Abstract
Amidst the social sciences scholarship that is dominated by either neoclassical economics or Marxist views, Capital as Power presents a thought-provoking and erudite argumentation of an alternative understanding of the nature of capital. Asserting that orthodox perspectives of capitalism are inadequate, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler impressively historicise and argue against both liberal and Marxist conceptions of capital as an innate ‘economic’ or ‘market-created’ entity that can be calculated in terms of ‘utils’ or sheer ‘abstract labour’. In the most radical argumentative fashion, the authors offer a heterodox view by averring the fictitious ontological nature of capital which cannot be empirically detected, quantified or measured. Moreover, they contend that the economics-inspired conception of capital is inherently misleading, that is, solely conceiving capital as the ultimate derivative of the production–consumption nexus. Alternatively, capital must be broadly situated within the more complex, multifaceted and highly contested dynamics of power – or politics, to be more precise. Neither an empirical entity nor a social bond inherent in material things, capital is indeed a ‘symbolic representation of power’ (p. 7).
This volume is divided into five substantive parts. With the aim of historicising the notion of capital within the broader history of ideas in political economy, Part 1 discusses extensively that the erroneous economistic understanding of capital can be found in the problematic bifurcation between politics and economics, and within economics itself, the infamous and convoluted distinction between nominal and real. Part 2, meanwhile, concentrates on the misguided conceptions of capital from both the Marxist and liberal viewpoints. In this section, the authors maintain that neoclassical economics fundamentally runs in a fallacious circular reasoning. This means that in the aim of explaining capital productivity, liberals have to turn to the quantity of capital whose logical ontogenesis is completely dependent on describing also the quantity of profit. In contrast, Marxists remain evasive by merely centring upon their parochially oriented thesis that capital accumulation is just a mere offshoot of the exploitation of workers. Part 3 further explores the faultiness of capital conceived within the theoretical purviews of production and equipment, instead of the intricate subtleties of capitalisation and finance. Conclusively, Part 4 introduces a heterodox theory of capital accumulation, and Part 5 justifies the authors’ concept of capital as power.
This book offers a great service to the scholarship of political economy, most especially on its determined revival of the almost-forgotten ‘Cambridge Controversy’ on the ontological nature of capital (see p. 79). Amidst contemporary social sciences that are hegemonically shaped by neoclassical theories, Nitzan and Bichler make a compelling case for why capital should not be conceived in purely ‘materialist’ terms, but instead in terms of multi-faced dynamics of power relations magnified at the global level, as seen in today’s version of capitalism. The quintessential strength of this volume is its extensive historicisation of the major problems that haunt political economy, followed by a clear presentation of key paradigms in understanding capital; before eventually presenting their ambitious goal of reintroducing power dynamics as the ultimate working principle behind capital and its accompanying processes. One of the most notable arguments advanced is the notion of capitalists as ‘absentee owners of power’ wherein there is a marked ‘separation of ownership from production’ (pp. 230–1). I suspect that the sort of capitalist exploitation first exposed by Marx has been further advanced by the authors by highlighting further the highly deplorable ‘ontological distance’ between the capitalist and the sphere of production through which the severity of exploitation emanates from – although it should be noted that Nitzan and Bichler do not explicitly aim for this.
Despite the commendable goals of the authors in defying the enormity of power posed by the ‘academic churches’ of neoclassical economics and Marxism, there are apparently some inadequacies to the study of power and capital than Nitzan and Bichler claim. Firstly, they contend that globalisation can be epitomised as ‘capitalization of power on a global scale’ (p. 350). This may sound purely reductionist, from a holistic globalisation studies perspective, considering that there are other equally important modalities of power (e.g. culture, military, diplomacy, etc.) that operate at the global scale which may be considered as wholly distinct from sheer ‘capitalisation’. Secondly, the authors’ ontology of the state as a sheer ‘mode of power’ appears to be unconvincing, since their argumentation is completely dismissive of a very active and rich scholarship on the theories of the state; most especially on state–society relations. It seems that their ontology of the state was merely created in order to fit within their ambitious doctrine of ‘capital as power’ conceived as the irrepressible force of global politics. State–society dynamics are much more intricate than what they seem to be in the context of this book’s characterisation. Nevertheless, these points should not hinder people from reading this book, as I suspect that this work will be an eventual classic in political economy for its deeply impressive challenge to the orthodoxy of the discipline, as well as its remarkable survey of the state of the scholarship on capital.