Price
increase
from 1300 to 1900: 769%
?
?
Nitzan Bichler - 2012 - Capital as Power
S.
Bureau of Economic Analysis via Global Insight (series code: IF).
For the 1930-66 period, we spliced in the number of deals, linking it with prior and latter value ratios.
16 Depth
Husbandman: I think it is long of you gentlemen that this dearth is, by reason you enhance your lands to such an height, as men that live thereon must needs sell dear . . . or else they were not able to make the rent again.
Knight: And I say it is long of you husbandmen, that we are forced to raise our rents, by reason we must buy all things so dear that we have of you . . . which now will cost me double the money. . . .
--From a sixteenth-century text, A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England Quoted in Leo Huberman's Man's Worldly Goods
The farmers and knights of the sixteenth century could be forgiven for failing to understand the universal 'laws' of inflation. They didn't realize that their own local problems in fact were part of a much bigger global process. They were oblivious to the influx of precious metals and ignorant of the growing importance of credit and capitalization. They had no comparative data to look at and no in-house economists to 'interpret' them. In fact, as far as they were concerned, inflation didn't even exist. There were only increases in prices. The term 'inflation' came into common use only three centuries later.
Nonetheless, these illiterate sixteenth-century folks were smart enough to see what many present-day economists wish we forgot - namely, that infla- tion is a conflictual process of redistribution. The prices that the farmers charged were costs for the knights, while those that the knights set were costs for the farmers. Both hiked their prices, but never at the same rate. And this differential meant that those who raised their prices faster redistributed income from those who did so more slowly.
But the inflationary struggle isn't simply a tug-of-war between 'indepen- dent' individuals or groups in society. 1 It is an entire regime, an encompassing political process of transforming capitalist power. Note that inflation per se is much older than capitalism. As we have seen, prices already existed in the early civilizations and were leveraged and manipulated well before the arrival of capital. But capitalism is the first mode of power to be overwhelmingly
? 1 For a typical tug-of-war approach to inflation, see Hirschman (1985).
362 Accumulation of power
denominated in prices. And hence it was only with the rise of accumulation that inflation could emerge as a key aspect of the social creorder; and it was only in the twentieth century, with rise of large organized units, that inflation became a defining feature of the state of capital. The purpose of this chapter is to examine some of the ways in which prices and inflation assume this role through the process of differential accumulation. 2
Depth: internal and external
One of the more flexible features of the capitalist mega-machine is the ability to increase power indirectly as well as directly (Equation 4 in Chapter 14). Capitalist power, exerted over society as a whole, is coded in the level and pattern of differential earnings. As we have seen, dominant capital can broaden this power directly by making its organization grow faster than the average. But there is also the other, indirect route of deepening the elemental power of its organization. Whereas breadth hinges on the number of employ- ees in the corporate organization, depth depends on earnings per employee - a measure of the corporation's ability to leverage its organizational power over society as a whole.
Of these two methods, the former is the more effective. Operating primarily through mergers and acquisitions, it can generate enduring large- scale increases in capitalized power. Yet amalgamation isn't always feasible; and when breadth occasionally recedes, dominant capital has to resort to depth - or risk differential decumulation. It is through this latter process that price changes and inflation come into the accumulation picture. 3
Let's look at the depth process more closely. Earnings per employee can be decomposed into three elements associated with the number of units produced/sold by the corporation (indicated by the term 'units'). 4 These include (1) unit price, (2) unit cost and (3) units per employee:
1. earnings per employee = earnings earnings * units
1. earnings per employee = employment = units * employment
1. earnings per employee = unit earnings * units per employee
1. earnings per employee = (unit price - unit cost) * units per employee
2 For a fuller theoretical and empirical analysis of inflation and stagflation, including critiques of existing approaches, see Nitzan (1992; 2001), Bichler and Nitzan (2001: Ch. 5) and Nitzan and Bichler (2000; 2002: Ch. 4).
3 This and the next chapter illustrate our empirical arguments with available statistics of price and quantity aggregates. By using conventional data we keep the empirical critique at the same level as the theories and studies we challenge. For an alternative conceptualization that attempts to bypass the 'quality' trap of aggregation and devise alternative measures, see Nitzan (1992: Ch. 7).
4 For simplicity, our exposition here assumes that all output is sold.
? ? ? ? Depth 363
According to this equation, dominant capital can increase its differential depth by some combination of the following: (1) raising the number of units sold per employee faster than the average; (2) lowering unit cost faster than the average; (3) increasing unit price faster than the average.
Most political economists emphasize the first two methods and deempha- size if not reject the third. In the race for accumulation, they argue, the ultimate winners are those whose inputs are the most efficient and least expensive. That's the ABC of economic survival. It is of course true, the argu- ment continues, that 'monopolistic' firms sometimes can increase their profits by charging higher prices, but this practice is secondary and ephemeral. According to received convention, excessively high prices send buyers in search of cheaper substitutes; the excess profits generated by high prices attract competitors; and finally, there is always Schumpeter's creative destruction and the onslaught of innovations that even the strongest monop- olist cannot withstand.
All of this seems common sense - but, then, what looks sensible from the viewpoint of conventional political economy often gets inverted by differen- tial accumulation. In Chapter 15 we saw that, contrary to common belief, dominant capital benefits much more from mergers and acquisitions than from green-field growth. And in the present chapter we'll see a similar inversion with respect to prices: it turns out that raising prices is far more important for dominant capital than cutting costs.
Cost cutting
To clarify, it's not that the economists are wrong about cost cutting. The conflictual dynamics of capitalism, persistent even in the presence of oligopoly and monopoly, imply a constant pressure to raise the 'productivity' of the inputs and lower their prices. 5 This dual pressure, identified by the classical economists and reiterated by all subsequent schools, critical as well as conservative, seems beyond dispute.
And yet, from the viewpoint of differential accumulation, cutting cost is much like 'running on empty'. It helps dominant capital meet the average, not beat it. Admittedly, this latter claim isn't easy to test. The problem is that conventional data on productivity and input prices are rarely if ever broken down by firm size, so it is impossible to know whether and to what extent larger firms beat the average on either count. But the claim can be assessed indirectly, and the roundabout evidence seems consistent with the 'running- on-empty' thesis.
5 We use the concepts of 'productivity' and 'inputs' here from the what-you-see-is-what-you- get perspective of capitalist executives; the theoretical impossibility of defining these concepts rarely hinders their practical computation.
? 364 Accumulation of power
'Productivity' gains
Begin with 'productivity'. Analytically, the number of units sold per employee (denoted by 'units per employee') can be written as the ratio between sales per employee and unit price:
2. units per employee units salesemployees = sales per employee 2. units per employee = employees = sales = unit price
units
Using this equation, we can approximate the performance of dominant capital relative to the corporate sector as a whole.
Our proxy for dominant capital here is the Fortune 500 group of compa- nies (an alternative to the Compustat Top 100 from Chapter 14). Over the past half-century, sales per employee in the Fortune 500 group and in the corporate universe have grown more or less in tandem. The ratio between the Fortune 500 and the corporate universe was 1. 4 in 1954; it fell gradually to 1. 1 by 1969; and from there it rose steadily, reaching 1. 7 by 1993 (with the latter increase probably partly reflecting the growing significance of outsourcing by large firms). 6 The overall change from 1. 4 in 1954 to 1. 7 in 1993 represents a 20 per cent increase - miniscule when compared to the nineteenfold increase in differential profit per firm recorded over the same period (Figure 14. 2). It also seems reasonable to assume that the prices charged by larger firms haven't fallen relative to those of smaller ones (and have possibly increased) - particularly since, as we show in the next section, inflation has tended to work in their favour. 7
Now relate these two long-term developments to Equation (2). Since differential sales per employee rose only marginally while differential prices haven't fallen and have probably risen, it follows that 'productivity' gains by dominant capital were more or less the same as the social average.
The difficulty of securing differential 'productivity' gains shouldn't surprise us. Even if we ignore the hologramic nature of technology and focus only on the presumable 'in-house' development of production techniques, there is still no reason to expect large firms to be better in such development than small ones.
For instance, many of the current advances in bio-technology, informa- tion and communication are reported by smaller companies, some with only a handful of employees. Dominant capital is often unable to match this flurry of innovation. In many cases, large firms find it cheaper to let smaller compa- nies incur the R&D cost and then buy the more promising startups - some- times just to keep their technology from spreading too quickly. 8
6 Fortune stopped publishing employment data after 1993.
7 Figures in this paragraph are computed on the basis of data from Fortune, the U. S. Internal
Revenue Service and the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
8 'Big American companies', writes The Economist, 'fear that innovation is the secret of success
? ? ? ? ? ? - and that they cannot innovate'. Indeed, their 'terror' is that 'innovation seems to work best
Depth 365
Moreover, and probably more importantly, production techniques, regardless of who develops them, are notoriously difficult to monopolize. Unlike final commodities that can often be protected through patents, copy- rights and other exclusionary threats, improvements in the social organiza- tion of production tend to proliferate easily, and this rapid spread quickly dilutes the initial advantage of whoever implemented them first.
Input prices
The other route to cutting costs is to lower the prices of the inputs. Yet, here too it is very difficult to translate absolute reductions into differential reduc- tions. For a start, even the largest firms have only limited control over their input prices, particularly with the proliferation of 'outsourcing' and long 'production chains'. The challenge to differential accumulation of universal input prices was summarized neatly by the former chairman of Intel, Andrew Grove:
How do you build a company when your buyers are infinitely knowledge- able and where your suppliers maintain a level playing field for your competitors? What remains your competitive differentiator or your source of value or whatever academic cliche? you want to wrap around it?
(Byrne 2000)
Furthermore, even when large firms do control input prices, the benefits quickly tend to spill over to other firms. Thus, a wage freeze by dominant capital groups in the United States would empower smaller firms to follow suit; political pressure by automobile companies on the Indian government to subsidize oil would benefit all energy users; a British importer winning a tariff reduction gives competing importers a free ride, etc.
All in all, then, cost cutting is a poor differential tactic. Dominant capital has to pursue it with much zeal, lest it falls behind; but it can rarely use it to get ahead.
outside of them', a result of which '[m]uch of today's merger boom is driven by a desperate search for new ideas', with trading in intangible assets reaching $100 billion in 1998, up from $15 billion in 1990 (Anonymous 1999). 'Nobody holds out for organic growth any more', declares Sir Richard Sykes, chairman of Glaxo SmithKline, which in 1999 controlled 7. 3 per cent of the world market for pharmaceuticals. According to a 2000 Financial Times survey in which he is cited, the reason has little to do with 'efficiency gains'. Indeed, 'Those wary of mergers', reports the survey, 'argue there is no evidence of scale contributing to greater efficiency. Ed Scolnick, chief scientist at Merck, found absolutely no correlation between the size and productivity of his company's research laboratories. The relative success of small biotechnology companies suggests that scale in research may even be a disadvantage'. Of course, this is hardly a reason not to merge. As Jim Niedel of Glaxo points out in the same article, 'doubling up' (via merger) allows companies to screen twice as many compounds, not to mention the resulting increase in 'salespower' (Pilling 2000). In our terminology, it contributes to both internal breadth and external depth.
