Unlike the peasants of the Nile Valley, they were quasi-nomadic tribes who hadn't been
civilized
into complete docility.
Nitzan Bichler - 2012 - Capital as Power
was dominated by the financial fraction, C?
C?
by the commercial fraction and P?
P?
by the industrial fraction.
As we have seen, the industrial fraction was deemed productive: it was considered the engine of accumulation, the site where value was determined and surplus value created.
The financial and commercial fractions, by contrast, were seen as unproductive, deriving their profit through an intra-capitalist redistributional struggle.
During the 1970s and 1980s, many structural Marxists laboured to map the political economy of these fractions, a tradition that has since resurfaced in the fashionable study of 'financialization'. 32 In our view, though, this framework is inadequate for understanding the contemporary capitalist regime. The problem is straightforward: even if Marx's notion of capital were problem free and even if profit had everything to do with productive surplus and nothing to do with sabotage, the fractions of capital could still not be identified.
Severing accumulation from circulation
The first, analytical, difficulty concerns the link between Marxian circulation and the reality of accumulation. Conceptually, circulation happens on the assets side of the balance sheet, while accumulation occurs on the liabilities side. Since Marx counted all commodities in the same backward-looking unit of abstract labour, it was only logical for him to consider the two processes as mirror images. The firm advances the items on the assets side: money, raw materials, semi-finished goods, proprietary knowledge and the depreciated
32 Recent contributions to the 'financialization' literature include Williams et al. (2000), Froud, Johal and Williams (2002), Krippner (2005) and Epstein (2005).
Accumulation and sabotage 259
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portion of its machinery and structures. These items get augmented by surplus value. And as the surplus value gets ploughed back, the book value of the debt and shareholders' equity on the liabilities side expands by the same amount as the items on the assets side. Circulation and accumulation grow and (occasionally) contract in tandem.
But what seemed sensible to Marx has become irrelevant in the new order of capitalist power. Accounting book value is backward looking and there- fore extraneous. In the calculus of power, what matters is the corporation's forward-looking capitalization on the bond and stock markets. This capital- ization is a symbolic valuation and therefore cannot be circulated, by defini- tion. Moreover, calculated as the risk-adjusted discounted value of expected future earnings, it bears little relation (and, as we have seen in Chapter 10, often a negative relation) to the cost of the circulated assets.
And here lies the problem. The fractions of capital are anchored in the con- ceptual identity of circulation and accumulation. But with forward-looking accumulation having been severed from backward-looking circulation, production no longer bears directly on capital. And with capital out of the productive loop, the definition of the different fractions loses its meaning.
Where have all the fractions gone?
The second difficulty is empirical and historical. The vendibility of capital enables even relatively small corporations to operate in many different areas, and this diversification makes it impossible to decide which fraction they belong to - even if the definition of the fractions themselves was crystal clear.
For example, how are we to classify conglomerates such as General Electric, DaimlerChrysler, or Philip Morris? These firms operate in hundreds of different sectors across the entire business spectrum - from financial inter- mediation, through raw materials, to trade, manufacturing, entertainment, advertising and distribution - so what should we call them? Although these examples are admittedly extreme, corporate diversification has become so widespread that the problem is now very general. And that is merely the beginning.
The difficulty is not only that diversified firms produce and sell many differ- ent products, but also that there is no objective method to determine what part of their profit comes from which line of production. In addition to being unable to measure 'productivity' so as to pin down the ultimate 'source' of profit, we are faced here with the intractable maze of non-arm's-length trans- actions and transfer pricing between different branches of the same firm. For example, if GE Capital 'subsidizes' GE's jet-engine division by supplying it with 'cheap' credit, the result is to lower profit in the former and raise it in the latter - and all of that without there being any change in production or sales. 33
33 We write 'subsidizes' and 'cheap' with inverted commas since there is no objective bench- mark to gauge what is cheap and what is subsidized.
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And the problem only grows as we aggregate. In the national accounts, 'manufacturing profits' denote the earnings not of manufacturing establish- ments, but of so-called manufacturing firms. Unlike the former, which often produce a well-defined set of commodities, the latter are a hybrid. They comprise firms whose largest single line of business, measured in terms of sales, is manufacturing. But given that manufacturing represents only part - and sometimes a fairly small part - of the firm's overall sales, the result is that the bulk of 'manufacturing profit' may very well come from activities other than manufacturing. 34
These considerations suggest that the fraction view cannot be treated as a universal feature of capitalism. It may have been a useful rough classification during the pre-diversification phase (particularly for purposes of political alli- ances, etc. ). But it has dubious theoretical value and little empirical relevance in an era of hyper capitalization, absentee ownership and conglomeration.
Toward fractions of power
These difficulties have led some orthodox Marxists to throw in the fractions towel, at least for the time being. Thus Dume? nil and Le? vy admit that large 'non-financial' corporations engage in 'financial' activities and that extensive diversification means that the term 'finance' can now be used to denote 'capi- talist owners' in general (as opposed to their managers). Yet, unwilling to give up Marx's scheme, they prefer to see these as problems to be solved. 'In our opinion', they say 'the analysis of the various fractions of the ruling classes, and the related institutions, still needs to be completed' (2005: 21-22).
We do not share this optimism. The difficulties here are not soluble - at least not within the framework of conventional economics, whether Marxist or neoclassical. The deadlock was candidly acknowledged by Paul Sweezy in his assessment of Monopoly Capital (1966), a deservingly famous book that he wrote together with Paul Baran twenty-five years earlier. His observations are worth quoting at some length because they show both the problem and why economics cannot solve it:
Why did Monopoly Capital fail to anticipate the changes in the structure and functioning of the system that have taken place in the last twenty-five years? Basically, I think the answer is that its conceptualization of the capital accumulation process is one-sided and incomplete. In the estab- lished tradition of both mainstream and Marxian economics, we treated capital accumulation as being essentially a matter of adding to the stock of existing capital goods. But in reality this is only one aspect of the
34 The insurmountable difficulties of matching business profits with specific lines of industrial activity are alluded to in various methodology papers which, unfortunately, few students of fractions bother to read (see for example, U. S. Department of Commerce. Bureau of Economic Analysis 1985: xiv; 2001: M21-M22).
