After all, capitalists seek profit, profit increases as cost falls, and cost falls as efficiency rises - so isn't it in capitalists' best interest to adopt the most
productive
techniques?
Nitzan Bichler - 2012 - Capital as Power
The pond metaphor is taken from his book.
3 In physics, the innovator was David Bohm (Bohm 1980; Bohm and Peat 1987; Hiley and Peat 1987). In neuro-psychology it was Karl Pribram (1971).
? Accumulation and sabotage 225
Unfortunately, though, the social impulses that make up this hologramic fusion cannot be assigned objective individual weights commensurate with their separate 'contributions', whether productive or counterproductive. Unlike natural events, these impulses are social in nature and inter-subjective in interpretation. Although each of them is 'present' in every social product, the extent of that presence is impossible to quantify objectively. And that impossibility pretty much seals the fate of any theory attempting to root distribution in objective productivity: the quantitative input-output structure of production cannot be mapped because it does not exist, and what does not exist cannot be a basis for theory that purports to measure it.
Resonance and dissonance
The alternative is to think of this hologramic interaction in its totality. A single pulse still means little. A repeated pulse creates a pattern. A repeated pulse coming at a regular interval - i. e. at a given frequency - creates a styl- ized oscillating pattern. Oscillators pulsing at their so-called natural frequency tend to 'speak' easily with other oscillators that beat at the same or similar frequency. Their co-vibrations are said to 'resonate'. Resonant systems are energy-efficient, requiring minimal energy both to sustain and amplify their vibrations. They are also self-synchronizing, tending to recali- brate and pull in outliers that beat at slightly different frequencies. Finally, they pervade the universe - all the way from the structure of the atom, through living systems, to the movement of celestial bodies.
Metaphorically, we can think of Veblen's industry as a resonant system. Its purpose is to better human life efficiently, and that purpose can best be achieved through reasoned coordination and integration; that is, through a resonant system whose numerous social pulses are organized so that they beat at purposeful and mutually reinforcing frequencies. What constitutes a reso- nant industry - and, indeed, the very 'good life' its resonance tries to achieve - is of course open-ended. It is up to society to decide these things. And such decisions, since they concern society as a whole, become more meaningful as they grow more democratic.
This articulation of industry yields a notion of productivity that is very different from the one used in conventional political economy. Neoclassicists and Marxists think of 'productive efficiency' in terms of objective inputs and outputs. The goal is output, and efficient processes are those that produce a given output with the minimal amount of inputs. This definition, though, cannot be applied to the analytical notion of a resonant industry for two basic reasons.
First, the ends and means of industry do not have objective quanta. When a single person assesses the relationship of a well-defined set of inputs and a single output, the measurement may seem unambiguous. But as we have seen in Chapter 8, the illusion of objectivity quickly dissipates once we start to aggregate, and it disappears completely when we deal with society as whole.
226 Bringing power back in
At that level, the magnitudes can only be measured inter-subjectively. This inter-subjectivity can take various forms. It can be enforced by a dictator or an oligarchy; it can be imposed by capitalist power through the guise of voluntary exchange; or it can be decided openly and democratically, through a broad participatory process in which a resonance-seeking society conscien- tiously assigns quantities to its preferences and methods. The last measure, representing our articulation of industry, obviously is inconsistent with any objective definition of efficiency.
The second reason is that the ends are not necessarily separate from the means. Standard measures of efficiency treat inputs as something to be mini- mized and outputs as something to be maximized - but that approach is meaningful only if the two categories are mutually exclusive. From the view- point of a resonant industry, though, the ends and means are not mutually exclusive: the creativity, joy and comfort of those who produce are as impor- tant as what they produce. And since the very process of bettering human life is part and parcel of that better life, the 'inputs' get mingled with the 'outputs' and the conventional concept of efficiency breaks down. Instead of an objec- tively given ratio of outputs to inputs, productivity becomes what society makes it to be: the democratically articulated 'good life' per person.
With this alternative concept in mind, consider now the realm of business. Although endlessly crisscrossing that of industry, the sphere of business tends to pulse at different frequencies - different from each other and different from that of industry. The main purpose of business is differential return. At the disaggregate level, this goal compels capitalists, as individuals and in groups, to act at cross purposes, such that each tends to beat at a different frequency. The aggregate picture is somewhat different. As we have seen in Part III, at its most general level business has its own super-resonance, so to speak - a reso- nance manifested through the religious adherence of all capitalists to the universal commands of capitalization. But this super-resonance of business conflicts with that of industry. It has to.
Now, it is true - and here we differ from Veblen and side with Marx - that business can and does 'propel' industry. It pushes human beings, organiza- tions and institutions into a state of hyperactivity, constantly shaping and restructuring their interactions. But this propulsion - and here Veblen was right - does not and cannot make industry productive, by definition. If the propulsion resonates with industry - that is, if it serves the inter-subjectively defined 'good life' - it becomes part of industry. But then, since industry is open to all and therefore inherently non-profitable, the propulsion ceases to be a business proposition. The only way to make a profit is through disso- nance. It is only by propelling industry in ways that interfere with and partly hamper its open integration, coordination and the well-being of its partici- pants that business earnings can be appropriated and capital accumulated.
Of course, like all metaphors, this one too shouldn't be taken literally, but as a mental framework to help us imagine alternative explanations. The task
Accumulation and sabotage 227 now is to explore precisely how business undermines industry and the way in
which their interaction can inform a concrete theory of capital as power.
Absentee ownership and strategic sabotage
The natural right of investment
Over the long term, argued Veblen, output depends mostly on the size of the population and the scope of the industrial arts; 'tangible assets' are relatively insignificant. Throughout history, the occasional destruction of material equipment and resources has usually been a relatively minor inconvenience. In Ireland, for example, the encouragement of illiteracy by the British occu- piers hindered development much more effectively than the destruction of the country's infrastructure. Even in the twentieth century, when physical accu- mulation had reached unprecedented levels, it took war-stricken Germany and Japan only a few years to launch their 'economic miracles'.
In the short term, however, tangible equipment is significant, and it is here, according to Veblen, that ownership comes into the picture:
For the transient time being, therefore, any person who has the legal right to withhold any part of the necessary industrial apparatus or materials from current use will be in a position to impose terms and exact obedi- ence, on pain of rendering the community's joint stock of technology inoperative for that extent. Ownership of industrial equipment and natural resources confers such a right legally to enforce unemployment, and so to make the community's workmanship useless to that extent. This is the Natural Right of Investment.
(Veblen 1923: 65-66, emphasis added)
A modern reader may find this definition of investment puzzling, so it is perhaps useful to put the term in historical context. Originally, the meaning of 'investment' had nothing to do with money and even less to do with production. Investment was a matter of power, pure and simple. Investio in Latin means 'to dress', and in Europe of the Middle Ages it was a signifier of feudal property rights. Lords would typically give their vassals a suit of clothing - or vestes - as part of their keep and as a sign of honour. The symbolic ceremony of transferring property rights from the lord to the vassal was known as investiture. The property in question could have been an estate, an office, a monastery, or simply a stipend (feodum de bursa). The ceremony 'vested' the vassal with the fief, conferring on him tenure or seisin - a legal seizure protected against invasion from any quarter (Bloch 1961: 173, 349; Ganshof 1964: 97, 126). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word 'investment' entered commercial use only in the early seventeenth century with the East India trade, and its contemporary connotation of
228 Bringing power back in
converting money capital into tangible income-yielding assets appeared only in the middle of the eighteenth century.
