neo-Marxist theories of the state.
Now, it’s worth stressing here that both Marx and the neo-Marxists have had very meaningful things to say about the world. These include, among other things, a comprehensive vista of human history – an approach that negates and supersedes the particular histories dictated by elites; the notion that ideas are dialectically embedded in their concrete material history; the link between theory and praxis; the view of capitalism as a totalizing political-power regime; the universalizing-globalizing tendencies of this regime; the dialectics of the class struggle; the fight against exploitation, oppression and imperial rule; and the emphasis on autonomy and freedom as the motivating force of human development.
These ideas are all indispensable. More importantly, the development of these ideas is deeply enfolded, to use David Bohm’s term, in the very history of the capitalist regime, and in that sense they can never be discarded as erroneous.9
But all of that still leaves a key issue unresolved. In the absence of a unifying value theory, there is no logically coherent and empirically meaningful way to explain the so-called economic accumulation of capital – let alone to account for how culture and the state presumably affect such accumulation. In other words, we have no explanation for the most important process of all – the accumulation of capital.
Capitalism, though, remains a universalizing system – and a universalizing system calls for a universal theory. So maybe it’s time to stop the fracturing. We don’t need finer and finer nuisances. We don’t need new sub-disciplines to be connected through inter- and trans-disciplinary links. And we don’t need imperfections and distortions to tell us why our theories don’t work.
What we do need is a radical Ctrl-Alt-Del. As Descartes tells us, to be radical means to go to the root, and the root of capitalism is the accumulation of capital. This, then, should be our new starting point.
The Capitalist Mode of Power
In the remainder of the paper we briefly outline some of the key elements of our own approach to capital. We begin with power. We argue that capital is not means of production, it is not the ability to produce hedonic pleasure, and it is not a quantum of dead productive labor. Rather, capital is power, and only power.
Further, and more broadly, we suggest that capitalism is best viewed not as a mode of production or consumption, but as a mode of power. Machines, production and consumption of course are part of capitalism, and they certainly feature heavily in accumulation. But the role of these entities in the process of accumulation, whatever it may be, is significant primarily through the way they bear on power.
To explicate our argument, we start with two related entities: prices and capitalization. Capitalism – as we already noted, and as both liberals and Marxists correctly recognize – is organized as a commodity system denominated in prices. Capitalism is particularly conducive to numerical organization because it is based on private ownership, and anything that can be privately owned can be priced. This situation means that, as private ownership spreads spatially and socially, price becomes the universal numerical unit with which the capitalist order is organized.
Now, the actual pattern of this order is created through capitalization. Capitalization, to paraphrase physicist David Bohm, is the generative order of capitalism. It is the flexible and all-inclusive algorithm that creorders – or continuously creates the order of – capitalism.
Capitalizing Power
What exactly is capitalization? Capitalization is a symbolic financial entity, a ritual that the capitalists use to discount to present value risk-adjusted expected future earnings. This ritual has a very long history. It was first invented in the capitalist Bourgs of Europe, probably sometime during the fourteenth century. It overcame religious opposition to usury in the seventeenth century to become a conventional practice among bankers. Its mathematical formulae were first articulated by German foresters in the mid-nineteenth century. Its ideological and theoretical foundations were laid out at the turn of the twentieth century. It started to appear in textbooks around the 1950s, giving rise to a process that contemporary experts refer to as “financialization.” And by the early twenty-first century, it has grown into the most powerful faith of all, with more followers than of all the world’s religions combined.
Now, as Ulf Martin argues in a forthcoming paper, capitalization is an operational-computational symbol. Unlike ontological symbols, capitalization isn’t a passive representation of the world. Instead, it is an active, synthetic calculation. It is a symbol that human beings create and impose on the world – and in so doing, they shape the world in the image of their symbol.
Capitalists – as well as everyone else – are conditioned to think of capital as capitalization, and nothing but capitalization. The ultimate question here is not the particular entity that the capitalist owns, but the universal worth of this entity defined as a capitalized asset.
Neoclassicists and Marxists recognize this symbolic creature – but given their view that capital is a (so-called) real economic entity, they don’t quite know what to do with its symbolic appearance. The neoclassicists bypass the impasse by saying that, in principle, capitalization is merely the image of real capital – although, in practice, this image gets distorted by unfortunate market imperfections. The Marxists approach the problem from the opposite direction. They begin by assuming that capitalization is entirely fictitious – and therefore unrelated to the actual, or real capital. But, then, in order to sustain their labor theory of value, they also insist that, occasionally, this fiction must crash into equality with real capital.
In our view, these attempts to make capitalization fit the box of real capital are an exercise in futility. As we already saw, not only does real capital lack an objective quantity, but the very separation of economics from politics – a separation that makes such objectivity possible in the first place – has become defunct. And, indeed, capitalization is hardly limited to the so-called economic sphere.