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Bringing power back in
process. Accumulation is also a matter of adding to the stock of financial assets. The two aspects are of course interrelated, but the nature of this interrelation is problematic to say the least. The traditional way of handling the problem has been in effect to assume it away: for example, buying stocks and bonds (two of the simpler forms of financial assets) is assumed to be merely an indirect way of buying real capital goods. This is hardly ever true, and it can be totally misleading. This is not the place to try to point the way to a more satisfactory conceptualization of the capital accumulation process. It is at best an extremely complicated and difficult problem, and I am frank to say that I have no clues to its solu- tion. But I can say with some confidence that achieving a better under- standing of the monopoly capitalist society of today will be possible only on the basis of a more adequate theory of capital accumulation, with special emphasis on the interaction of its real and financial aspects, than we now possess.
(Sweezy 1991, emphasis added)
The stumbling block sits right at the end of the paragraph: 'the interaction between the real and financial aspects'. Sweezy recognized that the problem lies in the very concept of capital - yet he could not solve it precisely because he continued to bifurcate it into 'real' and 'financial' aspects.
And that shouldn't surprise us. 'Whatever happens', writes Hegel (1821: 11), 'every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age, jump over Rhodes'. Sweezy and his Monthly Review group had pushed the frontier of Marxist research for much of the post-war period, but by the 1990s their ammunition ran out. They recognized the all-imposing reality of finance, but their bifurcated world could not properly accommodate it.
In reality, there is no bifurcation. All capital is finance, and only finance. And every type of capital, including that which is formally associated with industry, is inherently unproductive. From a power perspective, the very clas- sification of capitals along lines of industrial activity, even in the absence of diversification and forward-looking capitalization, is misconceived.
Production is always a socio-hologramic activity, carried through the integrated realm of industry. The business corporation, by contrast, is a differ- ential legal construct. Being a legal entity, General Motors does not, and indeed cannot, produce cars. It merely controls the production of cars. But then so do firms such as Mitsubishi Trading and Deutsche Bank. Through different forms of power, each of these corporations controls key aspects of the production of cars, and that control in turn enables them to command undifferentiated parts of the total societal profit. The way to classify firms, therefore, is not on the narrow basis of production, but along broader lines of power, of which production is merely one aspect.
13 The capitalist mode of power
Every soul and every object have their own purpose but all ultimately aim at one: the conquest of the world for Genghis Khan.
--Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years I don't separate myself from the state. I have no other interests.
--Oleg Deripaska, owner of Rusal and at one point Russia's richest man
We now broaden the discussion of capital as power. In the previous chapter, we argued that capitalization discounts the power of capitalists to strat- egically limit social creativity and well-being. Capitalists inflict business dissonance on industrial resonance and leverage the consequence in the form of differential profitability. But power is not merely the means of business. It is also its most fundamental aim.
To articulate this argument, we begin the chapter by tracing the origin of mechanization to the ancient power civilizations of the river deltas, where the first giant machine was invented. This early machine, though, was not material, but social. It was made not of physical components, but of human beings. And its ultimate purpose was not production, but the exertion of power for the sake of power. Capital, we argue, is a modern incarnation of this mega-machine, a mechanized social structure driven by power for its own sake. From this viewpoint, the architecture of capitalism is better understood not as a mode of production, but as a mode of power.
The mode of power of a society, we argue, constitutes the 'state' of that society. The second part of the chapter explores this proposition. It examines the feudal mode of power, traces the process through which it gave way to a capitalist mode of power, and examines how the logic of capital has gradually penetrated, altered and eventually become the state - the state of capital.
A final note before we begin: as in Chapter 12, here too we translate and negate existing concepts and introduce new ones, here too we develop the argument at length, and here too we suggest that the reader suspend judgement till the end.
264 Bringing power back in
Material and symbolic drives
One of the most comprehensive attempts to understand the interaction between technology and power was offered by Lewis Mumford (1934; 1961; and primarily 1967; 1970). Mumford challenged the conventional emphasis on the material nature of technology, focusing instead on its symbolic aspects. Techniques, he argued, were integral to man's higher culture. In his opinion, the final aim of technology was the shaping of society rather than nature. Indeed, the most complex machines were not tangible but social.
Thus, whereas Veblen emphasized the progressive separation between the positive aspects of material technology and the negative features of social power, Mumford (who was greatly influenced by Veblen) suggested a different dichotomy between democratic and authoritarian technologies. Democratic technology centred on human progress; authoritarian technology focused on human control. Rather than following Veblen's notion of power as a fetter on technology, Mumford began by viewing power itself as a form of technology.
The invisible technology
In contrast to the conventional creed, Mumford emphasized the symbolic aspects of early human development. Limited by the materialist bias of their profession, he argued, archaeologists understandably judge human progress on the basis of physical objects. 'Man the maker', however, was a fairly late arrival, and the creation of physical artefacts were preceded by other, less visible but equally important mental activities. Moreover, the subsequent growth of material production has done little to diminish the primacy of symbolic drives.
According to Mumford, perhaps the most important human technology - invisible to archaeology until the invention of writing - is language. The material technology of Palaeolithic and Neolithic societies (and in some sense even of our own age) remains infinitely inferior to the complexity, flexibility, uniformity, efficiency and growth of their spoken languages. It is unclear how long language took to develop, but according to Mumford little of what followed could have been achieved without the prior construction of this wholly symbolic technology. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that the devel- opment of language was driven by the everyday imperatives of survival - the hunting pack was dependent on short commands and had little use for the subtlety of language common even among the most archaic tribes still living today. According to Mumford, the principal drive was self-discovery.
Mumford argued that the latent function of language - much like the earlier appearance of ritual and taboo and the subsequent evolution of science and material technology - was to control, for better or worse, man's own mental and emotional energies. In many ancient cultures, words were consid- ered the most potent force: God is commonly believed to have created the
The capitalist mode of power 265
world with his words, a feat of power that humans have since striven to emulate. Both in goal and structure, language was a precursor for all later technological developments.
The two archetypes
From this premise, Mumford differentiated between two qualitatively distinct technologies: one associated with the democratic outlook of Neolithic culture, the other with the power bias of 'civilized' society. In his opinion, their distinct paths stem from a different reaction to death. Neolithic tech- nology takes the biological route, seeking to enhance life while accepting the inevitability of death. Power technology, by contrast, uses mechanical force and violence in the vain hope of achieving immortality.
This qualitative distinction, of course, cannot be applied easily to actual societies, certainly not with any precision. Most social formations contain elements of both technologies, and few if any conform closely to either ideal type. But the distinction is nonetheless useful as a general myth, a basic framework for understanding the dual underpinnings of social organizations.
