Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan:
Capital as Power.
Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism
@ Dissident Voice
Capital as Power.
Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism
@ Dissident Voice
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.
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