In other words, throughout the early history of the term, the causal link ran not from the creation of earnings to the right of ownership, but from vested ownership to the appropriation of earnings. And according to Veblen, the same principle continues to hold in the capitalist epoch. 'Capital goods' yield profit not because of their individual productivity, but because they are privately owned to begin with - that is, owned against others.
Private ownership and institutionalized exclusion
How does private ownership 'generate' earnings? By necessity, every social order is created and sustained through a certain mixture of cooperation and power. In simple egalitarian societies, cooperation was paramount; in capi- talism, power is the governing principle. The power principle of capitalism is rooted in the centrality of private ownership. The word 'private' comes from the Latin privatus, meaning 'restricted', and from privare, which means 'to deprive'. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells us, 'The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, "This is mine", and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society' (Rousseau 1754: Part III).
The most important feature of private ownership is not that it enables those who own, but that it disables those who do not. Technically, anyone can get into someone else's car and drive away, or give an order to sell all of Warren Buffet's shares in Berkshire Hathaway. The sole purpose of private ownership is to prevent us from doing so. In this sense, private ownership is wholly and only an institution of exclusion, and institutional exclusion is a matter of organized power.
Exclusion does not have to be exercised. What matters is the right to exclude and the ability to exact terms for not exercising that right. This right and ability are the foundation of accumulation. Business enterprise thrives on the implicit threat or explicit exercise of power embedded in ownership, with capitalist income being the 'ransom' for allowing industry to resonate:
Plainly, ownership would be nothing better than an idle gesture without this legal right of sabotage. Without the power of discretionary idleness, without the right to keep the work out of the hands of the workmen and the product out of the market, investment and business enterprise would cease. This is the larger meaning of the Security of Property.
(Veblen 1923: 66-67, emphasis added)
Of course, the role of power is hardly unique to capitalism. According to Veblen, all forms of ownership are based on the same principle of coercive appropriation, which in his view dates back to the early stages of barbarism and the initial emergence of predatory social customs. The differentiating
Accumulation and sabotage 229
factor, he says, is technological: the institutionalization of forceful seizure is intimately linked to the nature of tangible implements and to their relative significance in production. In the earlier stages of social development, forced appropriation was limited because there was little to appropriate and most objects were easily replaceable. But as society's 'immaterial assets' started to accumulate, so did the benefit from controlling its key 'material assets'.
The right to property
The first form of property rights, according to Veblen (1898; 1899a), was the ownership of people, particularly women. Etymologically, the English word 'husband' and the Mesopotamian word 'baal' both share the double meaning of ownership and marriage - and, in the latter case, also sexual exploit and the superior male-god of the west-Semitic pantheon. 4
Subsequently, the focus of ownership shifted (although not necessarily linearly) from slaves, to animals, to land. The specific trajectory depended on the nature of technological development, and it was only recently that it moved primarily to produced means of production. 5 Notably, prior to capi- talism neither slave ownership nor landed wealth were ever justified on grounds of productive contributions; both were institutionalized as a 'right' - by virtue of divine will or sheer force, but never as a consequence of creativity.
Now, clearly, the mere ownership of capital is no more productive than the ownership of slaves or land, so why do economists insist it is?
The answer, according to Veblen, is that economic theory had been unduly influenced by the transitory institutions of handicraft that existed during the transformation from feudalism to capitalism. Common sense suggested that craftsmen, working for themselves with their own material appliances, had a 'natural right' to own what they had made; it also implied that they could dispense with their product as they saw fit - that is, sell it for an income. 6 Handicraft and petty trade thus helped institutionalize pecuniary earnings as a natural extension of ownership-by-creativity. With exchange seen as a 'natural right of ownership', the very earning of income became a proof of productivity.
But this common sense is misleading for two reasons. First, even at the handicraft stage, production was an integrated societal process. Thus, despite
4 This was also the view of the early Marxists. According to Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), classes and the hierarchic state both evolved from private property, which in turn originated in the appropriation of women by men.
5 Early evidence of such shifts is found throughout the many debates over slavery and the parcelling of family estates in the Book of Numbers.
6 As John Locke put it in the seventeenth century: 'The Natural Liberty of Man is to be free from any Superior Power on Earth. . . to have only the Law of Nature for his Rule. . . . The measure of Property, Nature has well set, by the Extent of Mens Labour, and the Conveniency of Life' (1690, ? 22: 324 and ? 36: 334, original emphases).
? 230 Bringing power back in
the myth of 'individualism', private ownership was at least partly dependent on the dynamics of organized power (with the exclusionary practices of guilds offering a conspicuous illustration). Second, and more significantly, the institutions of handicraft were short-lived. As Veblen pointed out, technical change ushered in by the onset of the industrial revolution meant that produc- tion had to be conducted on a large scale, which in turn implied the progres- sive separation of ownership from production.
The absentee ownership of power
During the earlier stages of capitalism, production and business were still partly interwoven. 7 Indeed, even as late as the nineteenth century, US 'captains of industry' such as Cornelius Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie were seen as creative forces, acting as master workmen as well as astute businessmen. This duality did not last for long, however, and as business became increasingly separate from industry, the implication was no less than profound. Gradually, capitalism came to mean not merely the amassment of 'capital goods' under private ownership, but more profoundly a division between business and industry affected through the rise of absentee ownership.
The institution of absentee ownership has altered the very nature and meaning of capital. Not unlike the European lords of the Middle Ages, who gradually withdrew from the direct management of their estates, modern capitalists have become investors of 'funds', absentee owners of pecuniary wealth with no direct industrial dealings.
The complete delinking of capital from 'capital goods' is well illustrated by comical extremes. In the summer of 1928, the world's largest oil companies signed the secret Red Line Agreement, parcelling the Middle East between them for years to come. To celebrate the occasion, the architect of the deal, Calouste Gulbenkian, or 'Mr Five Percent' as he was otherwise known, char- tered a boat to cruise the Mediterranean with his daughter Rita:
Off the coast of Morocco, he caught sight of a type of ship he had never seen before. It looked very strange to him, with its funnel jutting up at the extreme stern of the long hull. He asked what it was. An oil tanker, Rita told him. He was fifty-nine years old, he had just made one of the greatest oil deals of the century, he was the Talleyrand of oil, and he had never before seen an oil tanker.
(Yergin 1991: 206)
This illustration is not an outlier. Currently, roughly half of all capitalist assets are owned indirectly through institutional investors such as pension and mutual funds, hedge and sovereign funds, insurance companies, banks
7 For a literary reflection of this fusion, see for instance the 'The Silent Men', a short story in Camus' Exile and the Kingdom (1958).
? Accumulation and sabotage 231
and corporations. The ultimate owners of these assets, whether big or small, exercise little voice in the management of the underlying production pro- cesses. For the most part, they merely buy and sell shares of these assets and collect the flow of dividends. Often, their diversification is so extensive that they don't know exactly what they own. And that characterization is by no means limited to portfolio owners. Many of the largest direct investors - including the capitalist dons whose names populate the Forbes listing of the superrich - are equally removed from any industrial dealings. Most of their energies are spent on the high politics of sabotage and the fine art of cutting and pasting assets through endless deals of divestment and merger - activities that they commonly carry out, just like Gulbenkian, without ever seeing a single 'capital good'.
Whereas most economists continue to view capital as an amalgamation of machines, structures, semi-finished commodities and measure-of-their-igno- rance technology, for the business investor capital has long been stripped of any physical characteristics. In the eyes of modern owners - whatever their gender, colour, religion, sexual inclination, ethnicity, culture, nationality, creed, height, weight or age - capital means one thing and one thing only: a pecuniary capitalization of earning capacity. It consists not of the owned facto- ries, mines, aeroplanes, retail establishments or computer hardware and soft- ware, but of the present value of profits expected to be earned by virtue of such ownership.
Of course, neoclassicists have never had a quarrel with capital as the present value of future earnings. In the long run, they assure us, demand and supply make this present value equal to the cost of producing that capital (assuming competitive markets, perfect foresight and the rest of the hedonic fairy tale). But as Veblen (1908) acutely observed long before the Cambridge Controversy (and as we have seen in Part III), this explanation was logically faulty from the very start. If capital and capital goods were indeed the same 'thing', he asked, how could capital move from one industry to another, while capital goods, the 'abiding entity' of capital, remained locked in their original position? Similarly, how could a business crisis diminish the value of capital when, as a material productive substance, the underlying capital goods remained unaltered? Or how could existing capital be denominated in terms of its productivity, when technological progress seemed to destroy its pecuniary value?
For Veblen, the answer was straightforward: capital simply is not a double-sided entity. It is a pecuniary magnitude, and only a pecuniary magni- tude, and its magnitude depends not on the capacity to produce but the ability to incapacitate. In the final analysis, the modern capitalist is nothing more than an absentee owner of power.
Strategic sabotage
What exactly is this power to incapacitate? Where does it come from, what form does it take, and how does it yield profit? According to Veblen, the
232 Bringing power back in
answer remained obscure partly because the historical consolidation of capi- talist property rights slowly substituted ideological manipulation and legal authority for brute force and religious sanctity.
With the twin emergence of the modern corporation and the modern state, capitalism has acquired a 'civilized' face: absentee ownership has become a legitimate norm; open violence has been replaced by latent threats under- written by hefty advertising budgets, bloated security services and over- flowing jails; and power has solidified into a mystical structure (at least for those subjected to it). In this new order, the power to incapacitate - or 'sabo- tage' as Veblen liked to call it - becomes a fully legitimate convention, carried out routinely and invisibly through the very subordination of industry to business. The blueprints of capitalist production are already programmed for business limitation, its hired managers are schooled in the art of invisible restriction, and its top executives are remunerated in proportion to profit. In order to merely earn the normal rate of return, all the owner has to do is own.
But then where is the 'sabotage'? Is it not true that in order to profit, busi- ness enterprise needs to promote industrial creativity, productive ingenuity and 'best practices'? The answer is not really. Strictly speaking, business cannot 'promote' industry. At most, it can unleash it - and even that it does only up to a point and under very specific conditions. Earnings do depend on output - but not on any type of output and not only on output. Moreover, the dependency is non-linear and sometimes inverted, which is why Veblen referred specifically to strategic sabotage.
Seen as an entire social order, business enterprise certainly is far more 'productive' than any earlier mode of social organization. 8 Yet, in Veblen's opinion, the immense productive vitality of this social order is an industrial, not a business phenomenon. Business enterprise is possible only in conjunc- tion with large-scale industry, though the reverse is not true (as illustrated by socialist industry or giant cooperatives such as Mondragon). The practices of business of course are closely related to industry, but only in point of control, never in terms of production and creativity. From this a priori vantage point, business per se is distinct from industry and therefore cannot boost industry, by definition. Even companies in possession of cutting-edge technology cannot promote industrial creativity; instead, they can merely relax - usually for a hefty fee - some of the constraints that would otherwise limit creativity.
This interpretation of the hyperproductivity of capitalism is quite different from that of Marx. In our view, Marx was correct to stress the dialectical imperative of technical change, an emphasis that the evolutionist Veblen preferred to disregard. Over the longer haul, capitalists indeed find them- selves compelled - and in turn force their society - to constantly revolutionize
8 This statement refers not to 'measured' increases in utility or abstract labour, but to the unprecedented social transformations, massive technical change and neck-breaking pace of energy conversion that came with the capitalist epoch.
? Accumulation and sabotage 233
the pattern of social reproduction. They continually 'invest' in having industry develop for them new methods and products and in expanding their capacity to produce them. Yet all of this they do in the expectation of adequate differential returns, and differential returns are possible only through restriction.
'Free is not a business model', explains the representative of eBay China (Dickie 2006). Money spent on having your engineers invent open-source technology or on making your workers create physical capacity that everyone can freely use is money gone down the drain. The only way such spending can become a profit-yielding investment is if others are prohibited from freely utilizing its outcome. In this sense, capitalist investment - regardless of how 'productive' it may appear or how much growth it seems to 'generate' - remains what it always was: an act of limitation.
The direction of industry
The limitation takes two general forms. The more important - but also more elusive and harder to delineate - concerns the very direction of industrial development. This restriction, of course, is hardly unique to capitalism, being inherent to the very development of any system of hierarchical production.
According to the historical evidence marshalled by Stephen Marglin (1974), rulers almost invariably fight to impose techniques that secure and amplify their power - often at the expense of efficiency (conventionally measured). This was true when the Romans forced slaves into brick and pottery 'factories' - just as it was true when European feudal lords imposed water mills and prohibited hand mills, when post-bellum American planters forced a credit-based system of share-cropping on small farmers, and when Stalin collectivized Soviet agriculture. The purpose of these technological impositions, Marglin argues, was 'divide and conquer'. And in his opinion, the same remains true with capitalist production: this is why British capital- ists retained demonstrably inefficient mining techniques, why they introduced the factory system well before the arrival of machines, and why they insisted on a minute division of labour that was debilitating to the point of becoming technically counterproductive.
At first sight, this capitalist imposition of inefficiency may seem surprising, if not counterintuitive.
After all, capitalists seek profit, profit increases as cost falls, and cost falls as efficiency rises - so isn't it in capitalists' best interest to adopt the most productive techniques? What exactly is the point of increasing power if the end result is lower profit? The question may sound biting - but it is the wrong one to ask. In fact there is no contradiction at all: in reality, power means not less profit but more profit.
The confusion is easy to sort out. The idea that profit maximization neces- sitates cost minimization and that cost minimization requires efficient production holds only in the fairy tale of perfectly competitive equilibrium. In this fictitious context, where prices and wages are set by mother market to
234 Bringing power back in
equilibrate marginal productivity and utility, it certainly makes sense for the 'representative' capitalist to adopt the most efficient techniques. 9
But once we get rid of the fiction and move to the real world where prices represent not utility and productivity but power, these imperatives immedi- ately break down on their own terms. 'Productive efficiency' (minimum inputs per unit of output) no longer implies 'economic efficiency' (minimum cost per unit of output), and 'economic efficiency' no longer means 'maximum profit'. In this imperfect context, it makes perfect sense for capitalists to impose 'inefficient' techniques: their very inefficiency is the power leverage through which profits are generated.
Let's illustrate this principle with more contemporary examples. Take transportation. On the face of it, a well-designed public transit seems much more conducive to human welfare and the natural environment than private transit. Yet, in the US and elsewhere, capitalist transportation has tended to move away from the public and toward the private. And the reason is not hard to grasp. Public transportation resonates with the integrated operation of industry and therefore doesn't sit well with regular flow of business profit.
This is perhaps the reason why early in the twentieth century the automo- bile companies bought and dismantled 100 electric railway systems in 45 US cities (Barnet 1980: Ch. 2). And it is also why these companies have long shunned any radical change in energy sources. The electric car, first invented in the 1830s, predates its gasoline and diesel counterparts by half a century, and for a while was more popular than both (Wakefield 1994). But by the early twentieth century, having proved less profitable than the gas guzzlers, it fell out of favour and was forcefully erased from the collective memory. Then came intolerable pollution, which in the 1990s led the state of California to mandate a gradual transition of automobiles to alternative energy. Complying with the new regulations, General Motors had its engineers quickly develop a highly efficient electric car, the EV1. But fearing that this gem of a car would undermine profit from their gas guzzlers, the company's owners, along with owners of other concerned corporations in the automo- tive and oil business, also invested in an orchestrated attempt to defeat the California bill. When the regulation was finally overturned, every specimen of the EV1 was recalled and literally shredded (Paine 2006). 10
A similar pattern emerges in the setting of broad electronic standards. In theory, the goal of such standards is to have as many different electronic components and processes resonate as seamlessly and effortlessly as possible. In practice, though, the debate is not over industrial resonance but business profit: it is not the technical blueprint that matters, but who will control it.
9 It is worth noting that this adoption merely keeps the capitalist running on empty, since perfect competition allows no profits beyond the marginal productivity of capital.
10 Of course, business circumstances change, and when in the 2000s global warming and peak oil emerged as lucrative profit opportunities, GM suddenly rediscovered its zeal for electric propulsion and quickly reinvented what it had previously shredded (Reed 2008).
? Accumulation and sabotage 235
The production of digital audio tapes (DAT) in the early 1990s, for instance, had been postponed (to the point of making the technology outdated) because several large firms could not reach a consensus regarding its effect on recording profits, a saga that has since been replayed in the 'format wars' over digital versatile discs (DVD) and high-definition optical discs.
These examples can easily be extended. Other broad industrial diversions include the development by pharmaceutical companies of expensive remedies for invented 'medical conditions' instead of drugs to cure real disease for which the afflicted are too poor to pay; the development by high-tech compa- nies of weapon technologies instead of alternative clean energies; the develop- ment by chemical and bio-technology corporations of one-size-fits-all genetically modified vegetation and animals instead of bio-diversified ones; the forced expansion by governments and realtors of socially fractured suburban sprawl instead of participatory and sustainable urbanization; the development by television networks of lowest-denominator programming that washes the brain instead of promoting its critical faculties; and so on.
Of course, as we repeatedly noted the line separating the socially desirable and productive from the undesirable and counterproductive is inter-subjec- tive and contestable. But taken together, these examples nonetheless suggest that a significant proportion of business-driven 'growth' is wasteful if not destructive, and that the sabotage underlying these socially negative trajecto- ries is exactly what makes them so profitable.
The pace of industry
The other limitation - perhaps less important but easier to approximate - concerns the growth of industrial capacity and output, whatever their purpose. The conventional view, both popular and academic, is that business loves growth. The more utilized the capacity and the faster its expansion, the greater the profit - or at least that's what we are told. The facts, though, tell a very different story. In reality, business can tolerate neither full-capacity utili- zation nor maximum growth. And why the aversion? Because otherwise profit would collapse to zero.
Consider again the automobile sector. Were the large car companies to decide to produce as much as possible rather than as much as the 'traffic can bear', their output could probably double on fairly short notice. And this potential is hardly unique to automobiles. Almost every modern industrial undertaking - from petroleum, through electronics, to clothing, machine tools, telecommunication, pharmaceuticals, construction, food processing and film, to name a few - tends to operate far below its full technological capacity (not to be confused with full business capacity). 11 If all industrial
11 The difference is fundamental. Conventional capacity measures consider what is feasible under the existing social order of business enterprise and production for profit, and usually estimate normal utilization to be in the 70-90 per cent range. Alternative conjectures based
? 236 Bringing power back in
undertakings were to follow the reckless example of automobiles, the relent- less pressure of oncoming goods and services would undermine tacit agree- ments and open cooperation among dominant firms and government agencies, trigger massive downward price spirals, and sooner or later end up in a Great Depression and a threat of political disintegration.
Speculating in a similar vein, Veblen (1923: 373) concluded that it was therefore hardly surprising that 'such a free run of production has not been had nor aimed at; nor is it at all expedient, as a business proposition, that anything of the kind should be allowed'. 12 Profits are inconceivable without production, but they are also impossible under a 'free run' of production. For profits to exist, business enterprise needs not only to control the direction of industrial activity, but also to restrict its pace below its full potential.
Business as usual
Conceptually, we would expect there to exist a non-linear relationship between the income share of capitalists on the one hand and their limitation of the pace of industry on the other. 13 This relationship is illustrated hypo- thetically in Figure 12. 1. The chart depicts the utilization of industrial capacity on the horizontal axis against the capitalist share of income on the vertical axis. Up to a point, the two move together. After that point, the rela- tionship becomes negative.
The reason is easy to explain by looking at extremes. If industry came to a complete standstill, capitalist earnings would be nil (bottom left point in Figure 12. 1). But capitalist earnings would also be zero if industry always and everywhere operated at full socio-technological capacity (bottom right point). Under this latter scenario, industrial considerations rather than business decisions would be paramount, production would no longer need the consent
on a material/technological limit, however, are likely to suggest far lower capacity utiliza- tion. Veblen, for one, estimated this utilization to fall short of 25 per cent (Veblen 1919: 81), a figure not much different from later estimates reported in Blair (1972: 474) and Foster (1986: Ch. 5). Interestingly, though not surprisingly, US military contractors, engaged in the most destructive form of business enterprise, sometime operate at as little as 10 per cent of their capacity - while earning superior rates of return (U. S. Congress 1991: 38).
12 A glimpse into what such a 'free run' might look like is offered by the recent experience of Japan: 'The underlying problem facing many Japanese companies', writes the Financial Times, 'is that they have misallocated capital over a long period. Instead of regarding it as a scarce resource to be used as efficiently as possible, they have pursued engineering excellence. . . . Japanese production lines are often models of automated efficiency, but less attention has been paid to whether the goods on them should be produced at all. Many companies have poured cash into projects that will never generate a return above the cost of capital' (Abrahams and Harney 1999).
13 Business limitations on the direction of industry are much more difficult to delineate and shall not be examined here.
? Accumulation and sabotage 237
? www. bnarchives. net
"Business As Usual" = Stategic Limitation of Industry
? ? ? Maximum "INDUSTRY" Minimum Sabotage (capacity utilization) Sabotage
Figure 12. 1 Business and industry
of owners, and these owners would then be unable to extract their tribute earnings. 14
In a capitalist society, 'business as usual' means oscillating between these two hypothetical extremes, with absentee owners limiting industrial activity to a greater or lesser extent. When business sabotage becomes excessive, pushing output toward the zero mark, the result is recession and low capi- talist earnings. When sabotage grows too loose, industry expands toward its societal potential, but that too is not good for business, since loss of control means 'glut' and falling capitalist earnings. For owners of capital the ideal condition, indicated by the top arc segment in Figure 12. 1, lies somewhere in between: with high capitalist earnings being received in return for letting industry operate - though only at less than full potential. Achieving this 'optimal' point requires Goldilocks tactics - neither too warm nor too cold - or what Veblen sardonically called the 'conscious withdrawal of efficiency'.
This theoretical relationship receives an astounding empirical confirma- tion from the recent history of the United States, depicted in Figure 12. 2. The
14 This hypothetical possibility was contemplated with great horror more than a century ago by The Spectator of London. In discussing workers' cooperatives, the newspaper concluded: 'They showed that associations of workmen could manage shops, mills, and all forms of industry with success, and they immensely improved the conditions of the men, but they did not leave a clear place for the masters (May 26, 1866, quoted in Marglin 1974: 73, emphasis added).
? "BUSINESS" (capital income share)
238 Bringing power back in 20
18
16
14
12
10
8
Figure 12. 2 Business and industry in the United States Note: Series are shown as 5-year moving averages.
? ? ? ? 1987
1943
2007
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 1933
1948
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? www. bnarchives. net
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
3 In physics, the innovator was David Bohm (Bohm 1980; Bohm and Peat 1987; Hiley and Peat 1987). In neuro-psychology it was Karl Pribram (1971).
? Accumulation and sabotage 225
Unfortunately, though, the social impulses that make up this hologramic fusion cannot be assigned objective individual weights commensurate with their separate 'contributions', whether productive or counterproductive. Unlike natural events, these impulses are social in nature and inter-subjective in interpretation. Although each of them is 'present' in every social product, the extent of that presence is impossible to quantify objectively. And that impossibility pretty much seals the fate of any theory attempting to root distribution in objective productivity: the quantitative input-output structure of production cannot be mapped because it does not exist, and what does not exist cannot be a basis for theory that purports to measure it.
Resonance and dissonance
The alternative is to think of this hologramic interaction in its totality. A single pulse still means little. A repeated pulse creates a pattern. A repeated pulse coming at a regular interval - i. e. at a given frequency - creates a styl- ized oscillating pattern. Oscillators pulsing at their so-called natural frequency tend to 'speak' easily with other oscillators that beat at the same or similar frequency. Their co-vibrations are said to 'resonate'. Resonant systems are energy-efficient, requiring minimal energy both to sustain and amplify their vibrations. They are also self-synchronizing, tending to recali- brate and pull in outliers that beat at slightly different frequencies. Finally, they pervade the universe - all the way from the structure of the atom, through living systems, to the movement of celestial bodies.
Metaphorically, we can think of Veblen's industry as a resonant system. Its purpose is to better human life efficiently, and that purpose can best be achieved through reasoned coordination and integration; that is, through a resonant system whose numerous social pulses are organized so that they beat at purposeful and mutually reinforcing frequencies. What constitutes a reso- nant industry - and, indeed, the very 'good life' its resonance tries to achieve - is of course open-ended. It is up to society to decide these things. And such decisions, since they concern society as a whole, become more meaningful as they grow more democratic.
This articulation of industry yields a notion of productivity that is very different from the one used in conventional political economy. Neoclassicists and Marxists think of 'productive efficiency' in terms of objective inputs and outputs. The goal is output, and efficient processes are those that produce a given output with the minimal amount of inputs. This definition, though, cannot be applied to the analytical notion of a resonant industry for two basic reasons.
First, the ends and means of industry do not have objective quanta. When a single person assesses the relationship of a well-defined set of inputs and a single output, the measurement may seem unambiguous. But as we have seen in Chapter 8, the illusion of objectivity quickly dissipates once we start to aggregate, and it disappears completely when we deal with society as whole.
226 Bringing power back in
At that level, the magnitudes can only be measured inter-subjectively. This inter-subjectivity can take various forms. It can be enforced by a dictator or an oligarchy; it can be imposed by capitalist power through the guise of voluntary exchange; or it can be decided openly and democratically, through a broad participatory process in which a resonance-seeking society conscien- tiously assigns quantities to its preferences and methods. The last measure, representing our articulation of industry, obviously is inconsistent with any objective definition of efficiency.
The second reason is that the ends are not necessarily separate from the means. Standard measures of efficiency treat inputs as something to be mini- mized and outputs as something to be maximized - but that approach is meaningful only if the two categories are mutually exclusive. From the view- point of a resonant industry, though, the ends and means are not mutually exclusive: the creativity, joy and comfort of those who produce are as impor- tant as what they produce. And since the very process of bettering human life is part and parcel of that better life, the 'inputs' get mingled with the 'outputs' and the conventional concept of efficiency breaks down. Instead of an objec- tively given ratio of outputs to inputs, productivity becomes what society makes it to be: the democratically articulated 'good life' per person.
With this alternative concept in mind, consider now the realm of business. Although endlessly crisscrossing that of industry, the sphere of business tends to pulse at different frequencies - different from each other and different from that of industry. The main purpose of business is differential return. At the disaggregate level, this goal compels capitalists, as individuals and in groups, to act at cross purposes, such that each tends to beat at a different frequency. The aggregate picture is somewhat different. As we have seen in Part III, at its most general level business has its own super-resonance, so to speak - a reso- nance manifested through the religious adherence of all capitalists to the universal commands of capitalization. But this super-resonance of business conflicts with that of industry. It has to.
Now, it is true - and here we differ from Veblen and side with Marx - that business can and does 'propel' industry. It pushes human beings, organiza- tions and institutions into a state of hyperactivity, constantly shaping and restructuring their interactions. But this propulsion - and here Veblen was right - does not and cannot make industry productive, by definition. If the propulsion resonates with industry - that is, if it serves the inter-subjectively defined 'good life' - it becomes part of industry. But then, since industry is open to all and therefore inherently non-profitable, the propulsion ceases to be a business proposition. The only way to make a profit is through disso- nance. It is only by propelling industry in ways that interfere with and partly hamper its open integration, coordination and the well-being of its partici- pants that business earnings can be appropriated and capital accumulated.
Of course, like all metaphors, this one too shouldn't be taken literally, but as a mental framework to help us imagine alternative explanations. The task
Accumulation and sabotage 227 now is to explore precisely how business undermines industry and the way in
which their interaction can inform a concrete theory of capital as power.
Absentee ownership and strategic sabotage
The natural right of investment
Over the long term, argued Veblen, output depends mostly on the size of the population and the scope of the industrial arts; 'tangible assets' are relatively insignificant. Throughout history, the occasional destruction of material equipment and resources has usually been a relatively minor inconvenience. In Ireland, for example, the encouragement of illiteracy by the British occu- piers hindered development much more effectively than the destruction of the country's infrastructure. Even in the twentieth century, when physical accu- mulation had reached unprecedented levels, it took war-stricken Germany and Japan only a few years to launch their 'economic miracles'.
In the short term, however, tangible equipment is significant, and it is here, according to Veblen, that ownership comes into the picture:
For the transient time being, therefore, any person who has the legal right to withhold any part of the necessary industrial apparatus or materials from current use will be in a position to impose terms and exact obedi- ence, on pain of rendering the community's joint stock of technology inoperative for that extent. Ownership of industrial equipment and natural resources confers such a right legally to enforce unemployment, and so to make the community's workmanship useless to that extent. This is the Natural Right of Investment.
(Veblen 1923: 65-66, emphasis added)
A modern reader may find this definition of investment puzzling, so it is perhaps useful to put the term in historical context. Originally, the meaning of 'investment' had nothing to do with money and even less to do with production. Investment was a matter of power, pure and simple. Investio in Latin means 'to dress', and in Europe of the Middle Ages it was a signifier of feudal property rights. Lords would typically give their vassals a suit of clothing - or vestes - as part of their keep and as a sign of honour. The symbolic ceremony of transferring property rights from the lord to the vassal was known as investiture. The property in question could have been an estate, an office, a monastery, or simply a stipend (feodum de bursa). The ceremony 'vested' the vassal with the fief, conferring on him tenure or seisin - a legal seizure protected against invasion from any quarter (Bloch 1961: 173, 349; Ganshof 1964: 97, 126). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word 'investment' entered commercial use only in the early seventeenth century with the East India trade, and its contemporary connotation of
228 Bringing power back in
converting money capital into tangible income-yielding assets appeared only in the middle of the eighteenth century.
In other words, throughout the early history of the term, the causal link ran not from the creation of earnings to the right of ownership, but from vested ownership to the appropriation of earnings. And according to Veblen, the same principle continues to hold in the capitalist epoch. 'Capital goods' yield profit not because of their individual productivity, but because they are privately owned to begin with - that is, owned against others.