Neolithic culture
Neolithic culture does not see work as alienating labour, but rather as a communal process intertwined with the broader ecological system. Work is often backbreaking, but physical toil is compensated for by companionship, cooperation, song and rhyme, while aesthetic achievements are valued no less than abundance of yield. Indeed, many early feats of domestication - such as fertilization, the sacrifice of food for future growth, the harnessing of cattle and the use of a plough - were probably first practised as religious rituals. Feminine traits abound - from the lunar cycle linking cultivation to menstru- ation and sexuality, through the primary role of containers (pot, jar, house, village), to the careful cultivation of gardens and the patient rearing of chil- dren. Festivities, ceremonies and rituals revolve around the family, neigh- bours and community. Eating, drinking and sexual activity occupy a central place. There is no lifetime division of labour. Knowledge is rarely monopo- lized, and most types of work can be performed by all members of the community. Systemic gender inequality is uncommon. There are no social classes, and authority stems from age. Violence is limited and dictatorial power rarely tolerated. 1
Neolithic culture established the merit of morality, self-discipline, coop- eration and social order. It had shown the value of public goods and fore- thought. Most importantly, over time it has proven to be the most resilient
1 For more on the cooperative, life-loving aspects of Neolithic culture, worship and rituals, see Gimbutas (1982).
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form of social organization, always outlasting the far more energetic yet brittle power civilization.
These aspects of Neolithic culture, Mumford argued, did not disappear with the archaic village. As a form of social technology, they persist within modern society - sometimes visibly as in villages, communal organizations and even business companies, and at other times invisibly as resistance to the dictates of mechanical civilization.
Mumford also identified some significant shortcomings in Neolithic culture. The exclusive nature of small associations restricts human inter- action, the horizons are limited, and pettiness and suspicion prevent broader cooperation. And, indeed, after its initial burst of discoveries and inven- tions, Neolithic innovation died down and stagnation set in. Conservatism made Neolithic settlements vulnerable to external invasions, and when horse-mounted tribes, equipped with metals and weapons, moved in, many Neolithic communities succumbed and withered.
Power civilization
Against this backdrop of a peaceful if limited form of democratic organiza- tion rose the spectre of power civilization under the authoritarian rule of divine kingship. The first of these social amalgamations evolved in the great river deltas - from Egypt and Mesopotamia to the Indus Valley and China. According to Mumford, the unifying hallmark of these amalgamations was absolute power.
The need for such power was partly rooted in material circumstances. Physical surplus and the consequent amassment of material wealth for the first time had created the possibility of 'total loss'. The population was large and growing, segmented by an increasing division of labour and evermore interdependent. Under these conditions, flooding, drought and later total war could easily have spelled catastrophe, if not complete annihilation. Whereas Neolithic culture could flexibly respond to the first two and rarely faced the third, in the urban amalgamates of the deltas these threats had to be counter- acted resolutely and ruthlessly. And given the large scale of activity, such a response could be achieved only through the sanction of absolute authority.
But as Mumford argued, material considerations tell only part of the story; the other and perhaps more important part is symbolic. The rise of power civilization was accompanied by the appearance of the sky gods. Neolithic earth gods, attuned to the micro biological cycle of fertility and operating on a human scale, were no longer sufficient for the task at hand. For the kings, risk of disaster made failure increasingly unacceptable, thus amplifying the ever-present fear of death. Neolithic culture, humbled by its limited potential, had to accept mortality, but kings were no longer bound by Neolithic hori- zons. Control over growing resources and larger populations suggested to them - admittedly with some justification - that the 'skies were the limit'. Expanding insight into writing, mathematics and astronomy gave their task
The capitalist mode of power 267
cosmic proportions. But as Josephus Flavius wisely observed, 'The union of what is divine and what is mortal is disagreeable' (Koestler 1952: 237). So as earthly rationality grew hand in hand with supernatural irrationality, the king, dazzled by both his achievements and fears, was driven toward the ulti- mate feat of becoming an immortal sun god himself.
Power civilization appeared after rising agricultural yield for the first time had enabled a systematic generation of food surpluses. According to Mumford, it was probably at that point that hunting chiefs, who had earlier entertained symbiotic relationships with Neolithic settlements, first discov- ered the promise of forceful redistribution. Weapons, which had previously been used primarily against animals, were now increasingly applied against people, and total war became a permanent institutional feature.
Neolithic excavations offer little or no evidence of fortification or arma- ment. The first fortifications are associated with urban centres, while heaps of cracked sculls - early evidence of organized murder - do not appear until kingship. Neolithic art did not glorify warriors and leaders. It left us no wall paintings of massacres and prisoners. It never built tombs in which lesser mortals were sacrificed for the afterlife of rulers. These aesthetic manifesta- tions emerged only when humanity embarked on its 'civilized' power trip to control nature and, most importantly, people. 2
2 The contrast between the authoritarian drive of power civilization and the democratic impulse of Neolithic technology is well illustrated by the fundamental difference between the ancient royal scripts on the one hand and the alphabet on the other. The former were used in the hierarchical administration of taxation, material stocks and masses of human beings. But beyond their practical role, they also served as a means of instilling institutional privation, fear and awe. Their structures were exceedingly if not deliberately complicated. Egyptian hieroglyphics, Mesopotamian cuneiform and Chinese logography all have hundreds and often many thousands of symbols. Studying these scripts required many years of harsh schooling and systematic harassment that would put to shame even the best public schools of the British Empire (Kramer 1963). Their impenetrable structure helped sustain hierarchy and prevent entry. It made broad learning impossible, deterred innovation and fixed the cosmos against subversion. It was a technology of sabotage, par excellence.
The democratic invention of the alphabet destroyed this exclusivity and opened up a world of freedom. The first known alphabet was written on the walls of the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, sometime during the fifteenth or fourteenth century BCE. The writers were probably the western-Semitic Apiru (or Amurru) who worked there as periodic zapping labour. Both the Bible and Egyptian evidence suggest that the royal administrators did not like these guest workers.
Unlike the peasants of the Nile Valley, they were quasi-nomadic tribes who hadn't been civilized into complete docility. Perhaps in defiance of their employers who had cheated them, they invented a new script and used it to record their names and work days. This script, known as Proto-Sinaitric, simplified the Egyptian hieroglyphs, reducing them to only 40 symbols. Two hundred years later, Proto- Sinaitric became an alphabet with 24 symbols (Giveon 1978; Naveh 1987). In due course, this democratic act, having decimated the sabotage of exclusive reading and writing, would open the door to philosophy, history, science and democracy - feats of autonomy and creativity that were inconceivable in the early power civilizations.
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The mega-machine
According to Mumford, the first power machine was social. In attempting to emulate the perfect cosmic order so as to annul their own mortality, kings turned to design, assemble and operate a human mega-machine. Absolute con- trol of this mega-machine served as evidence of supernatural power, and the machine's most fantastic output - megalomaniacal graves - were supposed to open the gate to immortality.
The mega-machine of the early kingships typically comprised three prin- cipal components: a labour machine of peasant conscripts to erect public works; a military machine to impose internal discipline and engage in external war; and a bureaucratic machine to keep the accounts. Control was in the hands of a tight caste comprising the royal court and the high priesthood - the former maintaining a monopoly over physical force, the latter over knowledge and ideology. Division of labour and advanced specialization (Egyptian mining expeditions, for instance, had up to 50 different job descrip- tions), strict regimentation, uncompromising discipline and tough punish- ment turned the workers, soldiers and officials of these organizations into mere mechanical components. Initiative was all but forbidden and flexibility disallowed. Taken as whole, these organizations formed 'a combination of resistant parts, each specialized in function, operating under human control, to utilize energy and to perform work'. In short, they fulfilled all the requirements of Franz Reuleaux's classic definition of a machine (Mumford 1967: 191).
The fusion of rational insight and highly irrational aspirations resulted in a massive explosion of what political economists now call 'productivity'. Seen from a material standpoint, the technological achievements of the early mega- machine, particularly the construction of the pyramids, remained unparal- leled until our own epoch. But according to Mumford, the more significant contribution was the construction of the human mega-machine itself. It was here that the three basic principles of mechanization - complex coordination, de-humanization, and remote control - were first applied. In other words, the original object of mechanization was society itself. And in due course, just as the cosmic worldview was a necessary prerequisite for the adoption of universal weights, coins, the calendar and the clockwork, the human mega- machine became the ultimate model for subsequent non-human mechan- ization.
The mega-machine enabled human beings, for the first time, to transcend some of their own biological limitations. The principles of universality, order and predictability opened the door to a continuous expansion of knowledge. Urban amalgamations assembled by the first mega-machines opened new horizons for human interaction, triggering occasional flurries of creativity difficult to achieve in small and disjoined Neolithic settlements.
But the unleashing of such positive forces was neither the intended purpose nor the most important consequence of the mega-machine. According to
The capitalist mode of power 269
Mumford, the ultimate goal of human organization on a large scale was and remains negative: exerting social power for its own sake. The use of brute force is more than a means of exacting obedience; it is the very manifestation of a power civilization. Human sacrifice, although pre-dating kingship, became a central preoccupation of civilized societies, slowly becoming institutional- ized, perhaps unconsciously, in the form of war. In its extreme incarnation, argued Mumford, kingship was a 'man eating device', and the cannibalistic lust of earlier kings has repeatedly resurfaced in subsequent appearances of social mega-machines (1967: 184). Even today, monetized property (capital) and the death penalty (capital punishment) remain linked to the same root, caput.
To sum up, Mumford put the power orientation of the mega-machine model in sharp contrast to the democratic features of Neolithic society. With the mega-machine, Neolithic dispersion was replaced by power concentra- tion; ecological production by mechanization; lack of specialization by a life- long division of labour; limited local violence by the institutionalization of total war; cooperation by exploitation, forced labour and slavery; and egali- tarianism by a class structure.
The mega-machine resurrected: capital
Eventually, the early mega-machines of the great deltas crumbled under their own weight. For all their external might, they were internally vulnerable: de- humanization and obedience stifled initiative, while preoccupation with power and death were bound to undermine legitimacy. And when the 'myth of the machine' died - that is, when the power structure no longer fulfilled the Pharaoh's promise of 'life, prosperity and wealth' - the social pyramid was liable to falter.
But according to Mumford, the 'myth of the machine', much like Neolithic culture before it, has outlived its first historical incarnation, and in the sixteenth century centralized power once more emerged to control human consciousness. Nothing seemed to escape this renewed preoccupation with organized power. The most significant sign was the resurrection of the sky gods and the growing assimilation of Galileo's mechanical world picture. Every social innovation - from Venetian music and French diplomacy to Newtonian physics and Hobbesian politics - was marked by mechanical rationalism. And indeed, within only a few centuries, mechanization had once again taken command - so much so that in 1933 the entrance to the World's Fair at Chicago could proudly boast: 'Science explores: Technology executes: Man Conforms'. This announcement, together with the title of the fair - 'The Century of Progress' - attests to the extent to which the 'myth of the machine' has been restored (Mumford 1970: 213).
Extending Mumford, we argue that the new mega-machine has become much more powerful than the old - though for reasons that Mumford him- self did not explore. In his analysis, Mumford focused mainly on the newly
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resurrected institution of kingship and its successor, the sovereign state. But lurking within the cocoon of the state - and soon emerging to define the very meaning of the state - was a new and very specific logic that Mumford largely ignored: the nomos of capital.
In our view, capital fulfils all the characteristics of a mega-machine. Based on the universal ritual of capitalization and a fundamental belief in the 'normal rate of return', capital is a symbolic crystallization of power exercised over large-scale human organizations, typically by a small group of large absentee owners intertwined with key government officials.
The underlying driving force of large-scale capitalist organizations is not fundamentally different from that which propelled the rulers of earlier power regimes: they all seek to control nature and, ultimately, human beings. But the structures of these power regimes - their architectures, institutions and processes - are fundamentally different. These differences, we argue, make the capitalist mega-machine more potent than any of its real or imagined predecessors - more than Genghis Khan's rolling war machine, more than Orwell's party state, perhaps even more than Huxley's human reproduction line. There are several key reasons for this greatly enhanced power:
1 Universality. Although capital appears fractured by complex production chains and fragmented ownership stakes, in fact it is highly universal. The power symbols of earlier mega-machines were largely culture- specific, relying on the physical display of public works, armies, sacrifice, flags and emblems. Capital, by contrast, is reduced to one symbol: capi- talization. By the early twenty-first century, this symbol has been effec- tively abstracted down to electronic flickers, computer bits and bytes that make people the world over march to the invisible command of capital.