? 366 Accumulation of power
Stagflation
The road to differential depth is not to cut cost but to inflate prices. As we shall see, inflation often redistributes income from wages to profits and from small to large firms; it elevates the differential earnings per employee of the leading corporations; and it deepens the 'elemental power' of dominant capital.
But the process is full of puzzles. First, there is the general theoretical conundrum. Conventional theory associates inflation with growth, yet reality usually brings inflation together with stagnation. Since this combination is not supposed to happen, economists decided to contain the damage by giving it a special name. They called it 'stagflation' - an anomalous mixture of stag- nation and inflation that shouldn't be confused with 'normal', growth-driven inflation (growthflation? ). 9
And then there is our own bizarre proposition that stagflation, whether normal or anomalous, fuels the differential accumulation of dominant capital. Most readers will probably find this suggestion somewhat difficult to swallow. How could firms gain from a combined crisis of rising prices, stag- nating production and falling employment? Why should this crisis benefit larger firms relative to smaller ones? And if stagflation is so beneficial to the most powerful groups in society, why don't we have it all the time? Clearly, there are many questions to sort out here, so it is worthwhile to backtrack a bit and provide some context.
The historical backdrop
To start with, there seems to be a general neglect, including among critical political economists, of the historical significance of inflation for capitalist development. On the face of it, this neglect is rather surprising. Inflation - commonly defined as a general rise in the price of commodities - is hardly new. According to David Hackett Fischer (1996), since the thirteenth century there have been no less than four major inflationary waves, or 'price revolu- tions' as he calls them. Figure 16. 1 illustrates the pattern of these waves in the UK, a country whose price indices go back the farthest (note the log scale). 10
The first wave occurred during the thirteenth century; the second during the sixteenth century; the third in the latter part of the eighteenth century; and the most recent began in the early twentieth century and is still going. As Fischer argues, each of these price revolutions was accompanied, particularly toward the latter part of the wave, by a deepening socio-economic crisis. In
9 The term 'stagflation' was reputedly coined in the 1960s by British parliamentarian Ian Macleod and later popularized by Paul Samuelson (1974).
10 The patterns of US consumer prices (since the early nineteenth century) and of US whole- sale prices (since the mid-eighteenth century) are remarkably similar to the UK ones shown in Figure 16. 1.
? 10,000
1,000
100
10
1
1200 1300
1400 1500 1600
1700 1800 1900
2000 2100
Figure 16. 1
Consumer prices in the UK, 1271-2007
Source: Till 1948, data are from Global Financial Data (series code: CPGBRM); from 1949 onward, data are from International Financial Statistics through Global Insight (series code: L64@C112).
other words, the 'anomaly' of inflation in the midst of stagnation is not a twentieth-century novelty. It's been with us for half a millennium, if not more. Now, to be fair to the classical political economists, the specific backdrop
against which they were writing was largely one of price stability and even deflation - not inflation. As shown in Figure 16. 1, UK consumer prices had hardly changed between 1600 and 1750. In the second half of the eighteenth century they rose relatively quickly, but then fell again throughout the nine- teenth century. Between 1800 and 1900 - a formative period of political economy - consumer prices in Great Britain and wholesale prices in the United States both dropped by more than one third. 11 In this deflationary context, it was only natural to concentrate on production and the coercive discipline of 'market forces' and to ignore inflation.
However, the historical backdrop changed dramatically during the twen- tieth century. First, inflation has risen to unprecedented levels. As Figure 16. 1
11 Data for the United States are from Global Financial Data (series code: WPUSAM for the wholesale price index).
Depth 367
? ? ? ? ? log scale
? ? ? Price increase from 1900 to 2007: 5,785%
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
Price increase from 1300 to 1900: 769%
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 1900
www. bnarchives. net
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 368 Accumulation of power
shows, UK prices rose by nearly 6,000 per cent between 1900 and 2007, compared with less than 800 per cent in the previous six centuries combined. 12 Second, there was a clear change in pattern. Whereas during pervious waves prices oscillated around their uptrend, in the twentieth century - with the notable exception of the 1930s - they moved only up. 13
The classical political economists, writing in a different era, perhaps could be excused for not paying too much attention to inflation. But having lived through the experience of the twentieth century, contemporary observers cannot ask for similar leniency.
Neutrality?
Of course, modern political economists don't deny that inflation exists, and some even agree that it may have short-term consequences. But in the opinion of most, all of this is much ado about nothing. In the long run, inflation has little or no effect. It is 'neutral'.
And why this insistence on 'neutrality'? The reason goes back to David Hume's 'classical dichotomy'. As we have seen earlier in the book, political economists follow this dichotomy to separate the 'real' and 'nominal' spheres of economic life. Of these two, the 'real' sphere of production, consumption and distribution is considered primary; the 'nominal' sphere of money and absolute prices is thought of mostly as a lubricant, a mechanism that merely facilitates the movement of the 'real economy'. And since money prices are 'nominal' and therefore do not impinge on the 'real', their overall inflation (or deflation) must be 'neutral', by definition. 14
Aggregates
The belief that inflation is 'neutral' is greatly facilitated by the way econ- omists define it. There are two common definitions: (1) inflation as a
12 The US pattern is almost identical, although the magnitudes are smaller: between 1900 and 2007, consumer prices in the land of unlimited opportunities rose by only 2,700 per cent (computed from Global Financial Data [series code CPUSAM] and International Financial Statistics through Global Insight [series code: IMF:L64@C111]).
13 The story of the 1930s is more complicated than the aggregate data suggest. Recall from Chapter 12 that most of the price drop during the period happened in competitive indus- tries. In the more concentrated industries prices remained relatively stable, and in some sectors they even rose.
14 This view is pervasive. 'There cannot, in short, be intrinsically a more insignificant thing, in the economy of society, than money', tells us John Stuart Mill (1848: Book 3, Ch. 7). Arthur Pigou wrote a whole book to debate The Veil of Money (1949), and Franco Modigliani informs us that 'Money is "neutral", a "veil" with no consequences for real economic magnitudes' (Papademos and Modigliani 1990: 405). And since, according to Milton Friedman (1968: 98), 'inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenom- enon', it follows that an overall increase in money prices, however annoying, is neutral in the grander scheme of things (on the origins of the terms 'veil of money' and 'neutrality of money', see Patinkin and Steiger 1989).
? Depth 369
continuous increase in the average price level; and (2) inflation as an ongoing increase in 'liquidity'; that is, an increase in the total amount of money rela- tive to the total volume of commodities.
These two definitions are often seen as equivalent: if we derive the average price level P as the ratio between the total amount of money M and the overall 'quantity' of commodities Q (ignoring the velocity of circulation), it is obvious that in order for the average price P to rise (or fall), the liquidity ratio M/Q has to rise (or fall) at the same rate, and vice versa. 15 In this strict sense, Milton Friedman is correct: inflation indeed is 'always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon', by definition. But inflation is never only a monetary phenomenon.
Disaggregates
The important thing to note here is the aggregate perspective: the conven- tional definition focuses wholly and only on averages and totals. This fact is crucial, since to define inflation in this way is to miss the point altogether.
Inflation certainly involves a rise in the average price of commodities; but that is like saying that the average outcome of a game between two basketball teams is always a draw: one team's win is another's loss. Although mathemat- ically correct, the statement is irrelevant to the reality of basketball games. If these games always ended up in a draw, players would soon be looking for another game - one that they could actually win. Similarly with inflation. If all prices rose at the same average rate, inflation definitely would be 'neutral', as mainstream economists say. But it would also serve no purpose whatsoever and hence cease to exist.
The crux of inflation is not that prices rise in general, but that they rise dif- ferentially. Inflation is never a uniform process. Although most prices tend to rise during inflation, they never rise at the same rate. There is always a spread, with some prices rising faster and others more slowly. From this viewpoint, the engine of inflation is a redistributional struggle fought through rising prices. The overall level of inflation is merely the surface consequence of that struggle.
So in the end, Milton Friedman is right - but only in part. Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon; but it is also always and everywhere a redistributional phenomenon. 16
15 Note that the equivalence of the two definitions breaks down once we admit that commodi- ties cannot be aggregated into an overall 'quantity' (Chapter 8). However, since economists are generally indifferent to this impossibility, we don't press it in this chapter.
16 The following is a technical note for those interested in the fine print. Mainstream econo- mists would readily admit that in reality prices do not all change at the same rate, and that relative price variations may even be positively correlated with the rate of inflation (see for instance Parks 1978). But these relative variations, they would add, neither cause inflation nor bear on its consequences.
First, in a competitive market relative price variations reflect changes in consumer preferences (marginal utility) and technology (marginal productivity), and in that sense
? 370 Accumulation of power
Redistribution
The difference between the two views is decisive. For those who see inflation as an aggregate 'nominal' process of 'too-much-money-chasing-too-few- commodities', indeed there is little reason to look any further into the so- called 'real' world of distribution. The only relevant questions are, first, how much money is created and, second, how increased liquidity is 'transmitted' to higher prices.
But if inflation is merely the aggregate appearance of an underlying redis- tributional conflict, the way to understand it is to begin from that very struggle. From this perspective, there are two important questions: (1) who are the winners and losers in the struggle; and (2) what is the broader char- acter of that struggle? We deal with each question in turn.
Winners and losers
Inflation redistributes income in many different ways, of which we highlight two: redistribution between workers and capitalists, and redistribution between small and large firms. 17
Workers and capitalists
Figure 16. 2 contrasts the redistribution between workers and capitalists with the rate of wholesale price inflation in the United States over the past half- century (the insert in the top-left corner shows the period since 1985 and will be examined later). The distribution of income denotes the ratio between the
have little to do with overall inflation. Second, 'disequilibrium' prices - namely, those that do not reflect the underlying logic of utility and productivity - may exist, but only temporarily. Soon enough, the market would force them back to their 'proper' equilibrium levels. And finally, during inflation deviations from equilibrium prices arise mostly from misguided expectations and therefore are never systematic in their pattern. These devia- tions could make some 'agents' richer and others poorer, but only by fluke. Disequilibrium prices could also arise from 'government intervention' and 'monopoly practices' (mainly by labour unions), but the redistributional effect is nullified once agents become aware of these 'imperfections' and 'discount' them into their demand and supply. Moreover, regardless of their redistributional impact, these 'imperfections' cannot translate into inflation unless validated by increases in overall liquidity.
Unfortunately, this line of defence is persuasive only to those who erect it. First, marginal utility and productivity are never observable, so there is no way to know the 'equilibrium' price that equates them. Second, equilibrium prices, as their name suggests, hold only in equilibrium. But since we never know whether we are in equilibrium or disequilibrium, we never know which prices are 'out of line'. Finally, it is unclear why we should assume that inflation does not systematically redistribute income. To argue that market forces prevent such systematic redistribution may be a meaningful explanation for an observed outcome. But shouldn't we first establish that this is indeed the outcome?
17 Inflation is also related to the distribution of assets, a topic to which we return later in the chapter.
? 40
35
30
25
20 15 10
5
0
-5
www. bnarchives. net
-10
1950 1960
Depth 371 10
? ? ? log scale
Corporate Earnings per Share / Wage Rate * (Index, right)
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Wholesale Price Index
(annual % change, left)
2000 2010 2020
1
? ?
16 Depth
Husbandman: I think it is long of you gentlemen that this dearth is, by reason you enhance your lands to such an height, as men that live thereon must needs sell dear . . . or else they were not able to make the rent again.
Knight: And I say it is long of you husbandmen, that we are forced to raise our rents, by reason we must buy all things so dear that we have of you . . . which now will cost me double the money. . . .
--From a sixteenth-century text, A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England Quoted in Leo Huberman's Man's Worldly Goods
The farmers and knights of the sixteenth century could be forgiven for failing to understand the universal 'laws' of inflation. They didn't realize that their own local problems in fact were part of a much bigger global process. They were oblivious to the influx of precious metals and ignorant of the growing importance of credit and capitalization. They had no comparative data to look at and no in-house economists to 'interpret' them. In fact, as far as they were concerned, inflation didn't even exist. There were only increases in prices. The term 'inflation' came into common use only three centuries later.
Nonetheless, these illiterate sixteenth-century folks were smart enough to see what many present-day economists wish we forgot - namely, that infla- tion is a conflictual process of redistribution. The prices that the farmers charged were costs for the knights, while those that the knights set were costs for the farmers. Both hiked their prices, but never at the same rate. And this differential meant that those who raised their prices faster redistributed income from those who did so more slowly.
But the inflationary struggle isn't simply a tug-of-war between 'indepen- dent' individuals or groups in society. 1 It is an entire regime, an encompassing political process of transforming capitalist power. Note that inflation per se is much older than capitalism. As we have seen, prices already existed in the early civilizations and were leveraged and manipulated well before the arrival of capital. But capitalism is the first mode of power to be overwhelmingly
? 1 For a typical tug-of-war approach to inflation, see Hirschman (1985).
362 Accumulation of power
denominated in prices. And hence it was only with the rise of accumulation that inflation could emerge as a key aspect of the social creorder; and it was only in the twentieth century, with rise of large organized units, that inflation became a defining feature of the state of capital. The purpose of this chapter is to examine some of the ways in which prices and inflation assume this role through the process of differential accumulation. 2
Depth: internal and external
One of the more flexible features of the capitalist mega-machine is the ability to increase power indirectly as well as directly (Equation 4 in Chapter 14). Capitalist power, exerted over society as a whole, is coded in the level and pattern of differential earnings. As we have seen, dominant capital can broaden this power directly by making its organization grow faster than the average. But there is also the other, indirect route of deepening the elemental power of its organization. Whereas breadth hinges on the number of employ- ees in the corporate organization, depth depends on earnings per employee - a measure of the corporation's ability to leverage its organizational power over society as a whole.
Of these two methods, the former is the more effective. Operating primarily through mergers and acquisitions, it can generate enduring large- scale increases in capitalized power. Yet amalgamation isn't always feasible; and when breadth occasionally recedes, dominant capital has to resort to depth - or risk differential decumulation. It is through this latter process that price changes and inflation come into the accumulation picture. 3
Let's look at the depth process more closely. Earnings per employee can be decomposed into three elements associated with the number of units produced/sold by the corporation (indicated by the term 'units'). 4 These include (1) unit price, (2) unit cost and (3) units per employee:
1. earnings per employee = earnings earnings * units
1. earnings per employee = employment = units * employment
1. earnings per employee = unit earnings * units per employee
1. earnings per employee = (unit price - unit cost) * units per employee
2 For a fuller theoretical and empirical analysis of inflation and stagflation, including critiques of existing approaches, see Nitzan (1992; 2001), Bichler and Nitzan (2001: Ch. 5) and Nitzan and Bichler (2000; 2002: Ch. 4).
3 This and the next chapter illustrate our empirical arguments with available statistics of price and quantity aggregates. By using conventional data we keep the empirical critique at the same level as the theories and studies we challenge. For an alternative conceptualization that attempts to bypass the 'quality' trap of aggregation and devise alternative measures, see Nitzan (1992: Ch. 7).
4 For simplicity, our exposition here assumes that all output is sold.
? ? ? ? Depth 363
According to this equation, dominant capital can increase its differential depth by some combination of the following: (1) raising the number of units sold per employee faster than the average; (2) lowering unit cost faster than the average; (3) increasing unit price faster than the average.
Most political economists emphasize the first two methods and deempha- size if not reject the third. In the race for accumulation, they argue, the ultimate winners are those whose inputs are the most efficient and least expensive. That's the ABC of economic survival. It is of course true, the argu- ment continues, that 'monopolistic' firms sometimes can increase their profits by charging higher prices, but this practice is secondary and ephemeral. According to received convention, excessively high prices send buyers in search of cheaper substitutes; the excess profits generated by high prices attract competitors; and finally, there is always Schumpeter's creative destruction and the onslaught of innovations that even the strongest monop- olist cannot withstand.