Private ownership and institutionalized exclusion
How does private ownership 'generate' earnings? By necessity, every social order is created and sustained through a certain mixture of cooperation and power. In simple egalitarian societies, cooperation was paramount; in capi- talism, power is the governing principle. The power principle of capitalism is rooted in the centrality of private ownership. The word 'private' comes from the Latin privatus, meaning 'restricted', and from privare, which means 'to deprive'. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells us, 'The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, "This is mine", and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society' (Rousseau 1754: Part III).
The most important feature of private ownership is not that it enables those who own, but that it disables those who do not. Technically, anyone can get into someone else's car and drive away, or give an order to sell all of Warren Buffet's shares in Berkshire Hathaway. The sole purpose of private ownership is to prevent us from doing so. In this sense, private ownership is wholly and only an institution of exclusion, and institutional exclusion is a matter of organized power.
Exclusion does not have to be exercised. What matters is the right to exclude and the ability to exact terms for not exercising that right. This right and ability are the foundation of accumulation. Business enterprise thrives on the implicit threat or explicit exercise of power embedded in ownership, with capitalist income being the 'ransom' for allowing industry to resonate:
Plainly, ownership would be nothing better than an idle gesture without this legal right of sabotage. Without the power of discretionary idleness, without the right to keep the work out of the hands of the workmen and the product out of the market, investment and business enterprise would cease. This is the larger meaning of the Security of Property.
(Veblen 1923: 66-67, emphasis added)
Of course, the role of power is hardly unique to capitalism. According to Veblen, all forms of ownership are based on the same principle of coercive appropriation, which in his view dates back to the early stages of barbarism and the initial emergence of predatory social customs. The differentiating
Accumulation and sabotage 229
factor, he says, is technological: the institutionalization of forceful seizure is intimately linked to the nature of tangible implements and to their relative significance in production. In the earlier stages of social development, forced appropriation was limited because there was little to appropriate and most objects were easily replaceable. But as society's 'immaterial assets' started to accumulate, so did the benefit from controlling its key 'material assets'.
The right to property
The first form of property rights, according to Veblen (1898; 1899a), was the ownership of people, particularly women. Etymologically, the English word 'husband' and the Mesopotamian word 'baal' both share the double meaning of ownership and marriage - and, in the latter case, also sexual exploit and the superior male-god of the west-Semitic pantheon. 4
Subsequently, the focus of ownership shifted (although not necessarily linearly) from slaves, to animals, to land. The specific trajectory depended on the nature of technological development, and it was only recently that it moved primarily to produced means of production. 5 Notably, prior to capi- talism neither slave ownership nor landed wealth were ever justified on grounds of productive contributions; both were institutionalized as a 'right' - by virtue of divine will or sheer force, but never as a consequence of creativity.
Now, clearly, the mere ownership of capital is no more productive than the ownership of slaves or land, so why do economists insist it is?
The answer, according to Veblen, is that economic theory had been unduly influenced by the transitory institutions of handicraft that existed during the transformation from feudalism to capitalism. Common sense suggested that craftsmen, working for themselves with their own material appliances, had a 'natural right' to own what they had made; it also implied that they could dispense with their product as they saw fit - that is, sell it for an income. 6 Handicraft and petty trade thus helped institutionalize pecuniary earnings as a natural extension of ownership-by-creativity. With exchange seen as a 'natural right of ownership', the very earning of income became a proof of productivity.
But this common sense is misleading for two reasons. First, even at the handicraft stage, production was an integrated societal process. Thus, despite
4 This was also the view of the early Marxists. According to Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), classes and the hierarchic state both evolved from private property, which in turn originated in the appropriation of women by men.
5 Early evidence of such shifts is found throughout the many debates over slavery and the parcelling of family estates in the Book of Numbers.
6 As John Locke put it in the seventeenth century: 'The Natural Liberty of Man is to be free from any Superior Power on Earth. . . to have only the Law of Nature for his Rule. . . . The measure of Property, Nature has well set, by the Extent of Mens Labour, and the Conveniency of Life' (1690, ? 22: 324 and ? 36: 334, original emphases).
? 230 Bringing power back in
the myth of 'individualism', private ownership was at least partly dependent on the dynamics of organized power (with the exclusionary practices of guilds offering a conspicuous illustration). Second, and more significantly, the institutions of handicraft were short-lived. As Veblen pointed out, technical change ushered in by the onset of the industrial revolution meant that produc- tion had to be conducted on a large scale, which in turn implied the progres- sive separation of ownership from production.
The absentee ownership of power
During the earlier stages of capitalism, production and business were still partly interwoven. 7 Indeed, even as late as the nineteenth century, US 'captains of industry' such as Cornelius Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie were seen as creative forces, acting as master workmen as well as astute businessmen. This duality did not last for long, however, and as business became increasingly separate from industry, the implication was no less than profound. Gradually, capitalism came to mean not merely the amassment of 'capital goods' under private ownership, but more profoundly a division between business and industry affected through the rise of absentee ownership.
The institution of absentee ownership has altered the very nature and meaning of capital. Not unlike the European lords of the Middle Ages, who gradually withdrew from the direct management of their estates, modern capitalists have become investors of 'funds', absentee owners of pecuniary wealth with no direct industrial dealings.
The complete delinking of capital from 'capital goods' is well illustrated by comical extremes. In the summer of 1928, the world's largest oil companies signed the secret Red Line Agreement, parcelling the Middle East between them for years to come. To celebrate the occasion, the architect of the deal, Calouste Gulbenkian, or 'Mr Five Percent' as he was otherwise known, char- tered a boat to cruise the Mediterranean with his daughter Rita:
Off the coast of Morocco, he caught sight of a type of ship he had never seen before. It looked very strange to him, with its funnel jutting up at the extreme stern of the long hull. He asked what it was. An oil tanker, Rita told him. He was fifty-nine years old, he had just made one of the greatest oil deals of the century, he was the Talleyrand of oil, and he had never before seen an oil tanker.
(Yergin 1991: 206)
This illustration is not an outlier. Currently, roughly half of all capitalist assets are owned indirectly through institutional investors such as pension and mutual funds, hedge and sovereign funds, insurance companies, banks
7 For a literary reflection of this fusion, see for instance the 'The Silent Men', a short story in Camus' Exile and the Kingdom (1958).
? Accumulation and sabotage 231
and corporations. The ultimate owners of these assets, whether big or small, exercise little voice in the management of the underlying production pro- cesses. For the most part, they merely buy and sell shares of these assets and collect the flow of dividends. Often, their diversification is so extensive that they don't know exactly what they own. And that characterization is by no means limited to portfolio owners. Many of the largest direct investors - including the capitalist dons whose names populate the Forbes listing of the superrich - are equally removed from any industrial dealings. Most of their energies are spent on the high politics of sabotage and the fine art of cutting and pasting assets through endless deals of divestment and merger - activities that they commonly carry out, just like Gulbenkian, without ever seeing a single 'capital good'.
Whereas most economists continue to view capital as an amalgamation of machines, structures, semi-finished commodities and measure-of-their-igno- rance technology, for the business investor capital has long been stripped of any physical characteristics. In the eyes of modern owners - whatever their gender, colour, religion, sexual inclination, ethnicity, culture, nationality, creed, height, weight or age - capital means one thing and one thing only: a pecuniary capitalization of earning capacity. It consists not of the owned facto- ries, mines, aeroplanes, retail establishments or computer hardware and soft- ware, but of the present value of profits expected to be earned by virtue of such ownership.