2 Cohesion. The unifying belief in the normal rate of return as the ultimate yardstick for social action is all embracing. It penetrates government, business, mass communication and culture, gradually taking over their very articulation and development. By providing a common language, this belief helps unite the various elites into a cohesive, if not seamless, ruling class of absentee owners, making opposition all the more difficult.
3 Expandability. Unlike the power of kings and sovereign governments, capital power is vendible. And the fact that capital can be bought and sold means that the power it represents can be expanded on an ever- increasing scale. For the first time in history, it seems that the sky is the limit. As Mr Collins, the oil magnate in Traven's The White Rose, puts it, 'There isn't any land anywhere in the world that I can't get if I want it . . . even if it's on Jupiter - I get it - as sure as death' (Traven 1929: 34).
4 Intensity. The focus on profit enables capitalists to deepen as well as broaden their power. The ancient mega-machine was a relatively well- defined organization. Power was exercised mostly over the organization itself and in that sense was 'organization augmenting': to have more of it
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required a bigger organization. The capitalist mega-machine is a much broader construct. It consists not of the corporation per se, but of the entire scope of capitalistic reproduction. As we elaborate in the final part of the book, control over this totality is proportionate to the various capitalized profit shares. A capitalist group can increase this share directly by expanding its own corporate organization; but it can also do so indirectly, by raising its profit per 'unit of organization' so as to become 'leaner and meaner'.
5 Absorptiveness. Any process of power that systematically affects the expected level and pattern of profit is quickly capitalized (non-systematic effects usually get classified as better-to-ignore 'extraordinary items'). The discounters are constantly on the lookout, scanning the power landscape. They look to see whether education increases the relative wages of women, whether environmental policies raise the effective penalty for polluters, whether the use of military force alters the price of raw materials, whether television makes workers easier to predict, whether religious missions pacify indigenous populations, whether economic policy redistributes income, whether elections alter taxation, and so on - all with the aim of assessing the impact of these processes on profitability. Any regular effect on profit is instantly discounted into present value, and the power process this effect emanates from hence- forth becomes part of capital.
6 Flexibility. By virtue of its universality, cohesion, expandability, intensity and absorptiveness, capital has become the most flexible power structure in history. Contrary to earlier mega-machines that depended mainly on punishment, oppression, violence and terror, capital relies also - and often far more so - on reward. This ability to use both carrot and stick makes capital suppler and therefore more resilient than either kingship or sovereign government. And even when this richer menu of power occa- sionally fails, giving rise to losses and bankruptcy, large-scale capitalist organizations are usually able to resurrect themselves through merger, restructuring and the securitization of debt. Indeed, this flexibility is what makes capital accumulation possible in the first place. This last point can hardly be overstated. If orthodox economics were right and capital was indeed a physical amalgamation of 'machines' or 'production lines', its immobility and rigidity would have made accumulation impossible. By contrast, if we treat capital as a human mega-machine, a structure of social control, capitalization and re-capitalization become possible as business organizations adapt to and change reality. Literally, capital can be accumulated only because it is not a physical entity.
To sum up: the myth of the mega-machine enables us to think of capital
not as a material-productive apparatus, but as a symbolic architecture of social power. Operating through the price system, this architecture quantifies
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and reduces qualitatively diverse power processes into the universal language of capitalization, and by so doing absorbs them into the process of accumu- lation. Very little remains out of reach: power that can be priced is power that can be capitalized.
Yet it is precisely this encompassing feature that makes the capitalist mega- machine difficult to reconcile with existing theories of society. For if capital tends to absorb and internalize other forms of organized power, how can we differentiate it - and, indeed, should we differentiate it - from bureaucratic organization in general and the state in particular?
Consequent to these ambiguities, the historical ascent of the capitalist mega-machine has been grossly misunderstood - often to the point of putting the whole process on its head. The first misunderstanding concerns the sepa- ration of accumulation from organization within the corporation. The second, broader misunderstanding involves the relationship between corpo- rations and capital on the one hand and governments and state on the other. We deal briefly with the former and then turn to the latter.
Owners and technocrats
Begin with the inner compass of the corporate unit. As we saw in Chapter 4, the Weberians latched onto social mechanization as evidence that 'capital' - an entity that they erroneously equated with machines and productive artefacts - was actually on the decline, and that class analysis therefore had become irrelevant if not totally misleading.
For John Kenneth Galbraith (1967; 1983), a famous voice of this school, mechanization spelled the ascent of a new social strata: the 'technostructure'. Following the conventional creed, his starting assumption was that 'property' applies only to capital goods as distinct from organizations: the capitalist proprietors still own the physical productive apparatus, but not the organiza- tion and management of knowledge. And since in his view production has grown more dependent on the latter relative to the former, it follows that property owners must have lost their primacy to corporate technocrats and government regulators. Galbraith himself provided no evidence that this transformation had indeed occurred - although, following The Modern Corporation and Private Property by Berle and Means (1932) and The Managerial Revolution by Burnham (1941), he was not alone in inferring that ownership was becoming increasingly separate from control.
Despite their popularity, though, the 'separation thesis' and the conse- quent belief that capital was on the decline were founded on pretty shaky grounds. As Maurice Zeitlin (1974) convincingly showed, the direct evidence, including in Berle and Means's own study, was dubious from the very start: the separation of ownership from control was never much more than a 'pseu- dofact'. Neither the earlier data nor those furnished by subsequent attempts, he argued, showed that such separation had actually taken place, a claim that
The capitalist mode of power 273
has since been corroborated by numerous writers. 3 Other, less hostile critiques, like those of Baran and Sweezy (1966) and more recently Screpanti (1999), accepted that ownership was increasingly separate from day-to-day control. But in their view, this separation only subjugated executives to the rigid dictates of accumulation, turning the corporation into an even more effective 'profit machine'. 4
This last point is certainly confirmed by the evidence. As we shall see later in the chapter, when the European bourgeoisie took the lead from the declining feudal nobility, its ascent was manifested through a marked redistribution from landed income to pecuniary return on investment. If capitalists were indeed losing ground to the technostructure as Galbraith and others have argued, we would expect to see a similar redistribution - this time from profit and interest to the salaries of technocrats and professionals. And yet this redistribution never happened. Indeed, judging by the facts, capital seems to have grown stronger, not weaker.
