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I am currently reading Seeing like a State, by James C Scott, and one of the points he makes, is that one of the fundamental functions of the state is to make society legible. By introducing standardization in the social context, not only does the legibility of society become useful for the state and it’s various strategies of governance, but it aims to make societies that are more governable.
It struck me immediately that this is precisely the act of creordering. Where Dominant Capital has succeeded at creating a society of consumers, who become more consumerist with time, and engendering support of neoclassical ideology to rationalize and justify the ever-increasing consumption, The State has created a society of governable civilians, who become more governable with time, and engendering support of government rule through liberal democratic ideology to rationalize and justify the ever-increasing governability.
Where Capitalism has, over time, refined the granularity with which it can define the consumer (Targeted Marketing), the State has, over time, refined the granularity with which it can define the governable civilian (DNA Profiling). I use these targeted marketing and DNA profiling, but there are many categories of legibility that encompass each individual that is subjected to creorder processing.
I am also currently reading the Invention of Capitalism by Michael Perelman, in which he very clearly illustrates that the early classical economists that formed the basis upon which Capitalism emerged from mercantilism as a dominant force throughout the world, was all public words that were essentially just a smoke screen to cover that they were desperately trying to ensure their own relevance to the Dominant Capital of the time. Which suggests that Main-stream Economics is little more than a facade intended to cover up the true power structures dominating society.
Now, this comparative equivalence between State Power and Capital Power strikes me as particularly useful, since we have seen through CasP that Capital is the quantitative measure of power. But as yet, there has been no equivalent Measure of State Power. Which brings me to my point. In CasP, Nitzan & Bichler wrote
To understand capitalism therefore is to decipher the link between quality and quantity, to reduce the multifaceted nature of social power to the universal appearance of capital accumulation.
and I am wondering if instead of the neoclassical economic theory of value of utilitarianism, we can view State Power as the “multifaceted social power” that underpins the ability of Capital to creorder
So my questions are these:
1. Is State Power the Qualitative mirror of the Quantitative Power of Capital?
2. Can the legibility of society be used to Qualitatively measure the State’s ability to creorder society?
3. If the answers to 1. & 2. are yes, would there be a correlation between the Power of the State, and the Power of Capital?
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Alternatively, Instead of viewing the state as the Qualitative half of the power coin, perhaps the state can be deconstructed using the existing CasP framework.
For instance, viewing Politics and Governance in the same way that Veblen framed Business and Industry. In which case, Politics would need to sabotage Governance in order to accumulate power.
Another example would be Political Parties competing with one another for dominance. In the same way that corporations seek differential accumulation, and are deemed dominant when they accumulate at a higher rate than their competition, Political parties seek differential power, and are deemed dominant when they accumulate at a higher rate than their competition. Thus, even when overall support for the system of politics is in decline, as long as support for one party declines more slowly than that of other parties, the Domination can be achieved.
The inability to quantify much of political ideology obviously hampers the potential for empirical analyses, but I am looking for ways to move past these inabilities, in much the same way that CasP managed to bypass the inability of neoclassicism and marxism to describe the accumulation of capital.
If Neoclassical and Marxist economic ideologies are predicated on theories of value, then can we similarly inspect the theories of value that underpin the State?
Liberal Democracies are supposed to be predicated on Liberty, Consent of the Governed, and Equality before the Law. But on the face of it, we can see an absolute failure of the foundation. So can we deconstruct the liberal ideology and use Liberty, Consent, and Equality as the quanta for measuring the accumulation of political power? Or would it be more apt to view The State not in terms of accumulation, and more broadly in terms of strength and rigidity?
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Sundry thoughts on the state of capital:
1. What makes the capitalist mode of power unique, is that it offers a universal measure of power relations in the form of differential capitalization (and its underlying elementary particles – differential future earnings, differential hype and differential risk).
2. Differential capitalization is not only universal, but also increasingly encompassing. It penetrates and creorders more and more power relations in society, minute and grand. And this penetration and creordering makes the mode of power – or the state of capital, as we call it – appear in constant flux.
3. This flux is deeply dialectical in that it interrelates the imposition of power and resistance to this imposition in what Ulf Martin (2019) calls an ‘autocatalytic sprawl’: the imposition of so-called rational power elicits ‘irrational’ resistance, which in turn calls for further impositions, further resistance, and so on.
4. In this context, the key question concerns the limits, or asymptotes, of this process. The capitalist incarnation of Lewish Mumford’s megamachine is probably the tallest, strongest and most encompassing the world has ever known. But these superlatives also indicate that it might be pushing against some limits beyond which its autocatalytic sprawl might implode. For more on these limits and their implications, see ‘The Asymptotes of Power’ (2012), ‘A CasP Model of the Stock Market’ (2016), and ‘Growing through Sabotage’ (2020).
5. The conventional conception of the modern state as a distinct entity, related to but conceptually separate from capital, is ill-equipped to deal with these integrated processes. James C. Scott’s notion of ‘legibility’ is theoretically trivial (and ‘not particularly original’, in his own words). Relations of power, by their very nature, creorder the universe on which they are imposed. And the process by which rulers make the terrain legible to them is by no means new. It’s written all over the history of the earliest states (just read Frankfort et al., Kramer and Mumford).
6. What is novel is that the logic of capital creordered a new state of capital out feudalism (see Ch. 13 in Capital as Power) . In this sense, the modern state is a creature of capitalism, just like capitalism is inconceivable without a state. They are two sides of the same thing: the state of capital.
7. Bottom line. Power relations, including those created by states (conventionally understood), can be and often are quantified. But they are quantified in different ways with different principles and distinct units. It is only when these relations are subjected and translated to the universal logic of capital (as power), that they too become universal….
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Frankfort, Henri, H. A. Groenewegen-Frankfort, John Albert Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen, and William Andrew Irwin. 1946. The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man. An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East. Chicago: The University of Chicago press.
Kramer, Samuel Noah. 1956. [1981]. History Begins at Sumer. Thirty-Nine Firsts in Man’s Recorded History. 3rd rev. ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Mumford, Lewis. 1967. The Myth of the Machine. Technics and Human Development. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.
Mumford, Lewis. 1970. The Myth of the Machine. The Pentagon of Power. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
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So my questions are these: 1. Is State Power the Qualitative mirror of the Quantitative Power of Capital? 2. Can the legibility of society be used to Qualitatively measure the State’s ability to creorder society? 3. If the answers to 1. & 2. are yes, would there be a correlation between the Power of the State, and the Power of Capital?
In a mature capitalist state, State Power and Capital Power are intertwined and inseparable. They are not mirrors of one another, nor is one qualitative and the other quantitative. They are, for all intents and purposes, one and the same. Yes, Dominant Capital is presented as all carrot (promises of liberty and the pursuit of happiness), and the State is presented as all stick (threats of and the use of legalized force), but Dominant Capital has captured the State, who by then has delegated many of its most important powers, including the power to create money, the power to control the money supply and limited sovereign immunity (aka limited liability), to Dominant Capital.
Once a state has delegated the power to create money to finance (aka Dominant Capital), finance will inexorably transform that state into an oligarchy or plutocracy, regardless of the state’s nominal constitutional form (monarchy, republic, liberal democracy, social democracy, communist).
What is happening in China right now is very interesting in that the state clearly has maintained control not only over the power to create money, but over finance generally. China may be the only “capitalist” state that controls capital instead of being controlled by it.
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If Neoclassical and Marxist economic ideologies are predicated on theories of value, then can we similarly inspect the theories of value that underpin the State? Liberal Democracies are supposed to be predicated on Liberty, Consent of the Governed, and Equality before the Law. But on the face of it, we can see an absolute failure of the foundation. So can we deconstruct the liberal ideology and use Liberty, Consent, and Equality as the quanta for measuring the accumulation of political power? Or would it be more apt to view The State not in terms of accumulation, and more broadly in terms of strength and rigidity?
Perhaps, liberalism, although presented as if it were universal, was never intended to be universal? Liberty, consent and equality for me, but not for you?
The reality is liberalism describes the political reality of the wealthy quite well.
Whether your trace the origins of liberalism to its early 19th century France and Benjamin Constant or late 17th century England and John Locke, the origins of capitalism preceded and informed liberalism. At this point, I view the liberal ideology as little more than capitalist propaganda, a clutch of normative myths (what Jason Stanley calls “flawed ideology”) we have been conditioned to embrace even while they always seem to recede from us. This does not mean I do not believe in the ideals liberalism espouses, I just don’t believe liberalism believes in the ideals liberalism espouses.
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In a mature capitalist state, State Power and Capital Power are intertwined and inseparable.
To be clear, such a condition is not inevitable. In the beginning, all social power derives from the state. Whether the state advances the status of one segment of society over another, or fails to protect one segment of society from another, society’s order flows from state action and/or inaction.
Capitalism requires the delegation of state power to private parties, i.e., capitalism proceeds from privilege.
I think of social power as a pie chart, with state power initially representing the whole pie. A state that believes in freedom of religion, in giving expression to that belief, carves out a domain of social power exclusive to religion. Over time, capitalist states have delegated more and more social power to capital, e.g., by ceding the power to control the money supply, limited sovereign immunity (limited liability), favorable tax treatment for capital, etc. The false duality of politics v. economics has been instrumental in securing this outcome for capital. (As an aside, I believe the separation of politics and economics logically flows from the separation of church and state; that doesn’t make it true, but the basic argument is the same when grounded in natural rights).
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