Dominant Capital and the New Wars

Abstract

The recent shift from ‘global villageism’ to the ‘new wars’ revealed a deep crisis in heterodox political economy. The popular belief in neoliberal globalization, peace dividends, fiscal conservatism and sound finance that dominated the 1980s and 1990s suddenly collapsed. The early 2000s brought rising xenophobia, growing military budgets and policy profligacy. Radicals were the first to identify this transition, but their attempts to explain it have been bogged down by two major hurdles: (1) most writers continue to apply nineteenth century theories and concepts to twenty-first century realities; and (2) few seem to bother with empirical analysis. This paper offers a radical alternative that is both theoretically new and empirically grounded. We use the ‘new wars’ as a stepping stone to understand a triple transformation that altered the nature of capital, the accumulation of capital and the unit of capital. Specifically, our argument builds on a power understanding of capital that emphasizes differential accumulation by dominant capital groups. Accumulation, we argue, has little to do with the amassment of material things measured in ‘utils’ or ‘abstract labor.’ Instead, accumu-lation, or ‘capitalization,’ represents a commodification of power by leading groups in society. Over the past century, this power has been restructured and concentrated through two distinct regimes of differential accumulation—‘breadth’ and ‘depth.’ A breadth regime relies on proletarianization, on green-field investment and, particularly, on mergers and acquisitions. A depth regime builds on redistribution through stagflation—that is, on differential inflation in the midst of stagnation. In contrast to breadth which presupposes some measure of growth and stability, depth thrives on ‘accumulation through crisis.’ The past twenty years were dominated by breadth, buttressed by neoliberal rhetoric, globalization and capital mobility. This regime started to run into mounting difficulties in the late 1990s, and eventually collapsed in 2000. For differential accumulation to continue, dominant capital now needs inflation, and inflation requires instability and social crisis. It is within this broader dynamics of power accumulation that the new wars need to be understood.

Biosurveillance as a Terrain of Innovation in an Era of Monopoly Finance Capital

“…Marazzi, 2008Marazzi, , 2010. The dissolution of the direct convertibility of the US dollar to gold factors has been brought into the discussion by certain authors, and is a prominent feature of analyses by, for example, Bichler and Nitzan (2004) in their studies on differential accumulation within breadth and depth regimes. In a recent review article, Lapavitsas (2011) summarizes financialization as: a systematic transformation of mature capitalist economies that comprise three fundamental elements: first, large non-financial corporations have reduced their reliance on bank loans and have acquired financial capacities; second, banks have expanded their mediating activities in financial households as well as lending to households; third, households have become increasingly involved in the realm of finance as debtors and as asset holders.…”

“…Money, perhaps, best expresses the difference between the two kinds of society, since discipline was always related to molded currencies containing gold as a numerical standard, whereas control is based on floating exchange rates, modulations, depending on a code setting sample percentages for various currencies. (Deleuze, 1990, p. 180) Bichler and Nitzan (2004) similarly argue that relative valuation of money set the stage for accumulation to become differential, or, in other words, a game of beating the averages. They further argue that differential accumulation is a key dynamic within financialization wherein staying ahead in the game of beating the averages necessitates a biopolitics of loss, disruption and social crises.…”

“…Thus the emergence of bioeconomics during this era is rooted in the organizing logic of neoliberal capitalism: bioeconomics became the prime preoccupation of not only US economic strategy, but of other industrial nation states as well, and animated the OECD's decision to launch a major policy project around the idea of biotechnological innovation as an economic strategy. The institutional articulation of innovation, economic prosperity and biotechnology was therefore initially framed in terms of capitalist expansion characterizing what Bichler and Nitzan (2004) would refer to as regimes of breadth, to exceed the inherent limitations of capitalism and defer its crisis.…”

Precarious Learning and Labour in Financialized Times

“…It can also be understood in terms of the importance of the stock market with regard to capital accumulation. Accumulation in stock market terms entails beating a game of averages, and in the late twentieth century, particularly after the dissolution of the direct convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold, being ahead in the game depends less on how many units are sold; rather it resembles a bet on who's things are going to sell relatively faster, or, a bet on future earnings (Bichler & Nitzan, 2004). Everything is up for financial speculation within the so-called FIRE economy (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate), including social crises, wars, debt, and even natural disaster (Klein, 2007).…”

The Power Underpinnings, and Some Distributional Consequences, of Trade and Investment Liberalisation in Canada

“…And finally, by rejecting a strict separation of polity from economy, capital from state and the real from the nominal, N&B embrace a holistic (or 'hologrammic') approach to accumulation. This has enabled them to establish stunning conceptual and empirical relationships between phenomena as seemingly disconnected as 'energy conflicts' in the Middle East, global inflation, domestic redistribution and the formation of corporate coalitions, to name just one example (see Bichler and Nitzan 2004). What the CAP framework is capable of doing, then, is directly linking large-scale social transformation and overt power processes, on the one hand, to shifts in prices, distribution and differential accumulation, on the other.…”