Figure 13. 1 pertains to the United States, for which there are systematic historical data going back to the late 1920s. The series in the chart shows the income share of capitalists, measured by the proportion of pre-tax profit and interest in national income. The historical picture painted here is unambig- uous. First, we can see that the income share of capitalists has trended upward, from an average of 12 per cent in the 1930s to 16 per cent recently. 5 Second, the chart shows that the volatility of the income share, indicated by the narrowing distance between the upper and lower dotted lines, has declined. Given that capitalization is boosted by higher earnings and lower risk, the combination of these two processes attests to the extent to which the mega-machine of capital has strengthened its grip over society. 6
3 According to Zeitlin, Berle and Means used an excessively high ownership cut-off point. They considered as managerial a corporation whose lead owner has less than a 20 per cent equity stake, while in fact effective control often can be exercised with as little as 10 or 5 per cent. They then went on to make a bad situation worse by overstating the number of firms that actually fulfilled this already loose criterion.
4 For more analyses of the 'separation thesis' and evidence on ownership and control, see Moore (1983), Scott (1997), La Porta et al. (1999) and Morck (2005).
5 The share of after-tax profit and interest in national income followed a similar trajectory. After the Second World War, sharp increases in corporate taxation reduced this share, which fell to 6 per cent in the mid-1940s. Subsequently, though, the effective tax rate drifted down- wards - a reduction that helped the corporate share of after-tax national income reach nearly 15 per cent by the mid-2000s.
6 As noted in footnote 15 in Chapter 12, unlike many radical political economists we do not consider rent and the earnings of unincorporated business as capitalist income. The US national-income share of these two components has declined from 20 per cent in the late 1920s to 10 per cent presently, causing the overall share of non-labour income to fall from 37 per cent to 27 per cent. This drop gives the impression that capital has been losing ground, while in fact the very opposite is true.
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20
18
16
14
12
10
8 6 4
1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
Figure 13. 1 Capital's share of income in the United States
Source: U. S. Department of Commerce through Global Insight (series codes: ZBECON for
pre-tax corporate profit; INTNETAMISC for interest; YN for national income).
Evidently, then, knowledge of production techniques is not a prerequisite for exacting obedience. In the final analysis, it is not the engineers and bureaucrats, but the capitalists who are in the driver seat. The ultimate drive of their corporate organizations is not 'continuity', 'security', or 'sales growth' as the managerialists would have us believe, but accumulation. And whether the capitalists are absent or present, the logic of their mega-machine seems to enforce this accumulation on society with increasing mechanical exactitude.
State and capital
Still, even with this evidence, students of capital have remained uncertain about how to link it to power. The main reason is simple enough. As Marx pointed out, historically, the regime of capital emerged together with the nation-state. Yet, as we have seen earlier in the book, theoretically, this joint emergence was fractured from the very start. The conventional bifurcation of 'politics' and 'economics' associated capital with production, leaving the state, and power more broadly, at the mercy of political scientists. Therefore,
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During the 1970s and 1980s, many structural Marxists laboured to map the political economy of these fractions, a tradition that has since resurfaced in the fashionable study of 'financialization'. 32 In our view, though, this framework is inadequate for understanding the contemporary capitalist regime. The problem is straightforward: even if Marx's notion of capital were problem free and even if profit had everything to do with productive surplus and nothing to do with sabotage, the fractions of capital could still not be identified.
Severing accumulation from circulation
The first, analytical, difficulty concerns the link between Marxian circulation and the reality of accumulation. Conceptually, circulation happens on the assets side of the balance sheet, while accumulation occurs on the liabilities side. Since Marx counted all commodities in the same backward-looking unit of abstract labour, it was only logical for him to consider the two processes as mirror images. The firm advances the items on the assets side: money, raw materials, semi-finished goods, proprietary knowledge and the depreciated
32 Recent contributions to the 'financialization' literature include Williams et al. (2000), Froud, Johal and Williams (2002), Krippner (2005) and Epstein (2005).
Accumulation and sabotage 259
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portion of its machinery and structures. These items get augmented by surplus value. And as the surplus value gets ploughed back, the book value of the debt and shareholders' equity on the liabilities side expands by the same amount as the items on the assets side. Circulation and accumulation grow and (occasionally) contract in tandem.
But what seemed sensible to Marx has become irrelevant in the new order of capitalist power. Accounting book value is backward looking and there- fore extraneous. In the calculus of power, what matters is the corporation's forward-looking capitalization on the bond and stock markets. This capital- ization is a symbolic valuation and therefore cannot be circulated, by defini- tion. Moreover, calculated as the risk-adjusted discounted value of expected future earnings, it bears little relation (and, as we have seen in Chapter 10, often a negative relation) to the cost of the circulated assets.
And here lies the problem. The fractions of capital are anchored in the con- ceptual identity of circulation and accumulation. But with forward-looking accumulation having been severed from backward-looking circulation, production no longer bears directly on capital. And with capital out of the productive loop, the definition of the different fractions loses its meaning.
Where have all the fractions gone?
The second difficulty is empirical and historical. The vendibility of capital enables even relatively small corporations to operate in many different areas, and this diversification makes it impossible to decide which fraction they belong to - even if the definition of the fractions themselves was crystal clear.
For example, how are we to classify conglomerates such as General Electric, DaimlerChrysler, or Philip Morris? These firms operate in hundreds of different sectors across the entire business spectrum - from financial inter- mediation, through raw materials, to trade, manufacturing, entertainment, advertising and distribution - so what should we call them? Although these examples are admittedly extreme, corporate diversification has become so widespread that the problem is now very general. And that is merely the beginning.
The difficulty is not only that diversified firms produce and sell many differ- ent products, but also that there is no objective method to determine what part of their profit comes from which line of production. In addition to being unable to measure 'productivity' so as to pin down the ultimate 'source' of profit, we are faced here with the intractable maze of non-arm's-length trans- actions and transfer pricing between different branches of the same firm. For example, if GE Capital 'subsidizes' GE's jet-engine division by supplying it with 'cheap' credit, the result is to lower profit in the former and raise it in the latter - and all of that without there being any change in production or sales. 33
33 We write 'subsidizes' and 'cheap' with inverted commas since there is no objective bench- mark to gauge what is cheap and what is subsidized.
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And the problem only grows as we aggregate. In the national accounts, 'manufacturing profits' denote the earnings not of manufacturing establish- ments, but of so-called manufacturing firms. Unlike the former, which often produce a well-defined set of commodities, the latter are a hybrid. They comprise firms whose largest single line of business, measured in terms of sales, is manufacturing. But given that manufacturing represents only part - and sometimes a fairly small part - of the firm's overall sales, the result is that the bulk of 'manufacturing profit' may very well come from activities other than manufacturing. 34
These considerations suggest that the fraction view cannot be treated as a universal feature of capitalism. It may have been a useful rough classification during the pre-diversification phase (particularly for purposes of political alli- ances, etc. ). But it has dubious theoretical value and little empirical relevance in an era of hyper capitalization, absentee ownership and conglomeration.
Toward fractions of power
These difficulties have led some orthodox Marxists to throw in the fractions towel, at least for the time being. Thus Dume? nil and Le? vy admit that large 'non-financial' corporations engage in 'financial' activities and that extensive diversification means that the term 'finance' can now be used to denote 'capi- talist owners' in general (as opposed to their managers). Yet, unwilling to give up Marx's scheme, they prefer to see these as problems to be solved. 'In our opinion', they say 'the analysis of the various fractions of the ruling classes, and the related institutions, still needs to be completed' (2005: 21-22).
We do not share this optimism. The difficulties here are not soluble - at least not within the framework of conventional economics, whether Marxist or neoclassical. The deadlock was candidly acknowledged by Paul Sweezy in his assessment of Monopoly Capital (1966), a deservingly famous book that he wrote together with Paul Baran twenty-five years earlier. His observations are worth quoting at some length because they show both the problem and why economics cannot solve it:
Why did Monopoly Capital fail to anticipate the changes in the structure and functioning of the system that have taken place in the last twenty-five years? Basically, I think the answer is that its conceptualization of the capital accumulation process is one-sided and incomplete. In the estab- lished tradition of both mainstream and Marxian economics, we treated capital accumulation as being essentially a matter of adding to the stock of existing capital goods. But in reality this is only one aspect of the
34 The insurmountable difficulties of matching business profits with specific lines of industrial activity are alluded to in various methodology papers which, unfortunately, few students of fractions bother to read (see for example, U. S. Department of Commerce. Bureau of Economic Analysis 1985: xiv; 2001: M21-M22).
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process. Accumulation is also a matter of adding to the stock of financial assets. The two aspects are of course interrelated, but the nature of this interrelation is problematic to say the least. The traditional way of handling the problem has been in effect to assume it away: for example, buying stocks and bonds (two of the simpler forms of financial assets) is assumed to be merely an indirect way of buying real capital goods. This is hardly ever true, and it can be totally misleading. This is not the place to try to point the way to a more satisfactory conceptualization of the capital accumulation process. It is at best an extremely complicated and difficult problem, and I am frank to say that I have no clues to its solu- tion. But I can say with some confidence that achieving a better under- standing of the monopoly capitalist society of today will be possible only on the basis of a more adequate theory of capital accumulation, with special emphasis on the interaction of its real and financial aspects, than we now possess.
(Sweezy 1991, emphasis added)
The stumbling block sits right at the end of the paragraph: 'the interaction between the real and financial aspects'. Sweezy recognized that the problem lies in the very concept of capital - yet he could not solve it precisely because he continued to bifurcate it into 'real' and 'financial' aspects.
And that shouldn't surprise us. 'Whatever happens', writes Hegel (1821: 11), 'every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age, jump over Rhodes'. Sweezy and his Monthly Review group had pushed the frontier of Marxist research for much of the post-war period, but by the 1990s their ammunition ran out. They recognized the all-imposing reality of finance, but their bifurcated world could not properly accommodate it.
In reality, there is no bifurcation. All capital is finance, and only finance. And every type of capital, including that which is formally associated with industry, is inherently unproductive. From a power perspective, the very clas- sification of capitals along lines of industrial activity, even in the absence of diversification and forward-looking capitalization, is misconceived.
Production is always a socio-hologramic activity, carried through the integrated realm of industry. The business corporation, by contrast, is a differ- ential legal construct. Being a legal entity, General Motors does not, and indeed cannot, produce cars. It merely controls the production of cars. But then so do firms such as Mitsubishi Trading and Deutsche Bank. Through different forms of power, each of these corporations controls key aspects of the production of cars, and that control in turn enables them to command undifferentiated parts of the total societal profit. The way to classify firms, therefore, is not on the narrow basis of production, but along broader lines of power, of which production is merely one aspect.
13 The capitalist mode of power
Every soul and every object have their own purpose but all ultimately aim at one: the conquest of the world for Genghis Khan.
--Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years I don't separate myself from the state. I have no other interests.
--Oleg Deripaska, owner of Rusal and at one point Russia's richest man
We now broaden the discussion of capital as power. In the previous chapter, we argued that capitalization discounts the power of capitalists to strat- egically limit social creativity and well-being. Capitalists inflict business dissonance on industrial resonance and leverage the consequence in the form of differential profitability. But power is not merely the means of business. It is also its most fundamental aim.
To articulate this argument, we begin the chapter by tracing the origin of mechanization to the ancient power civilizations of the river deltas, where the first giant machine was invented. This early machine, though, was not material, but social. It was made not of physical components, but of human beings. And its ultimate purpose was not production, but the exertion of power for the sake of power. Capital, we argue, is a modern incarnation of this mega-machine, a mechanized social structure driven by power for its own sake. From this viewpoint, the architecture of capitalism is better understood not as a mode of production, but as a mode of power.
The mode of power of a society, we argue, constitutes the 'state' of that society. The second part of the chapter explores this proposition. It examines the feudal mode of power, traces the process through which it gave way to a capitalist mode of power, and examines how the logic of capital has gradually penetrated, altered and eventually become the state - the state of capital.
A final note before we begin: as in Chapter 12, here too we translate and negate existing concepts and introduce new ones, here too we develop the argument at length, and here too we suggest that the reader suspend judgement till the end.
264 Bringing power back in
Material and symbolic drives
One of the most comprehensive attempts to understand the interaction between technology and power was offered by Lewis Mumford (1934; 1961; and primarily 1967; 1970). Mumford challenged the conventional emphasis on the material nature of technology, focusing instead on its symbolic aspects. Techniques, he argued, were integral to man's higher culture. In his opinion, the final aim of technology was the shaping of society rather than nature. Indeed, the most complex machines were not tangible but social.
Thus, whereas Veblen emphasized the progressive separation between the positive aspects of material technology and the negative features of social power, Mumford (who was greatly influenced by Veblen) suggested a different dichotomy between democratic and authoritarian technologies. Democratic technology centred on human progress; authoritarian technology focused on human control. Rather than following Veblen's notion of power as a fetter on technology, Mumford began by viewing power itself as a form of technology.
