Home Forum Political Economy Confidence in Obedience, or Confidence in Liquidity? Reply To: Confidence in Obedience, or Confidence in Liquidity?

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I think “confidence in obedience” collapses too many disparate issues into a singularity, obliterating any opportunity to distinguish between those issues and understand their differences.

Yes, “confidence in obedience” is a way of describing the totalizing meaning of capitalized power (see Questions 15-16 in ‘The Capitalist as Power Approach’).

Do you believe your Power Index directly measures confidence in obedience, or do you view it as merely indicative of it? I’ve gone back to the paper in which you first introduce the Power Index, but your assertions and reasoning are more logical than empirical.

I’m not sure, though, how the existence of this abstract notion is “obliterating any opportunity to distinguish between those issues and understand their differences.”

Abstraction destroys the ability to study details that are ignored or eliminated for the sake of simplification.  You can’t look at what you aren’t allowed to see.

Scot Griffin wrote:

This where I think CASP’s outright rejection of the politics v. economics duality is problematic. I have always agreed with you that this dichotomy is a false one, that politics and economics are inseparable, but I also think we have to accept that this dichotomy, as false as it is, is a normative myth that has real power over people’s thinking and drives the formation of capitalist institutions. Whether we treat the state and Finance as separate entities or lump them together as “the state of capital,” the two operate in concert towards the same ends, but they operate differently and independently according to the normative myth and false dichotomy of politics v. economics.

I realize that we don’t share the same views on this matter, but I don’t think that we reject the politics-economics duality outright. Here is what we write on pp. 29-30 of Capital as Power:

To sum up, then, both neoclassicists and Marxists separate politics from economics, although for different reasons. The neoclassicists see the separation as desirable and, if handled properly, potentially beneficial. By contrast, Marxists view the distinction as contradictory and, in the final analysis, destructive for capitalism. Yet, both conclusions, although very different, are deeply problematic — and for much the same reason. The difficulty lies less in the explanation of the duality and more in the widespread assumption that such a duality exists in the first place. Even E. P. Thompson, a brilliant historian who was otherwise critical of Marxist theoretical abstractions, seems unable to escape it. Writing on the development of British capitalism from the viewpoint of industrial workers, he describes the class socialization of workers as ‘subjected to an intensification of two intolerable forms of relationship: those of economic exploitation and of political oppression’ (1964: 198–99). In this dual world, the industrial labourer works for and is exploited by the factory owner — and when he organizes in opposition, in comes the policeman who breaks his bones, the sheriff who evicts him and the judge who jails him. Now, this bifurcation is certainly relevant and meaningful — but only up to a point. From the everyday perspective of a worker, an unemployed person, a professional, even a small capitalist, economics and politics indeed seem distinct. As noted, most people tend to think of entities such as ‘factory’, ‘head office’, ‘pay cheque’ and ‘shopping’ differently from the way they think of ‘political party’, ‘taxation’, ‘police’, ‘military spending’ and ‘foreign policy’. Seen from below, the former belong to economics, the latter to politics. But that is not at all what capitalism looks like from above. It is not how the capitalist ruling class views capitalism, and it is not the most revealing way to understand the basic concepts and broader processes of capitalism. When we consider capitalist society as a whole, the separation of politics and economics becomes a pseudofact. Contrary to both neoclassicists and Marxists who see this duality as inherent in capitalism, in our view it is a theoretical impossibility, one that is precluded by the very nature of capitalism. To paraphrase David Bohm (1980), from this broader perspective, the politics–economics duality is not a useful division, but a misleading fragmentation. It cannot be shown to exist — and if it did exist, profit and accumulation would cease and capitalism would disappear. The consequences of this entanglement for capital theory are dramatic. As we shall demonstrate, without an ‘economy’ clearly demarcated from ‘politics’ we can no longer speak of quantifiable utility and objective labour value; and with these measures gone, neoclassical and Marxian capital theories lose their basic building blocks. They can observe that Microsoft is worth $300 billion and that Toyota pays $2 billion for a new factory, but they cannot explain why.

Any disagreement about this dichotomy is more a matter of degree than substance (we both agree it is false, but I think it remains useful to consider).  Thanks for reminding me of the above language from your book. I was thinking of some of your more recent polemics against neoclassical and Marxist economics.

You write that:

Next to the capitalists themselves, it is the states whose potential “disobedience” is most concerning to dominant capital.

Yes. Conflicts within dominant capital, which we think of as a complex network of big capitalists, large corporations, government organs and so-called policymakers, are crucial. But in our view, these inner-class conflicts are tied to and delineated by the conflict between the rulers and the ruled. If this latter conflict did not exist or was insignificant, the share of profit in national income would have been far higher, the laws would have been very different and potentially far harsher for the underlying population, violence would have been more extreme, etc.

When I first read CasP (the book), it seemed to me that you and Bichler had established a new paradigm, a true break from how we understand political economy. I still believe that, and I realize now that the elements of current CasP theory that I find chafing are those that borrow too heavily from the old paradigm and seem, at least to me, to hold CasP back from achieving many of the goals you state in your 2015 paper “The CasP Project: Past, Present, Future.”

For example, I think that theorizing a “State of Capital” does not go far enough, that it would be better simply to focus on understanding and studying the Market as sovereign and relegate the modern state to the Market’s subject, as we all are (including capitalists).  The ruler is the Market, not the capitalists, but the capitalists have rights and privileges within the Market (are “citizens” of the Market), while the vast majority of people do not even have access to the Market because they must spend everything they have in the market for commodities to survive and so cannot afford to accumulate the capital necessary to enter the Market, i.e., to become a citizen of the State of Capital instead of a mere subject.  The difference between capitalists and everyone else is the power they derive from having enough freedom from the market to be members of the Market, which is why they fear the Market disappearing if liquidity disappears.

In this sense, I believe that capitalist power does not derive from confidence in the obedience of the ruled but from confidence in the continued rule of the Market.  And I’d prefer to jettison words like “ruler,” “ruled,” “citizen,” and “class” to focus entirely developing a new taxonomy based on differential power, which I think is more likely to lead to insights that eliminate such power altogether.

As an aside, I feel MMT, which is an entirely different thing than CasP theory, suffers from similar problems arising from the use of language and concepts of the former paradigm, but MMT’s wounds are self-inflicted because it insists on interpreting the history of classical money to pretend it was just like modern money, which Colin Drumm has disproven.  CasP’s reliance on the old paradigm seems to be a mix of habit and a sincere desire to explain the new paradigm in a way that your peers could understand (even if they ultimately refuse to do so).