All of this seems common sense - but, then, what looks sensible from the viewpoint of conventional political economy often gets inverted by differen- tial accumulation. In Chapter 15 we saw that, contrary to common belief, dominant capital benefits much more from mergers and acquisitions than from green-field growth. And in the present chapter we'll see a similar inversion with respect to prices: it turns out that raising prices is far more important for dominant capital than cutting costs.
Cost cutting
To clarify, it's not that the economists are wrong about cost cutting. The conflictual dynamics of capitalism, persistent even in the presence of oligopoly and monopoly, imply a constant pressure to raise the 'productivity' of the inputs and lower their prices. 5 This dual pressure, identified by the classical economists and reiterated by all subsequent schools, critical as well as conservative, seems beyond dispute.
And yet, from the viewpoint of differential accumulation, cutting cost is much like 'running on empty'. It helps dominant capital meet the average, not beat it. Admittedly, this latter claim isn't easy to test. The problem is that conventional data on productivity and input prices are rarely if ever broken down by firm size, so it is impossible to know whether and to what extent larger firms beat the average on either count. But the claim can be assessed indirectly, and the roundabout evidence seems consistent with the 'running- on-empty' thesis.
5 We use the concepts of 'productivity' and 'inputs' here from the what-you-see-is-what-you- get perspective of capitalist executives; the theoretical impossibility of defining these concepts rarely hinders their practical computation.
? 364 Accumulation of power
'Productivity' gains
Begin with 'productivity'. Analytically, the number of units sold per employee (denoted by 'units per employee') can be written as the ratio between sales per employee and unit price:
2. units per employee units salesemployees = sales per employee 2. units per employee = employees = sales = unit price
units
Using this equation, we can approximate the performance of dominant capital relative to the corporate sector as a whole.
Our proxy for dominant capital here is the Fortune 500 group of compa- nies (an alternative to the Compustat Top 100 from Chapter 14). Over the past half-century, sales per employee in the Fortune 500 group and in the corporate universe have grown more or less in tandem. The ratio between the Fortune 500 and the corporate universe was 1. 4 in 1954; it fell gradually to 1. 1 by 1969; and from there it rose steadily, reaching 1. 7 by 1993 (with the latter increase probably partly reflecting the growing significance of outsourcing by large firms). 6 The overall change from 1. 4 in 1954 to 1. 7 in 1993 represents a 20 per cent increase - miniscule when compared to the nineteenfold increase in differential profit per firm recorded over the same period (Figure 14. 2). It also seems reasonable to assume that the prices charged by larger firms haven't fallen relative to those of smaller ones (and have possibly increased) - particularly since, as we show in the next section, inflation has tended to work in their favour. 7
Now relate these two long-term developments to Equation (2). Since differential sales per employee rose only marginally while differential prices haven't fallen and have probably risen, it follows that 'productivity' gains by dominant capital were more or less the same as the social average.
The difficulty of securing differential 'productivity' gains shouldn't surprise us. Even if we ignore the hologramic nature of technology and focus only on the presumable 'in-house' development of production techniques, there is still no reason to expect large firms to be better in such development than small ones.
For instance, many of the current advances in bio-technology, informa- tion and communication are reported by smaller companies, some with only a handful of employees. Dominant capital is often unable to match this flurry of innovation. In many cases, large firms find it cheaper to let smaller compa- nies incur the R&D cost and then buy the more promising startups - some- times just to keep their technology from spreading too quickly. 8
6 Fortune stopped publishing employment data after 1993.
7 Figures in this paragraph are computed on the basis of data from Fortune, the U. S. Internal
Revenue Service and the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
8 'Big American companies', writes The Economist, 'fear that innovation is the secret of success
? ? ? ? ? ? - and that they cannot innovate'. Indeed, their 'terror' is that 'innovation seems to work best
Depth 365
Moreover, and probably more importantly, production techniques, regardless of who develops them, are notoriously difficult to monopolize. Unlike final commodities that can often be protected through patents, copy- rights and other exclusionary threats, improvements in the social organiza- tion of production tend to proliferate easily, and this rapid spread quickly dilutes the initial advantage of whoever implemented them first.
Input prices
The other route to cutting costs is to lower the prices of the inputs. Yet, here too it is very difficult to translate absolute reductions into differential reduc- tions. For a start, even the largest firms have only limited control over their input prices, particularly with the proliferation of 'outsourcing' and long 'production chains'. The challenge to differential accumulation of universal input prices was summarized neatly by the former chairman of Intel, Andrew Grove:
How do you build a company when your buyers are infinitely knowledge- able and where your suppliers maintain a level playing field for your competitors? What remains your competitive differentiator or your source of value or whatever academic cliche? you want to wrap around it?
(Byrne 2000)
Furthermore, even when large firms do control input prices, the benefits quickly tend to spill over to other firms. Thus, a wage freeze by dominant capital groups in the United States would empower smaller firms to follow suit; political pressure by automobile companies on the Indian government to subsidize oil would benefit all energy users; a British importer winning a tariff reduction gives competing importers a free ride, etc.
All in all, then, cost cutting is a poor differential tactic. Dominant capital has to pursue it with much zeal, lest it falls behind; but it can rarely use it to get ahead.
outside of them', a result of which '[m]uch of today's merger boom is driven by a desperate search for new ideas', with trading in intangible assets reaching $100 billion in 1998, up from $15 billion in 1990 (Anonymous 1999). 'Nobody holds out for organic growth any more', declares Sir Richard Sykes, chairman of Glaxo SmithKline, which in 1999 controlled 7. 3 per cent of the world market for pharmaceuticals. According to a 2000 Financial Times survey in which he is cited, the reason has little to do with 'efficiency gains'. Indeed, 'Those wary of mergers', reports the survey, 'argue there is no evidence of scale contributing to greater efficiency. Ed Scolnick, chief scientist at Merck, found absolutely no correlation between the size and productivity of his company's research laboratories. The relative success of small biotechnology companies suggests that scale in research may even be a disadvantage'. Of course, this is hardly a reason not to merge. As Jim Niedel of Glaxo points out in the same article, 'doubling up' (via merger) allows companies to screen twice as many compounds, not to mention the resulting increase in 'salespower' (Pilling 2000). In our terminology, it contributes to both internal breadth and external depth.