Of course, neoclassicists have never had a quarrel with capital as the present value of future earnings. In the long run, they assure us, demand and supply make this present value equal to the cost of producing that capital (assuming competitive markets, perfect foresight and the rest of the hedonic fairy tale). But as Veblen (1908) acutely observed long before the Cambridge Controversy (and as we have seen in Part III), this explanation was logically faulty from the very start. If capital and capital goods were indeed the same 'thing', he asked, how could capital move from one industry to another, while capital goods, the 'abiding entity' of capital, remained locked in their original position? Similarly, how could a business crisis diminish the value of capital when, as a material productive substance, the underlying capital goods remained unaltered? Or how could existing capital be denominated in terms of its productivity, when technological progress seemed to destroy its pecuniary value?
For Veblen, the answer was straightforward: capital simply is not a double-sided entity. It is a pecuniary magnitude, and only a pecuniary magni- tude, and its magnitude depends not on the capacity to produce but the ability to incapacitate. In the final analysis, the modern capitalist is nothing more than an absentee owner of power.
Strategic sabotage
What exactly is this power to incapacitate? Where does it come from, what form does it take, and how does it yield profit? According to Veblen, the
232 Bringing power back in
answer remained obscure partly because the historical consolidation of capi- talist property rights slowly substituted ideological manipulation and legal authority for brute force and religious sanctity.
With the twin emergence of the modern corporation and the modern state, capitalism has acquired a 'civilized' face: absentee ownership has become a legitimate norm; open violence has been replaced by latent threats under- written by hefty advertising budgets, bloated security services and over- flowing jails; and power has solidified into a mystical structure (at least for those subjected to it). In this new order, the power to incapacitate - or 'sabo- tage' as Veblen liked to call it - becomes a fully legitimate convention, carried out routinely and invisibly through the very subordination of industry to business. The blueprints of capitalist production are already programmed for business limitation, its hired managers are schooled in the art of invisible restriction, and its top executives are remunerated in proportion to profit. In order to merely earn the normal rate of return, all the owner has to do is own.
But then where is the 'sabotage'? Is it not true that in order to profit, busi- ness enterprise needs to promote industrial creativity, productive ingenuity and 'best practices'? The answer is not really. Strictly speaking, business cannot 'promote' industry. At most, it can unleash it - and even that it does only up to a point and under very specific conditions. Earnings do depend on output - but not on any type of output and not only on output. Moreover, the dependency is non-linear and sometimes inverted, which is why Veblen referred specifically to strategic sabotage.
Seen as an entire social order, business enterprise certainly is far more 'productive' than any earlier mode of social organization. 8 Yet, in Veblen's opinion, the immense productive vitality of this social order is an industrial, not a business phenomenon. Business enterprise is possible only in conjunc- tion with large-scale industry, though the reverse is not true (as illustrated by socialist industry or giant cooperatives such as Mondragon). The practices of business of course are closely related to industry, but only in point of control, never in terms of production and creativity. From this a priori vantage point, business per se is distinct from industry and therefore cannot boost industry, by definition. Even companies in possession of cutting-edge technology cannot promote industrial creativity; instead, they can merely relax - usually for a hefty fee - some of the constraints that would otherwise limit creativity.
This interpretation of the hyperproductivity of capitalism is quite different from that of Marx. In our view, Marx was correct to stress the dialectical imperative of technical change, an emphasis that the evolutionist Veblen preferred to disregard. Over the longer haul, capitalists indeed find them- selves compelled - and in turn force their society - to constantly revolutionize
8 This statement refers not to 'measured' increases in utility or abstract labour, but to the unprecedented social transformations, massive technical change and neck-breaking pace of energy conversion that came with the capitalist epoch.
? Accumulation and sabotage 233
the pattern of social reproduction. They continually 'invest' in having industry develop for them new methods and products and in expanding their capacity to produce them. Yet all of this they do in the expectation of adequate differential returns, and differential returns are possible only through restriction.
'Free is not a business model', explains the representative of eBay China (Dickie 2006). Money spent on having your engineers invent open-source technology or on making your workers create physical capacity that everyone can freely use is money gone down the drain. The only way such spending can become a profit-yielding investment is if others are prohibited from freely utilizing its outcome. In this sense, capitalist investment - regardless of how 'productive' it may appear or how much growth it seems to 'generate' - remains what it always was: an act of limitation.
The direction of industry
The limitation takes two general forms. The more important - but also more elusive and harder to delineate - concerns the very direction of industrial development. This restriction, of course, is hardly unique to capitalism, being inherent to the very development of any system of hierarchical production.
According to the historical evidence marshalled by Stephen Marglin (1974), rulers almost invariably fight to impose techniques that secure and amplify their power - often at the expense of efficiency (conventionally measured). This was true when the Romans forced slaves into brick and pottery 'factories' - just as it was true when European feudal lords imposed water mills and prohibited hand mills, when post-bellum American planters forced a credit-based system of share-cropping on small farmers, and when Stalin collectivized Soviet agriculture. The purpose of these technological impositions, Marglin argues, was 'divide and conquer'. And in his opinion, the same remains true with capitalist production: this is why British capital- ists retained demonstrably inefficient mining techniques, why they introduced the factory system well before the arrival of machines, and why they insisted on a minute division of labour that was debilitating to the point of becoming technically counterproductive.
At first sight, this capitalist imposition of inefficiency may seem surprising, if not counterintuitive.
After all, capitalists seek profit, profit increases as cost falls, and cost falls as efficiency rises - so isn't it in capitalists' best interest to adopt the most productive techniques? What exactly is the point of increasing power if the end result is lower profit? The question may sound biting - but it is the wrong one to ask. In fact there is no contradiction at all: in reality, power means not less profit but more profit.
The confusion is easy to sort out. The idea that profit maximization neces- sitates cost minimization and that cost minimization requires efficient production holds only in the fairy tale of perfectly competitive equilibrium. In this fictitious context, where prices and wages are set by mother market to
234 Bringing power back in
equilibrate marginal productivity and utility, it certainly makes sense for the 'representative' capitalist to adopt the most efficient techniques. 9
But once we get rid of the fiction and move to the real world where prices represent not utility and productivity but power, these imperatives immedi- ately break down on their own terms. 'Productive efficiency' (minimum inputs per unit of output) no longer implies 'economic efficiency' (minimum cost per unit of output), and 'economic efficiency' no longer means 'maximum profit'. In this imperfect context, it makes perfect sense for capitalists to impose 'inefficient' techniques: their very inefficiency is the power leverage through which profits are generated.
Let's illustrate this principle with more contemporary examples. Take transportation. On the face of it, a well-designed public transit seems much more conducive to human welfare and the natural environment than private transit. Yet, in the US and elsewhere, capitalist transportation has tended to move away from the public and toward the private. And the reason is not hard to grasp. Public transportation resonates with the integrated operation of industry and therefore doesn't sit well with regular flow of business profit.
This is perhaps the reason why early in the twentieth century the automo- bile companies bought and dismantled 100 electric railway systems in 45 US cities (Barnet 1980: Ch. 2). And it is also why these companies have long shunned any radical change in energy sources. The electric car, first invented in the 1830s, predates its gasoline and diesel counterparts by half a century, and for a while was more popular than both (Wakefield 1994). But by the early twentieth century, having proved less profitable than the gas guzzlers, it fell out of favour and was forcefully erased from the collective memory. Then came intolerable pollution, which in the 1990s led the state of California to mandate a gradual transition of automobiles to alternative energy. Complying with the new regulations, General Motors had its engineers quickly develop a highly efficient electric car, the EV1. But fearing that this gem of a car would undermine profit from their gas guzzlers, the company's owners, along with owners of other concerned corporations in the automo- tive and oil business, also invested in an orchestrated attempt to defeat the California bill. When the regulation was finally overturned, every specimen of the EV1 was recalled and literally shredded (Paine 2006). 10
A similar pattern emerges in the setting of broad electronic standards. In theory, the goal of such standards is to have as many different electronic components and processes resonate as seamlessly and effortlessly as possible. In practice, though, the debate is not over industrial resonance but business profit: it is not the technical blueprint that matters, but who will control it.
