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Index
RIPE series in global political economy
Contents
Illustrations
Figures
Tables
Acknowledgements
1 Why write a book about capital?
Capitalism without capital
This book is not about economics
How and why
What’s wrong with capital theory?
Toward a new theory of capital
A brief synopsis
Part I: dilemmas of political economy
Part II: the enigma of capital
Part III: capitalization
Lineages
Part IV: bringing power back in
Part V: accumulation of power
The capitalist creorder and humane society
Footnotes
Part I Dilemmas of political economy
2 The dual worlds
The bifurcations
Politics versus economics
The liberal view
The Marxist perspective
Capitalism from below, capitalism from above
Real and nominal
The classical dichotomy
The Marxist mismatch
Quantitative equivalence?
Footnotes
3 Power
The pre-capitalist backdrop
The new cosmology
The new science of capitalism
Separating economics from politics?
Enter power
Footnotes
4 Deflections of power
Liberal withdrawal and concessions
Neo-Marxism
The three fractures
Neo-Marxian economics: monopoly capital
Kalecki’s degree of monopoly
From surplus value to economic surplus
Realization and institutionalized waste
The limits of neo-Marxian economics
The culturalists: from criticism to postism
Statism
The techno-bureaucratic state
The autonomous state
The capitalist state
The state imperative
The flat approach
The hierarchical approach
Political Marxism
The capitalist totality
Footnotes
Part II The enigma of capital
5 Neoclassical parables
The material basis of capital
The production function
The two assumptions
Where does profit come from?
The birth of ‘economics’
Marginal productivity theory in historical context
The end of equilibrium
Public management
The best investment I ever made
Some very unsettling questions
The quantity of capital
Circularity
Reswitching
The Cambridge Controversy
Resuscitating capital
The measure of our ignorance
The victory of faith
Footnotes
6 The Marxist entanglement I
Content and form
The labour theory of value
Three challenges
Socially necessary abstract labour
Production
Transformation
The road ahead
The second transformation
Why only labour?
Excluding power
Omitting capitalization
What does the labour theory of value theorize?
Testing the labour theory of value
The price of what?
Absence of value
Recap
The first transformation
Inconsistency, redundancy, impossibility
The dual system
The complicating detour
Joint production
Capitalism sans values?
The transformation so far
New solutions, new interpretations
Changing the assumptions
Complexity
Changing the definitions
Recounting costs
Prices as values
Footnotes
7 The Marxist entanglement II
Productive and unproductive labour
Production versus circulation
Financial intermediation, advertising and insurance
Disaggregates in the aggregate
Objective exchange values?
Eating the cake and having it too
Capitalist answers, pre-capitalist questions
The product itself and the amount of wealth
The transformation of nature
Human needs
Non-capitalist production
Reproducing the social order
Social services
What is non-capitalist?
A qualitative value theory?
The retreat
Marx’s science
Quality without quantity?
Footnotes
8 Accumulation of what?
What gets accumulated?
Separating quantity from price
Quantifying utility
Let the price tell all
Finding equilibrium
Quantity without equilibrium
Hedonic regression
Quantifying labour values
Concrete versus abstract labour
A world of unskilled automatons?
Reducing skilled to unskilled labour
A clean slate
Footnotes
Part III Capitalization
9 Capitalization
Utility, abstract labour, or the nomos ?