In principle, every stream of expected income is a candidate for capitalization. And since income streams are generated by social entities, processes, organizations and institutions, we end up with capitalization discounting not the so-called sphere of economics, but potentially every aspect of society. Human life, including its social habits and its genetic code, is routinely capitalized. Institutions – from education and entertainment to religion and the law – are habitually capitalized. Voluntary social networks, urban violence, civil war and international conflict are regularly capitalized. Even the environmental future of humanity is capitalized. Nothing escapes the eyes of the discounters. If it generates expected future income, it can be capitalized, and whatever can be capitalized sooner or later is capitalized.
The encompassing nature of capitalization calls for an encompassing theory, and the unifying basis for such a theory, we argue, is power. The primacy of power is built right into the definition of private ownership. Note that the English word “private” comes from the Latin privatus, which means “restricted.” In this sense, private ownership is wholly and only an institution of exclusion, and institutional exclusion is a matter of organized power.
Of course, exclusion does not have to be exercised. What matter here are the right to exclude and the ability to exact pecuniary terms for not exercising that right. This right and ability are the foundations of accumulation.
Capital, then, is nothing but organized power. This power has two sides: one qualitative, the other quantitative. The qualitative side comprises the institutions, processes and conflicts through which capitalists constantly creorder society, shaping and restricting its trajectory in order to extract their tributary income. The quantitative side is the process that integrates, reduces and distils these numerous qualitative processes down to the universal magnitude of capitalization.
Industry and Business
What is the object of capitalist power? How does it creorder society? The answer begins with a conceptual distinction between the creative/productive potential of society – the sphere that Thorstein Veblen called industry – and the realm of power that, in the capitalist epoch, takes the form of business.10
Using as a metaphor the concept of physicist Denis Gabor, we can think of the social process as a giant hologram, a space crisscrossed with incidental waves. Each social action – whether an act of industry or of business – is an event, an occurrence that generates vibrations throughout the social space. But there is a fundamental difference between the vibrations of industry and the vibrations of business. Industry, understood as the collective knowledge and effort of humanity, is inherently cooperative, integrated and synchronized. It operates best when its various events resonate with each other. Business, in contrast, isn’t collective; it is private. Its goals are achieved through the threat and exercise of systemic prevention and restriction – that is, through strategic sabotage. The key object of this sabotage is the resonating pulses of industry – a resonance that business constantly upsets through built-in dissonance.
Let’s illustrate this interaction of business and industry with a simple example. Political economists, both mainstream and Marxist, postulate a positive relationship between production and profit. Capitalists, they argue, benefit from industrial activity – and, therefore, the more fully employed their equipment and workers, the greater their profit. But if we think of capital as power, exercised through the strategic sabotage of industry by business, the relationship becomes nonlinear – positive under certain circumstances, negative under others.11
This latter relationship is illustrated, hypothetically, in Figure 1. The chart depicts the utilization of industrial capacity on the horizontal axis against the capitalist share of income on the vertical axis. Now, up to a point, the two move together. After that point, the relationship becomes negative. The reason for this inversion is easy to explain by looking at extremes. If industry came to a complete standstill at the bottom left corner of the chart, capitalist earnings would be nil. But capitalist earnings would also be zero if industry always and everywhere operated at full socio-technological capacity – depicted by the bottom right corner of the chart. Under this latter scenario, industrial considerations rather than business decisions would be paramount, production would no longer need the consent of owners, and these owners would then be unable to extract their tributary earnings. For owners of capital, then, the ideal, Goldilocks condition, indicated by the top arc segment, lies somewhere in between: with high capitalist earnings being received in return for letting industry operate – though only at less than full potential.
Now, having laid out the theory, let’s look at the facts. Figure 2 shows this relationship for the United States since the 1930s. The horizontal axis approximates the degree of sabotage by using the official rate of unemployment, inverted (notice that unemployment begins with zero on the right, indicating no sabotage, and that, as it increases to the left, so does sabotage). The vertical axis, as before, shows the share of national income received by capitalists.
And lo and behold, what we see is very close to the theoretical claims made in Figure 1. The best position for capitalists is not when industry is fully employed, but when the unemployment rate is around 7 percent. In other words, the so-called “natural rate of unemployment” and “business as usual” are two sides of the same power process: a process in which business accumulates by strategically sabotaging industry.
Differential Accumulation
Now, power is never absolute; it’s always relative. For this reason, both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of capital accumulation have to be assessed differentially – that is, relative to other capitals. Contrary to standard political economy, liberal as well as Marxist, capitalists are driven not to maximize profit, but to “beat the average” and “exceed the normal rate of return.” Their entire existence is conditioned by the need to outperform, by the imperative to achieve not absolute accumulation, but differential accumulation. And that makes perfect sense. To beat the average means to accumulate faster than others; and since capital is power, capitalists who accumulate differentially increase their power.
