[lbo-talk] CAPITAL AS POWER -- A new book by Nitzan & Bichler

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Tue May 19 21:36:13 PDT 2009



>
> I'm curious if you find this passage in the first chapter objectionable:
>
> <quote>
> Marxists see things rather differently. Capital for them is not a material
> substance per se, but a social relation embedded in productive, material
> entities. In order to understand capital, they argue, we have to look behind
> the hedonic veneer of liberal ideology and examine the industrial essence of
> the system. From this viewpoint, the key issue is not the utility that the
> capital produces, but the social process by which capital itself gets
> produced. Consequently, the proper way to approach capital is not from the
> output side, as per the neoclassicists, but from the input side – the side
> of labour.

Yes, objectionable. These guys see Marx as economistic, and productivist and industrialistic. There are so many things wrong here, but they are fairly subtle. Capital is not a social relation, it is a material-semiotic relation. Capital does not have anything like a straightforward industrial essence. There is no one key... though the process by which capital itself is produced IS important, it is the process of capital's crisis-ridden and crisis-depended expanded reproduction that matters and that process is as fundamentally political, cultural, economic and aspirational as it is economic. And, finally, the proper way to approach capital is as a totality. Marx doesn't even start Capital with labor, much less labor as an input, he starts with commodities... but he does so as part of an intentional writing strategy, a strategy that implies that there need not necessarily be a singularly proper way. Capital, the book(s), is(are) dialectically engaged in a process of ideology critique and scientific analysis, of political understanding and cultural situatedness but that feels like too much for these guys - guys who don't want words to be like bats, who want to be able to write in simple, direct and clear language for people who are used to linear and reductivist causality... which is objectionable.


>
>
> Marxists, too, count capital in universal units: the units of 'abstract
> labour'. This is the elementary particle of Marx's cosmology.
> Quantitatively, the dollar value of capital in the Marxist scheme is
> proportionate to its cost of production, and, specifically, to the amount of
> abstract labour socially necessary to produce that capital.4

Most Marxists don't count capital, much less in universal, abstract units of labor. The third sentence completely elides any understanding of the difference between dollar value and Value, the difference between price and average socially necessary labor time impacted by any number of different market and regulatory rents, on the one hand, and the vagaries of local markets on the other. That same sentence goes on to misunderstand how Value is related to the average socially necessary labor time of production, not the particular costs of any particular capitalist's production process. Perhaps they understand this stuff, if they do they do a lousy job of getting it across here.


>
>
> Unfortunately, both explanations fail. In the end, neither the
> neoclassicists nor the Marxists are able to answer the question of what
> determines the magnitude of capital and its rate of accumulation.
> Many reasons conspire to produce this failure, but the most important one
> concerns the basic units of analysis. As we shall see, utils and abstract
> labour are deeply problematic categories. They cannot be observed directly
> with our senses, and they cannot be examined indirectly through
> intermediation. Their 'quantity' cannot be calculated, even theoretically.

I tend not to enjoy reading their work but there are a whole raft of Marxists who have been doing quantitative analyses of capital and capitalism... perhaps these guys have never heard of them... they must not have talked with anyone associated with the Socialist Register up there at York...


> In fact, they are not even logically consistent entities. These
> shortcomings are very serious, and the last one potentially detrimental.
> </quote>
>
> As for the power business, they explain that further as well:
>
> <quote>
> The secret to understanding accumulation, this book argues, lies not in the
> narrow confines of production and consumption, but in the broader processes
> and institutions of power. Capital, we claim, is neither a material object
> nor a social relationship embedded in material entities. It is not
> 'augmented' by power. It is, in itself, a symbolic representation of power.
> The starting point is finance. As we shall see, Marx classified finance as
> 'fictitious' capital – in contrast to the 'actual' capital embedded in the
> means of production.

This simply shows how very very very little they understand Marx on finance capital... by the way, how do they explain how its OK for them to argue that capital is a representation of power such that, I'd imagine, you can't actually see the power, only the representation but Marx isn't allowed to talk about the ways in which materializations of capital represent the materialist abstraction, Value?


> This classification puts the world on its head. In fact, in the real world
> the quantum of capital exists as finance, and only as finance. This is the
> core of the capitalist regime.
>


> ...
>
> This perspective is unlike that of conventional political economy. Liberal
> ideology likes to present capital and state as hostile, while Marxists think
> of them as complementary.

Good lord, they think Marxists AGREE on this?! Its as if they have no understanding of the modes of production debate or the complex, and often incommensurable, interpretations of the role of the state relative to the capitalist class.


> But in both approaches, the two entities – although related – are
> distinctly instituted and organized. Our own view is very different. As we
> see it, the legal–organizational entity of the corporation and the network
> of institutions and organs that make up government are part and parcel of
> the same encompassing mode of power. We call this mode of power the state of
> capital, and it is the ongoing transformation of this state of capital that
> constitutes the accumulation of capital.

This position was taken by Bill Friedland - a very old-style Marxist - in conversations with me more than twenty years ago... its a play on the word state, how cool and sophisticated is that.... Don't they even know that O'Connor argued, in 1973, that at the height of monopoly capitalism the economy grew because the state grew, not the other way around?


>
>
> </quote>
>
> Nitzan and Bichler should probably thank y'all. If you hadn't jumped in to
> criticize, I wouldn't have bothered to read. Now, I feel the need to order
> to book and read -- so I can continue to ignore the boring ass Postone! :)
>
> shag

At this point, I think I may just avoid both... like the plague.

Alan



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