(1) Two distinct economies? Yes and no. On the face of it, money is not the same as capital (although you can argue that, in the capitalist mode of power, money is capital with zero expected profit); commodities are different than financial assets (though you can argue that, in the capitalist mode of power, commodities are financial assets with a zero expected profit); and the pricing of commodities is different from the pricing of future income (although, in the capitalist mode of power, this difference disappears when commodities are sold to be delivered in the future, which suggests that the difference has to do with temporarily).
First, thank you for your time, observations and criticisms. I find the discussion helpful and I am encouraged by it.
As you can tell, I am struggling with how best to label the logical-legal domains I’ve identified. Is each domain an “economy,” a “polis” or just indicia of “class”? All I can say is that, within the U.S., these domains were created by a series of laws enacted over many decades since the U.S. Civil War, and they seem to have really emerged during the Reagan administration, most likely due to the tax reforms it enacted. Accordingly, even if you accept these domains as real and meaningful, they are not a precondition to capitalism itself. That said, they appear to be part of the capitalism we currently have, and understanding how these domains interact with each other may have explanatory power.
Regardless, I do see two distinct social orders emerging, and the differences go well beyond the boundaries of the domains as I’ve drawn them.
(2) Regardless of my reservations in (1) , there is the issue of parsimony. I’m just wondering which of your claims requires tucking the finance/political economy duality on top of CasP. At this point, it seems to me that all your claims here can be examined without this extra duality — though, I’d be happy to see your future research prove me wrong!
I developed the model in an effort to understand in a much more fine-tuned and nuanced way how power is created, manifested and applied.
At the end of the day, having a large market cap only gives a company so much power, and that power, whatever it is, does not transfer to the owners, nor does it usually extend much beyond the company’s ecosystem (suppliers, competitors and customers). Michael Porter’s “Five Forces Model,” which has been around since the 1980s, explains this aspect of capital as power better than CasP does, but it does not support CasP’s assertions regarding creorder.
One of the conclusions that my “extra duality” leads me to is that individual capitalists and firms are somewhat irrelevant. The fact that all capitalist wealth is really just one giant IOU from Finance places all the power of capital in Finance itself. You’ve called this “the state of capital,” and I have identified it as the “financial economy” or the “capital economy.” (This may explain why I have considered labeling the capital/financial domain as a polis, aka a state.)
In this sense, my model does not layer in an extra duality, it just gives more definition to CasP’s amorphous “state of capital.”
I also think there is value in abstracting the people (e.g., the “rulers” and the “ruled”) away and focusing on the system itself. Most capitalists are just cogs in the “state of capital,” and they are not even aware of that fact. They rule nothing, the holders of their “wealth” do.
(3) FIRE. You argue that real-estate and insurance were crucial in the emergence of capitalism, which is true — but how is this relevant to Finance as an analytical category?
That’s a good question. I am not wed to Finance as FIRE sector, but I have done more thinking on this matter than I’ve discussed so far.
Insurance and real estate should be considered as part of Finance (and the State of Capital) because both sectors create their own forms of “operational symbols” (i.e., policies and mortgages) that represent and affect entities in the political economy (material world). Just as a stock ticker extends Finance’s control over a previously unlisted corporation, so does a mortgage establish a means for controlling the underlying property. An insurance policy is more like a bet, but that’s also the essence of stock in a company that doesn’t issue dividends.
I prefer to think of this kind of “financialization” (the creation of financial symbols or avatars that represent a productive entity) in terms of a space-state control system (where those symbols are software sub-routines that are used to monitor output and provide feedback that guides the system under control.
Put more simply, the insurance and real estate sectors should be considered part of Finance/the State of Capital because each relies on the creation of economic claims to, or based on, existing legal rights. It is this additional layer of abstraction that is the hallmark of the State of Capital.