Let’s illustrate this process with another example, taken from our work on the Middle East.12 Figure 3 shows the differential performance of the world’s six leading privately owned oil companies relative to the Fortune 500 benchmark. Each bar in the chart shows the extent to which the oil companies’ rate of return on equity exceeded or fell short of the Fortune 500 average. The gray bars show positive differential accumulation – i.e. the percent by which the oil companies exceeded the Fortune 500 average. The black bars show negative differential accumulation; that is, the percent by which the oil companies trailed the average. Finally, the little explosion signs in the chart shows the occurrences of “Energy Conflicts” – that is, regional energy-related wars.
Now, conventional economics has no interest in the differential profits of the oil companies, and it certainly has nothing to say about relationship between these differential profits and regional wars. Differential profit is perhaps of some interest to financial analysts. Middle-East wars are the business of experts in international relations and security analysts. And since each of these phenomena belongs to a completely separate realm of society, no one has ever thought of relating them in the first place.
And yet, as it turns out, these phenomena are not simply related. In fact, they could be thought of as two sides of the very same process – namely, the global accumulation of capital as power.
We started to study this subject when we were still graduate students, back in the late 1980s, and we’ve published quite a bit about it since then. This research opened our eyes, first, to the encompassing nature of capital; and, second, to the insight that one can gain from analyzing its accumulation as a power process.
Notice the three remarkable relationships depicted in the chart. First, every energy conflict was preceded by the large oil companies trailing the average. In other words, for an energy conflict to erupt, the oil companies first had to differentiallydecumulate – a most unusual prerequisite from the viewpoint of any social science.
Second, every energy conflict was followed by the oil companies beating the average. In other words, war and conflict in the region, which social scientists customarily blame for “distorting” the aggregate economy, have served the differential interest of certain key firms at the expense of other key firms.
Third and finally, with one exception, in 1996-7, the oil companies never managed to beat the average without there first being an energy conflict in the region. In other words, the differential performance of the oil companies depended not on production, but on the most extreme form of sabotage: war.
Needless to say, these relationships, and the conclusions they give rise to, are nothing short of remarkable. First, the likelihood that all three patterns are the consequence of statistical fluke is negligible. In other words, there must be something very substantive behind the connection of Middle East wars and global differential profits.
Second, these relationships seamlessly fuse quality and quantity. In our research on the subject, we show how the qualitative aspects of international relations, superpower confrontation, regional conflicts and the activity of the oil companies on the one hand, can both explain and be explained by the quantitative global process of capital accumulation on the other.
Third, all three relationships have remained stable for half a century, allowing us to predict, in writing and before the events, both the first and second Gulf Wars. This stability suggests that the patterns of capital as power – although subject to historical change from within society – are anything but haphazard.
Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism
This type of research has gradually led us to the conclusion that political economy requires a fresh start.
At about the same time, in 1991, Paul Sweezy, one of the greatest American Marxists, wrote a piece that assessed Monopoly Capital (1966), a deservingly famous book that he wrote together with Paul Baran twenty-five years earlier. In that piece, Sweezy admitted that there is something very big missing from the Marxist and neoclassical frameworks: a coherent theory of capital accumulation. His observations are worth quoting at some length because they show both the problem and why economics cannot solve it:
Why did Monopoly Capital fail to anticipate the changes in the structure and functioning of the system that have taken place in the last twenty-five years? Basically, I think the answer is that its conceptualization of the capital accumulation process is one-sided and incomplete. In the established tradition of both mainstream and Marxian economics, we treated capital accumulation as being essentially a matter of adding to the stock of existing capital goods. But in reality this is only one aspect of the process. Accumulation is also a matter of adding to the stock of financial assets. The two aspects are of course interrelated, but the nature of this interrelation is problematic to say the least. The traditional way of handling the problem has been in effect to assume it away: for example, buying stocks and bonds (two of the simpler forms of financial assets) is assumed to be merely an indirect way of buying real capital goods. This is hardly ever true, and it can be totally misleading. This is not the place to try to point the way to a more satisfactory conceptualization of the capital accumulation process. It is at best an extremely complicated and difficult problem, and I am frank to say that I have no clues to its solution. But I can say with some confidence that achieving a better understanding of the monopoly capitalist society of today will be possible only on the basis of a more adequate theory of capital accumulation, with special emphasis on the interaction of its real and financial aspects, than we now possess. (Sweezy 1991, emphases added)
The stumbling block lies right at the end of the paragraph: “the interaction between the real and financial aspects.” Sweezy recognized that the problem concerns the very concept of capital – yet he could not solve it precisely because he continued to bifurcate it into “real” and “financial” aspects. And that shouldn’t surprise us. “Whatever happens,” writes Hegel (1821: 11), “every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age, jump over Rhodes.” Sweezy and hisMonthly Review group had pushed the frontier of Marxist research for much of the post-war period, but by the 1990s their ammunition had run out. They recognized the all-imposing reality of finance, but their bifurcated world could not properly accommodate it.
