Resonance and dissonance in the rhythms of freelance creative work In the last blog, I applied some of Nitzan and Bichler’s ideas to freelance work in the creative industries. I utilised their conceptualisation of the distinction between creativity and power, and of the sabotage of the former by the latter. Nitzan and Bichler describe the […]
Continue ReadingCapital as Power and Freelance Creative Work 3
Creativity, sabotage and the management of risk and responsibility in freelance creative work Nitzan and Bichler theorise a dissonant relation of sabotage between power and creativity, business and industry. What they show is that the control of creative processes of production is not antithetical to their success. Rather, it is constitutive of this success in […]
Continue ReadingCapital as Power and Freelance Creative Work 2
Capital as Power, risk-aversion and the avoidance of uncertainty Mainstream critiques of contemporary capitalism conducted in the wake of the Great Recession tend to indict a number of factors. Perceived short-termism. The dangerous compulsion to speculate. An attraction to growth for growth’s sake. The propensity towards the greedy and rapid accumulation of riches. But other […]
Continue ReadingCapital as Power and Freelance Creative Work 1
Rhythms of Risk and Responsibility in Freelance Creative Work This series of blogs applies Nitzan and Bichler’s theory of capital as power to the empirical concern of freelance work in the creative industries. It reports some findings from a research project I conducted earlier this year. The research was part of a three month Short-Term […]
Continue ReadingNo. 2014/01: McMahon, "Capitalist Power, Distribution and the Order of Cinema"
Working Paper No. 2014/01 James McMahon, “Capitalist Power, Distribution and the Order of Cinema” In this paper, the structure of Hollywood film distribution will be analyzed through the lens of risk. In both its technical and conceptual senses, risk is relevant to the study of Hollywood’s dominant firms. In the interest of lowering risk, the business […]
Continue ReadingNo Way Out: Crime, Punishment and the Capitalization of Power
The United States is often hailed as the world’s largest ‘free market’. But this ‘free market’ is also the world’s largest penal colony. It holds over seven million adults – roughly five per cent of the labour force – in jail, in prison, on parole and on probation. Is this an anomaly, or does the […]
Continue ReadingThe Weekly Sabotage: Week 4
Royal Authority and Private Property Last week we considered the concept of ownership though the work of Veblen and Marx. We noted that the establishment and protection of private property involved the dispossession of the many by the few and that this tendency begins with the appropriation of humans (slavery) and land for private profit. […]
Continue ReadingThe Colour of the Sun: A Metaphor for Methodology?
Found this video when browsing Boing Boing. Originally posted by NASA, this video is fascinating. It may also stand as a metaphor for the methodological problems in political economic theory. Consider part of the explanation behind the video: “As the colors sweep around the sun in the movie, viewers should note how different the same […]
Continue ReadingDiscussion: The Ups and Downs of Empirical Research
It is exciting to see this website grow. Content is being added here and there, and our Working Paper Series has its first paper. What already stands out on this website, in my opinion, is the strength of the empirical research. With our feet planted in society itself, we have before us a great big […]
Continue ReadingThe Capitalist Mode of Power: Critical Engagements with the Power Theory of Value
This edited volume offers the first critical engagement with one of the most provocative and controversial theories in political economy: the thesis that capital can be theorized as power and that capital is finance and only finance. The book also includes a detailed introduction to this novel thesis first put forward by Nitzan and Bichler […]
Continue ReadingThe Price of Human Life
This American Life is a great public radio show based out of Chicago. They just hit their 500th episode and to celebrate, Ira Glass talked with his other producers about favourite past episodes. Alex Blumberg, one of the producers of Planet Money, reflected on a particular co-production with This American Life. All the way back in […]
Continue ReadingFood Price Inflation as Redistribution: Towards a New Analysis of Corporate Power in the World Food System
This paper outlines the contours of a new research agenda for the analysis of food price crises. By weaving together a detailed quantitative examination of changes in corporate profit shares with a qualitative appraisal of the restructuring in business control over the organisation of society and nature, the paper points to the rapid ascendance of […]
Continue ReadingWhat Happened to the Bondholding Class? Public Debt, Power and the Top One Per Cent
In 1887 Henry Carter Adams produced a study demonstrating that the ownership of government bonds was heavily concentrated in the hands of a ‘bondholding class’ that lent to and, in Adams’s view, controlled the government like dominant shareholders control a corporation.
Continue ReadingThe Rise of a Confident Hollywood: Risk and the Capitalization of Cinema
This paper investigates the historical development of risk in the Hollywood film business. Using opening theatres as a proxy for future expectations, the paper demonstrates how, from 1981 to 2011, Hollywood has improved its ability to predict the financial rankings of its films. More specifically, the Hollywood film business has become better at predicting which […]
Continue ReadingThe Power Underpinnings, and Some Distributional Consequences, of Trade and Investment Liberalisation in Canada
Criticism of trade and investment liberalisation (TAIL) in North America has drawn attention to weak economic performance, wage-profit redistribution, social dumping and
Continue ReadingCapital as Power: Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism
Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists think of capital as an economic entity that they count in universal units of utils and abstract labour, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious: they can be […]
Continue ReadingCapital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder
Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists both think of capital as an ‘economic’ entity that they count in universal units of ‘utils’ or ‘abstract labour’, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious. Nobody has […]
Continue Reading