9 It is worth noting that this adoption merely keeps the capitalist running on empty, since perfect competition allows no profits beyond the marginal productivity of capital.
10 Of course, business circumstances change, and when in the 2000s global warming and peak oil emerged as lucrative profit opportunities, GM suddenly rediscovered its zeal for electric propulsion and quickly reinvented what it had previously shredded (Reed 2008).
? Accumulation and sabotage 235
The production of digital audio tapes (DAT) in the early 1990s, for instance, had been postponed (to the point of making the technology outdated) because several large firms could not reach a consensus regarding its effect on recording profits, a saga that has since been replayed in the 'format wars' over digital versatile discs (DVD) and high-definition optical discs.
These examples can easily be extended. Other broad industrial diversions include the development by pharmaceutical companies of expensive remedies for invented 'medical conditions' instead of drugs to cure real disease for which the afflicted are too poor to pay; the development by high-tech compa- nies of weapon technologies instead of alternative clean energies; the develop- ment by chemical and bio-technology corporations of one-size-fits-all genetically modified vegetation and animals instead of bio-diversified ones; the forced expansion by governments and realtors of socially fractured suburban sprawl instead of participatory and sustainable urbanization; the development by television networks of lowest-denominator programming that washes the brain instead of promoting its critical faculties; and so on.
Of course, as we repeatedly noted the line separating the socially desirable and productive from the undesirable and counterproductive is inter-subjec- tive and contestable. But taken together, these examples nonetheless suggest that a significant proportion of business-driven 'growth' is wasteful if not destructive, and that the sabotage underlying these socially negative trajecto- ries is exactly what makes them so profitable.
The pace of industry
The other limitation - perhaps less important but easier to approximate - concerns the growth of industrial capacity and output, whatever their purpose. The conventional view, both popular and academic, is that business loves growth. The more utilized the capacity and the faster its expansion, the greater the profit - or at least that's what we are told. The facts, though, tell a very different story. In reality, business can tolerate neither full-capacity utili- zation nor maximum growth. And why the aversion? Because otherwise profit would collapse to zero.
Consider again the automobile sector. Were the large car companies to decide to produce as much as possible rather than as much as the 'traffic can bear', their output could probably double on fairly short notice. And this potential is hardly unique to automobiles. Almost every modern industrial undertaking - from petroleum, through electronics, to clothing, machine tools, telecommunication, pharmaceuticals, construction, food processing and film, to name a few - tends to operate far below its full technological capacity (not to be confused with full business capacity). 11 If all industrial
11 The difference is fundamental. Conventional capacity measures consider what is feasible under the existing social order of business enterprise and production for profit, and usually estimate normal utilization to be in the 70-90 per cent range. Alternative conjectures based
? 236 Bringing power back in
undertakings were to follow the reckless example of automobiles, the relent- less pressure of oncoming goods and services would undermine tacit agree- ments and open cooperation among dominant firms and government agencies, trigger massive downward price spirals, and sooner or later end up in a Great Depression and a threat of political disintegration.
Speculating in a similar vein, Veblen (1923: 373) concluded that it was therefore hardly surprising that 'such a free run of production has not been had nor aimed at; nor is it at all expedient, as a business proposition, that anything of the kind should be allowed'. 12 Profits are inconceivable without production, but they are also impossible under a 'free run' of production. For profits to exist, business enterprise needs not only to control the direction of industrial activity, but also to restrict its pace below its full potential.
Business as usual
Conceptually, we would expect there to exist a non-linear relationship between the income share of capitalists on the one hand and their limitation of the pace of industry on the other. 13 This relationship is illustrated hypo- thetically in Figure 12. 1. The chart depicts the utilization of industrial capacity on the horizontal axis against the capitalist share of income on the vertical axis. Up to a point, the two move together. After that point, the rela- tionship becomes negative.
The reason is easy to explain by looking at extremes. If industry came to a complete standstill, capitalist earnings would be nil (bottom left point in Figure 12. 1). But capitalist earnings would also be zero if industry always and everywhere operated at full socio-technological capacity (bottom right point). Under this latter scenario, industrial considerations rather than business decisions would be paramount, production would no longer need the consent
on a material/technological limit, however, are likely to suggest far lower capacity utiliza- tion. Veblen, for one, estimated this utilization to fall short of 25 per cent (Veblen 1919: 81), a figure not much different from later estimates reported in Blair (1972: 474) and Foster (1986: Ch. 5). Interestingly, though not surprisingly, US military contractors, engaged in the most destructive form of business enterprise, sometime operate at as little as 10 per cent of their capacity - while earning superior rates of return (U. S. Congress 1991: 38).
12 A glimpse into what such a 'free run' might look like is offered by the recent experience of Japan: 'The underlying problem facing many Japanese companies', writes the Financial Times, 'is that they have misallocated capital over a long period. Instead of regarding it as a scarce resource to be used as efficiently as possible, they have pursued engineering excellence. . . . Japanese production lines are often models of automated efficiency, but less attention has been paid to whether the goods on them should be produced at all. Many companies have poured cash into projects that will never generate a return above the cost of capital' (Abrahams and Harney 1999).
13 Business limitations on the direction of industry are much more difficult to delineate and shall not be examined here.
? Accumulation and sabotage 237
? www. bnarchives. net
"Business As Usual" = Stategic Limitation of Industry
? ? ? Maximum "INDUSTRY" Minimum Sabotage (capacity utilization) Sabotage
Figure 12. 1 Business and industry
of owners, and these owners would then be unable to extract their tribute earnings. 14
In a capitalist society, 'business as usual' means oscillating between these two hypothetical extremes, with absentee owners limiting industrial activity to a greater or lesser extent. When business sabotage becomes excessive, pushing output toward the zero mark, the result is recession and low capi- talist earnings. When sabotage grows too loose, industry expands toward its societal potential, but that too is not good for business, since loss of control means 'glut' and falling capitalist earnings. For owners of capital the ideal condition, indicated by the top arc segment in Figure 12. 1, lies somewhere in between: with high capitalist earnings being received in return for letting industry operate - though only at less than full potential. Achieving this 'optimal' point requires Goldilocks tactics - neither too warm nor too cold - or what Veblen sardonically called the 'conscious withdrawal of efficiency'.
This theoretical relationship receives an astounding empirical confirma- tion from the recent history of the United States, depicted in Figure 12. 2. The
14 This hypothetical possibility was contemplated with great horror more than a century ago by The Spectator of London. In discussing workers' cooperatives, the newspaper concluded: 'They showed that associations of workmen could manage shops, mills, and all forms of industry with success, and they immensely improved the conditions of the men, but they did not leave a clear place for the masters (May 26, 1866, quoted in Marglin 1974: 73, emphasis added).
? "BUSINESS" (capital income share)
238 Bringing power back in 20
18
16
14
12
10
8
Figure 12. 2 Business and industry in the United States Note: Series are shown as 5-year moving averages.
? ? ? ? 1987
1943
2007
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 1933
1948
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? www. bnarchives. net
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