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Stagflation
The road to differential depth is not to cut cost but to inflate prices. As we shall see, inflation often redistributes income from wages to profits and from small to large firms; it elevates the differential earnings per employee of the leading corporations; and it deepens the 'elemental power' of dominant capital.
But the process is full of puzzles. First, there is the general theoretical conundrum. Conventional theory associates inflation with growth, yet reality usually brings inflation together with stagnation. Since this combination is not supposed to happen, economists decided to contain the damage by giving it a special name. They called it 'stagflation' - an anomalous mixture of stag- nation and inflation that shouldn't be confused with 'normal', growth-driven inflation (growthflation? ). 9
And then there is our own bizarre proposition that stagflation, whether normal or anomalous, fuels the differential accumulation of dominant capital. Most readers will probably find this suggestion somewhat difficult to swallow. How could firms gain from a combined crisis of rising prices, stag- nating production and falling employment? Why should this crisis benefit larger firms relative to smaller ones? And if stagflation is so beneficial to the most powerful groups in society, why don't we have it all the time? Clearly, there are many questions to sort out here, so it is worthwhile to backtrack a bit and provide some context.
The historical backdrop
To start with, there seems to be a general neglect, including among critical political economists, of the historical significance of inflation for capitalist development. On the face of it, this neglect is rather surprising. Inflation - commonly defined as a general rise in the price of commodities - is hardly new. According to David Hackett Fischer (1996), since the thirteenth century there have been no less than four major inflationary waves, or 'price revolu- tions' as he calls them. Figure 16. 1 illustrates the pattern of these waves in the UK, a country whose price indices go back the farthest (note the log scale). 10
The first wave occurred during the thirteenth century; the second during the sixteenth century; the third in the latter part of the eighteenth century; and the most recent began in the early twentieth century and is still going. As Fischer argues, each of these price revolutions was accompanied, particularly toward the latter part of the wave, by a deepening socio-economic crisis. In
9 The term 'stagflation' was reputedly coined in the 1960s by British parliamentarian Ian Macleod and later popularized by Paul Samuelson (1974).
10 The patterns of US consumer prices (since the early nineteenth century) and of US whole- sale prices (since the mid-eighteenth century) are remarkably similar to the UK ones shown in Figure 16. 1.
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other words, the 'anomaly' of inflation in the midst of stagnation is not a twentieth-century novelty. It's been with us for half a millennium, if not more. Now, to be fair to the classical political economists, the specific backdrop
against which they were writing was largely one of price stability and even deflation - not inflation. As shown in Figure 16. 1, UK consumer prices had hardly changed between 1600 and 1750. In the second half of the eighteenth century they rose relatively quickly, but then fell again throughout the nine- teenth century. Between 1800 and 1900 - a formative period of political economy - consumer prices in Great Britain and wholesale prices in the United States both dropped by more than one third. 11 In this deflationary context, it was only natural to concentrate on production and the coercive discipline of 'market forces' and to ignore inflation.
However, the historical backdrop changed dramatically during the twen- tieth century. First, inflation has risen to unprecedented levels. As Figure 16. 1
11 Data for the United States are from Global Financial Data (series code: WPUSAM for the wholesale price index).
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shows, UK prices rose by nearly 6,000 per cent between 1900 and 2007, compared with less than 800 per cent in the previous six centuries combined. 12 Second, there was a clear change in pattern. Whereas during pervious waves prices oscillated around their uptrend, in the twentieth century - with the notable exception of the 1930s - they moved only up. 13
The classical political economists, writing in a different era, perhaps could be excused for not paying too much attention to inflation. But having lived through the experience of the twentieth century, contemporary observers cannot ask for similar leniency.
Neutrality?
Of course, modern political economists don't deny that inflation exists, and some even agree that it may have short-term consequences. But in the opinion of most, all of this is much ado about nothing. In the long run, inflation has little or no effect. It is 'neutral'.
And why this insistence on 'neutrality'? The reason goes back to David Hume's 'classical dichotomy'. As we have seen earlier in the book, political economists follow this dichotomy to separate the 'real' and 'nominal' spheres of economic life. Of these two, the 'real' sphere of production, consumption and distribution is considered primary; the 'nominal' sphere of money and absolute prices is thought of mostly as a lubricant, a mechanism that merely facilitates the movement of the 'real economy'. And since money prices are 'nominal' and therefore do not impinge on the 'real', their overall inflation (or deflation) must be 'neutral', by definition. 14
Aggregates
The belief that inflation is 'neutral' is greatly facilitated by the way econ- omists define it. There are two common definitions: (1) inflation as a
12 The US pattern is almost identical, although the magnitudes are smaller: between 1900 and 2007, consumer prices in the land of unlimited opportunities rose by only 2,700 per cent (computed from Global Financial Data [series code CPUSAM] and International Financial Statistics through Global Insight [series code: IMF:L64@C111]).
13 The story of the 1930s is more complicated than the aggregate data suggest. Recall from Chapter 12 that most of the price drop during the period happened in competitive indus- tries. In the more concentrated industries prices remained relatively stable, and in some sectors they even rose.