As younger researchers socialized in a different world, we didn’t carry the same theoretical baggage. Uninhibited, we applied the Cartesian Ctrl-Alt-Del and started by assuming that there is no bifurcation to begin with and therefore no real-financial interaction to explain. All capital is finance and only finance, and it exists as finance because accumulation represents not the material amalgamation of utility or labor, but the creordering of power.
To challenge capitalism is to alter and eventually abolish the way it creorderspower. But in order to do so effectively, we need to comprehend exactly what is it that we challenge. Power, we argue, isn’t an external factor that distorts or supports a material process of accumulation; instead, it is the inner driving force, the means and ends of capitalist development at large. From this viewpoint, capitalism is best understood and contested not as a mode of consumption and production, but as a mode of power. Perhaps this understanding of what our society is could help us make it what it should be.
  1. The historical tension between the civil urban space of economy and capital and the coercive violent space of politics and state is explored from different perspectives in Robert Lopez’s The Birth of Europe(1967), Charles Tilly’s Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992 (1992) and Henri Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution (2003). []
  2. This separation haunts even the most innovative Marxists. Henry Lefebvre, for example, introduced the notion of urban society as a way of transcending the base-superstructure of Marx’s industrial society – only to find himself describing this new society in terms of … economics and politics. []
  3. The fascinating evolution and path-breaking heroes of the mechanical worldview are described in Arthur Koestler’s unparallel history of cosmology, The Sleepwalkers (1959). The philosophical underpinnings of the scientific revolution, particularly in physics, are examined in Zev Bechler’s Newton’s Physics and the Conceptual Structure of the Scientific Revolution (1991). []
  4. The history of the notion of force, from ancient thought to modern physics, is told in Max Jammer’sConcepts of Force (1957). The social myths of the gods are narrated in Robert Graves’ The Golden Fleece (1944) and analyzed in his study of The Greek Myths (1957). []
  5. The notion of abstract labor was first articulated by Karl Marx in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). The term util was coined by Irving Fisher in his Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Price (1892). []
  6. The notion that there exists an external rationality – and that human beings can do no more than discover this external rationality – was expressed, somewhat tongue in cheek, by the number theorist Paul Erdös. A Hungarian Jew, Erdös did not like God, whom he nicknamed SF (the supreme fascist). But God, whether likable or not, predetermined everything. In mathematics, God set not only the rules, but also the ultimate proofs of those rules. These proofs are written, so to speak, in “The Book,” and the mathematician’s role is simply to decipher its pages (Hoffman 1998). Most of the great philosopher-scientists – from Kepler and Descartes to Newton and Einstein – shared this view. They all assumed that the principles they looked for – be they the “laws of nature” or the “language of God” – were primordial and that their task was simply to “find” them (Agassi 1990). []
  7. The difference between heteronomy and autonomy is developed in the social and philosophical writings of Cornelius Castoriadis – see, for example, his Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy (1991). []
  8. We say “almost” since the issue isn’t really settled. The highest academic authorities on the subject still debate, first, whether, even under the most stringent (read socially impossible) conditions, a unique general equilibrium can be shown to exist (at least on paper); and, second, if such equilibrium does exist, whether or not it is likely to persist. []
  9. The notion of enfoldment, or the nesting of different levels of theory, consciousness and order, is developed in David Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980) and David Bohm and David Peat’s Science, Order, and Creativity (1987). []
  10. Cf. The Theory of Business Enterprise (Veblen 1904) and Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times (Veblen 1923). []
  11. Note that these considerations pertain only to the quantitative aspect of industrial activity; they do not deal with the qualitative nature of its output, or the conditions under which the output is produced. Obviously, these latter aspects are equally important, and here, too, business sabotage often operates to restrict the human potential by forcing social activity into trajectories that are as harmful as they are profitable. []
  12. See, for example, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimson Bichler, The Global Political Economy of Israel (2002: Ch. 5), Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, “Dominant Capital and the New Wars” (2004) and Jonathan Nitzan and Shimson Bichler, “New Imperialism, or New Capitalism?” (2006). []
Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler are co-authors of Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Reorder, RIPE series in Global Political Economy (London and New York: Routledge, 2009). All their publications are freely available from The Bichler & Nitzan Archives. Read other articles by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, or visit Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan's website.