CartCapital & Power Instructor: Colin Drumm Date & Time: Sundays July 11, 18, 25, August 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 14:00 to 16:30 ET
DESCRIPTION: This Seminar is focused around a close study of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s Capital as Power, which presents an analysis of the theoretical shortcomings of both neoclassical economics (based on the concept of utility) and Marxism (based on the concept of value) and offers an alternative view which rejects the possibility of separating economic value from political power. Capital, they argue, is not an “economic entity,” but rather a “language in which the capitalist ruling class conceives and shapes society.” Instead of understanding economic modernity as an epoch in which the “disembedded” and autonomous logic of the economic comes to dominate and subordinate political power to itself, Nitzan and Bichler offer us the tools to understand the way in which political struggles and strategic confrontations always lie behind the appearance of an autonomous economic process, and, indeed, make it possible in the first place. By moving beyond the categories of value and utility towards an economic theory based around the concepts of the optionality of power and the social production of liquidity, it is possible to conceive of political-economic systems as contingent and open to political contestation rather than being determined by “immanent laws” or a natural, objective equilibrium. Supplemantary readings will be drawn from Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Ibn Khaldun, Thomas Munn, Marx, Veblen, Mirowski, and Robert Meister.
IMAGE: The New York Stock Exchange on October 20, 1987. Associated Press
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