The unit of capitalist order
The pattern of capitalist order
Formulae
First steps
Coming of age
The capitalization of every thing
Human beings
Organizations, institutions, processes
The future of humanity
Capitalization and the qualitative–quantitative nomos of capitalism
Footnotes
10 Capitalization
From fiction to distortion: Marx’s view
From mirror to distortion: the neoclassical view
Microsoft vs General Motors
Tobin’s Q: adding intangibles
Boom and bust: adding irrationality
The gods must be crazy
Footnotes
11 Capitalization
Earnings
Hype
Decomposition
Movers and shakers of hype
Random noise
Flocks of experts and the inefficiency of markets
Let there be hype
The discount rate
The normal and the risky
Probability and statistics
Averting risk: the Bernoullian grip
The unknowable
The capital asset pricing model
Portfolio selection
CAPM
Circularity
Risk and power
The degree of confidence
Toward a political economy of risk
Summing up
Appendix to Chapter 11: strategists’ estimates of S&P earnings per share
Footnotes
Part IV Bringing power back in
12 Accumulation and sabotage
The categories of power
Veblen’s world
Industry and business
The two languages
The immaterial equipment
The hand of power
The social hologram
The whole picture
Resonance and dissonance
Absentee ownership and strategic sabotage
The natural right of investment
Private ownership and institutionalized exclusion
The right to property
The absentee ownership of power
Strategic sabotage
The direction of industry
The pace of industry
Business as usual
Taking stock and looking ahead
Pricing for power
From price taking to price making
The markup and the target rate of return
Pricing and incapacitating
Is free competition free of power?
The capitalist norm
The normal rate of return and the natural rate of unemployment
Antecedents: return and sabotage in antiquity
Pecuniary power: ancient versus capitalist
The differential underpinnings of universal sabotage
In sum
Capital and the corporation
Capital as negation
The rise of the modern corporation
Productive wealth and corporate finance
Equity versus debt
Immaterial assets
Material assets
The maturity of capitalism
Fractions of capital
Severing accumulation from circulation
Where have all the fractions gone?
Toward fractions of power
Footnotes
13 The capitalist mode of power
Material and symbolic drives
The invisible technology
The two archetypes
Neolithic culture
Power civilization
The mega-machine
The mega-machine resurrected: capital
Owners and technocrats
State and capital
Metamorphosis
Reordering
Contradictory interdependency
Notions of space
Cosmic space
Social space
State as a mode of power
The feudal mode of power
The feudal state
The limits of feudal power
The capitalization of feudal power
Faubourg, bourg, bourgeoisie
The dual economy
Private and public
Liberty as differential power
War and inflation
War and credit
Bypassing power: private instruments
Absorbing power: state finance
The genesis of capital as power
The government bond
Primitive accumulation?
Government capitalized
The state of capital
Who are the regulators?
Sovereign owners?
Whose policy?
Whose interests?
What is to be done?
Footnotes
Part V Accumulation of power
14 Differential accumulation and dominant capital
Creorder
Creating order
The power role of the market
How to measure accumulation?
‘Real’ benchmarking?
It’s all relative
Differential capitalization and differential accumulation
The capitalist creorder
The figurative identity
The universe of owners
Dominant capital
Aggregate concentration
Differential measures
Accumulation crisis or differential accumulation boom?
Historical paths
The boundaries of novelty
Spread, integration, oscillation
Regimes of differential accumulation
Some implications
Footnotes
15 Breadth
Green-field
Running ahead of the pack
Running with the pack
Mergers and acquisitions
A mystery of finance
The efficiency spin
From efficiency to power
Patterns of amalgamation
Merger waves
Tobin’s Q
From classical Marxism to monopoly capitalism
Differential advantage
Three transformations
Breaking the envelope
Globalization
Capital movements and the unholy trinity
Global production or global ownership?
Net or gross?
Capital flow and the creorder of global power
Foreign investment and differential accumulation
Appendix to Chapter 15: data on mergers and acquisitions
Footnotes
16 Depth
Depth: internal and external
Cost cutting
‘Productivity’ gains
Input prices
Stagflation
The historical backdrop
Neutrality?
Aggregates
Disaggregates
Redistribution
Winners and losers
Workers and capitalists
Small and large firms
Patterns
Accumulating through crisis
Business as usual
The imperative of crisis
Varieties of stagflation
The stagflation norm
The hazards of inflation
Capitalization risk
The politics of inflation
Stop-gap
Policy autonomy and the capitalist creorder
Footnotes
17 Differential accumulation
Amalgamation versus stagflation
The pattern of conflict
A new type of cycle
Oscillating regimes: a bird’s eye view
The role of the Middle East
Coalitions
Unrepeatable since time immemorial?
The retreat of breadth
The boundaries of differential accumulation
Out of bounds
Postscript, January 2009
Footnotes
References
Index
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