Summary:
According to the theory of capital as power (CasP), capitalists and corporations are driven not to maximize profit, but to ‘beat the average’. Their yardstick is not an unmeasurable theoretical abstraction, but the readily observable performance of others. Their aim is not to increase their ‘material gain’, counted in fictitious utils or socially necessary abstract labour time, but to earn more money than everyone else. And the reason, we argue, has to do with power. In capitalism, capital is power, and to accumulate it differentially – i.e., relative to others – is to fortify and augment one’s organized power over others....In the animal world, three things and three things only are important — food, sex, and standing in the social hierarchy relative to dominance and submission. Got
Topics:
Mike Norman considers the following as important:
This could be interesting, too:
According to the theory of capital as power (CasP), capitalists and corporations are driven not to maximize profit, but to ‘beat the average’. Their yardstick is not an unmeasurable theoretical abstraction, but the readily observable performance of others. Their aim is not to increase their ‘material gain’, counted in fictitious utils or socially necessary abstract labour time, but to earn more money than everyone else. And the reason, we argue, has to do with power. In capitalism, capital is power, and to accumulate it differentially – i.e., relative to others – is to fortify and augment one’s organized power over others....In the animal world, three things and three things only are important — food, sex, and standing in the social hierarchy relative to dominance and submission. Got
Topics:
Mike Norman considers the following as important:
This could be interesting, too:
New Economics Foundation writes Is the Labour government delivering on its promises?
John Quiggin writes Dispensing with the US-centric financial system
New Economics Foundation writes Whose growth is it anyway?
Matias Vernengo writes What is heterodox economics?
According to the theory of capital as power (CasP), capitalists and corporations are driven not to maximize profit, but to ‘beat the average’. Their yardstick is not an unmeasurable theoretical abstraction, but the readily observable performance of others. Their aim is not to increase their ‘material gain’, counted in fictitious utils or socially necessary abstract labour time, but to earn more money than everyone else. And the reason, we argue, has to do with power. In capitalism, capital is power, and to accumulate it differentially – i.e., relative to others – is to fortify and augment one’s organized power over others....In the animal world, three things and three things only are important — food, sex, and standing in the social hierarchy relative to dominance and submission. Got that?
Real-World Economics Review Blog
Dominant capital is much more powerful than you think
Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, authors of Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder