Home Forum Political Economy Polanyi and CasP Reply To: Polanyi and CasP

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1. Interaction versus dissolution

In my work with Shimshon, we have argued that the ‘politics-economics’ duality, born from the early consternation of feudal power by the rising European burgs, has become a fetter on our understanding of capitalism.

This duality, which is imposed on, exists and accepted as a symbolic fixation at the lower levels of the social hierarchy, is lessened as we move up the scale until it disappears completely at the top levels of dominant capital. For the dominant capitalist-governmental rulers, the categories of ‘economics’ and ‘politics’ (or ‘society’ more generally) dissipate and are replaced by notion of differential power and the various forms of strategic sabotage that underpin it.

This perspective is quite different from Polanyi, for whom the issue is the interaction between the spheres, rather than their very dissolution.

2. Creorder

In CasP, the capitalist creorder — i.e., the ongoing creation of the capitalist order — is applied to the nature of capital. Capital, we argue, is not a productive economic entity but a symbolic financial ritual. It represents neither utility nor productivity, but the creording of differential power writ large.

It is true that many political economists, including Polanyi, have examined the effect of power on accumulation, whether negative or positive. But to the best of our knowledge, none (not even Veblen) have proposed — let alone theorized and researched — the notion that capital as such is a financial representation of power and nothing but power.

For more:

The Capital As Power Approach. An Invited-then-Rejected Interview with Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, 2020, http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/640/

CasP’s ‘Differential Accumulation’ versus Veblen’s ‘Differential Advantage’ (Revised and Expanded), 2019, http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/583/