14 This view is pervasive. 'There cannot, in short, be intrinsically a more insignificant thing, in the economy of society, than money', tells us John Stuart Mill (1848: Book 3, Ch. 7). Arthur Pigou wrote a whole book to debate The Veil of Money (1949), and Franco Modigliani informs us that 'Money is "neutral", a "veil" with no consequences for real economic magnitudes' (Papademos and Modigliani 1990: 405). And since, according to Milton Friedman (1968: 98), 'inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenom- enon', it follows that an overall increase in money prices, however annoying, is neutral in the grander scheme of things (on the origins of the terms 'veil of money' and 'neutrality of money', see Patinkin and Steiger 1989).
? Depth 369
continuous increase in the average price level; and (2) inflation as an ongoing increase in 'liquidity'; that is, an increase in the total amount of money rela- tive to the total volume of commodities.
These two definitions are often seen as equivalent: if we derive the average price level P as the ratio between the total amount of money M and the overall 'quantity' of commodities Q (ignoring the velocity of circulation), it is obvious that in order for the average price P to rise (or fall), the liquidity ratio M/Q has to rise (or fall) at the same rate, and vice versa. 15 In this strict sense, Milton Friedman is correct: inflation indeed is 'always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon', by definition. But inflation is never only a monetary phenomenon.
Disaggregates
The important thing to note here is the aggregate perspective: the conven- tional definition focuses wholly and only on averages and totals. This fact is crucial, since to define inflation in this way is to miss the point altogether.
Inflation certainly involves a rise in the average price of commodities; but that is like saying that the average outcome of a game between two basketball teams is always a draw: one team's win is another's loss. Although mathemat- ically correct, the statement is irrelevant to the reality of basketball games. If these games always ended up in a draw, players would soon be looking for another game - one that they could actually win. Similarly with inflation. If all prices rose at the same average rate, inflation definitely would be 'neutral', as mainstream economists say. But it would also serve no purpose whatsoever and hence cease to exist.
The crux of inflation is not that prices rise in general, but that they rise dif- ferentially. Inflation is never a uniform process. Although most prices tend to rise during inflation, they never rise at the same rate. There is always a spread, with some prices rising faster and others more slowly. From this viewpoint, the engine of inflation is a redistributional struggle fought through rising prices. The overall level of inflation is merely the surface consequence of that struggle.
So in the end, Milton Friedman is right - but only in part. Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon; but it is also always and everywhere a redistributional phenomenon. 16
15 Note that the equivalence of the two definitions breaks down once we admit that commodi- ties cannot be aggregated into an overall 'quantity' (Chapter 8). However, since economists are generally indifferent to this impossibility, we don't press it in this chapter.
16 The following is a technical note for those interested in the fine print. Mainstream econo- mists would readily admit that in reality prices do not all change at the same rate, and that relative price variations may even be positively correlated with the rate of inflation (see for instance Parks 1978). But these relative variations, they would add, neither cause inflation nor bear on its consequences.
First, in a competitive market relative price variations reflect changes in consumer preferences (marginal utility) and technology (marginal productivity), and in that sense
? 370 Accumulation of power
Redistribution
The difference between the two views is decisive. For those who see inflation as an aggregate 'nominal' process of 'too-much-money-chasing-too-few- commodities', indeed there is little reason to look any further into the so- called 'real' world of distribution. The only relevant questions are, first, how much money is created and, second, how increased liquidity is 'transmitted' to higher prices.
But if inflation is merely the aggregate appearance of an underlying redis- tributional conflict, the way to understand it is to begin from that very struggle. From this perspective, there are two important questions: (1) who are the winners and losers in the struggle; and (2) what is the broader char- acter of that struggle? We deal with each question in turn.
Winners and losers
Inflation redistributes income in many different ways, of which we highlight two: redistribution between workers and capitalists, and redistribution between small and large firms. 17
Workers and capitalists
Figure 16. 2 contrasts the redistribution between workers and capitalists with the rate of wholesale price inflation in the United States over the past half- century (the insert in the top-left corner shows the period since 1985 and will be examined later). The distribution of income denotes the ratio between the
have little to do with overall inflation. Second, 'disequilibrium' prices - namely, those that do not reflect the underlying logic of utility and productivity - may exist, but only temporarily. Soon enough, the market would force them back to their 'proper' equilibrium levels. And finally, during inflation deviations from equilibrium prices arise mostly from misguided expectations and therefore are never systematic in their pattern. These devia- tions could make some 'agents' richer and others poorer, but only by fluke. Disequilibrium prices could also arise from 'government intervention' and 'monopoly practices' (mainly by labour unions), but the redistributional effect is nullified once agents become aware of these 'imperfections' and 'discount' them into their demand and supply. Moreover, regardless of their redistributional impact, these 'imperfections' cannot translate into inflation unless validated by increases in overall liquidity.
Unfortunately, this line of defence is persuasive only to those who erect it. First, marginal utility and productivity are never observable, so there is no way to know the 'equilibrium' price that equates them. Second, equilibrium prices, as their name suggests, hold only in equilibrium. But since we never know whether we are in equilibrium or disequilibrium, we never know which prices are 'out of line'. Finally, it is unclear why we should assume that inflation does not systematically redistribute income. To argue that market forces prevent such systematic redistribution may be a meaningful explanation for an observed outcome. But shouldn't we first establish that this is indeed the outcome?
17 Inflation is also related to the distribution of assets, a topic to which we return later in the chapter.
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