The invisible technology
In contrast to the conventional creed, Mumford emphasized the symbolic aspects of early human development. Limited by the materialist bias of their profession, he argued, archaeologists understandably judge human progress on the basis of physical objects. 'Man the maker', however, was a fairly late arrival, and the creation of physical artefacts were preceded by other, less visible but equally important mental activities. Moreover, the subsequent growth of material production has done little to diminish the primacy of symbolic drives.
According to Mumford, perhaps the most important human technology - invisible to archaeology until the invention of writing - is language. The material technology of Palaeolithic and Neolithic societies (and in some sense even of our own age) remains infinitely inferior to the complexity, flexibility, uniformity, efficiency and growth of their spoken languages. It is unclear how long language took to develop, but according to Mumford little of what followed could have been achieved without the prior construction of this wholly symbolic technology. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that the devel- opment of language was driven by the everyday imperatives of survival - the hunting pack was dependent on short commands and had little use for the subtlety of language common even among the most archaic tribes still living today. According to Mumford, the principal drive was self-discovery.
Mumford argued that the latent function of language - much like the earlier appearance of ritual and taboo and the subsequent evolution of science and material technology - was to control, for better or worse, man's own mental and emotional energies. In many ancient cultures, words were consid- ered the most potent force: God is commonly believed to have created the
The capitalist mode of power 265
world with his words, a feat of power that humans have since striven to emulate. Both in goal and structure, language was a precursor for all later technological developments.
The two archetypes
From this premise, Mumford differentiated between two qualitatively distinct technologies: one associated with the democratic outlook of Neolithic culture, the other with the power bias of 'civilized' society. In his opinion, their distinct paths stem from a different reaction to death. Neolithic tech- nology takes the biological route, seeking to enhance life while accepting the inevitability of death. Power technology, by contrast, uses mechanical force and violence in the vain hope of achieving immortality.
This qualitative distinction, of course, cannot be applied easily to actual societies, certainly not with any precision. Most social formations contain elements of both technologies, and few if any conform closely to either ideal type. But the distinction is nonetheless useful as a general myth, a basic framework for understanding the dual underpinnings of social organizations.
Neolithic culture
Neolithic culture does not see work as alienating labour, but rather as a communal process intertwined with the broader ecological system. Work is often backbreaking, but physical toil is compensated for by companionship, cooperation, song and rhyme, while aesthetic achievements are valued no less than abundance of yield. Indeed, many early feats of domestication - such as fertilization, the sacrifice of food for future growth, the harnessing of cattle and the use of a plough - were probably first practised as religious rituals. Feminine traits abound - from the lunar cycle linking cultivation to menstru- ation and sexuality, through the primary role of containers (pot, jar, house, village), to the careful cultivation of gardens and the patient rearing of chil- dren. Festivities, ceremonies and rituals revolve around the family, neigh- bours and community. Eating, drinking and sexual activity occupy a central place. There is no lifetime division of labour. Knowledge is rarely monopo- lized, and most types of work can be performed by all members of the community. Systemic gender inequality is uncommon. There are no social classes, and authority stems from age. Violence is limited and dictatorial power rarely tolerated. 1
Neolithic culture established the merit of morality, self-discipline, coop- eration and social order. It had shown the value of public goods and fore- thought. Most importantly, over time it has proven to be the most resilient
1 For more on the cooperative, life-loving aspects of Neolithic culture, worship and rituals, see Gimbutas (1982).
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form of social organization, always outlasting the far more energetic yet brittle power civilization.
These aspects of Neolithic culture, Mumford argued, did not disappear with the archaic village. As a form of social technology, they persist within modern society - sometimes visibly as in villages, communal organizations and even business companies, and at other times invisibly as resistance to the dictates of mechanical civilization.
Mumford also identified some significant shortcomings in Neolithic culture. The exclusive nature of small associations restricts human inter- action, the horizons are limited, and pettiness and suspicion prevent broader cooperation. And, indeed, after its initial burst of discoveries and inven- tions, Neolithic innovation died down and stagnation set in. Conservatism made Neolithic settlements vulnerable to external invasions, and when horse-mounted tribes, equipped with metals and weapons, moved in, many Neolithic communities succumbed and withered.
Power civilization
Against this backdrop of a peaceful if limited form of democratic organiza- tion rose the spectre of power civilization under the authoritarian rule of divine kingship. The first of these social amalgamations evolved in the great river deltas - from Egypt and Mesopotamia to the Indus Valley and China. According to Mumford, the unifying hallmark of these amalgamations was absolute power.
The need for such power was partly rooted in material circumstances. Physical surplus and the consequent amassment of material wealth for the first time had created the possibility of 'total loss'. The population was large and growing, segmented by an increasing division of labour and evermore interdependent. Under these conditions, flooding, drought and later total war could easily have spelled catastrophe, if not complete annihilation. Whereas Neolithic culture could flexibly respond to the first two and rarely faced the third, in the urban amalgamates of the deltas these threats had to be counter- acted resolutely and ruthlessly. And given the large scale of activity, such a response could be achieved only through the sanction of absolute authority.
But as Mumford argued, material considerations tell only part of the story; the other and perhaps more important part is symbolic. The rise of power civilization was accompanied by the appearance of the sky gods. Neolithic earth gods, attuned to the micro biological cycle of fertility and operating on a human scale, were no longer sufficient for the task at hand. For the kings, risk of disaster made failure increasingly unacceptable, thus amplifying the ever-present fear of death. Neolithic culture, humbled by its limited potential, had to accept mortality, but kings were no longer bound by Neolithic hori- zons. Control over growing resources and larger populations suggested to them - admittedly with some justification - that the 'skies were the limit'. Expanding insight into writing, mathematics and astronomy gave their task
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cosmic proportions. But as Josephus Flavius wisely observed, 'The union of what is divine and what is mortal is disagreeable' (Koestler 1952: 237). So as earthly rationality grew hand in hand with supernatural irrationality, the king, dazzled by both his achievements and fears, was driven toward the ulti- mate feat of becoming an immortal sun god himself.
Power civilization appeared after rising agricultural yield for the first time had enabled a systematic generation of food surpluses. According to Mumford, it was probably at that point that hunting chiefs, who had earlier entertained symbiotic relationships with Neolithic settlements, first discov- ered the promise of forceful redistribution. Weapons, which had previously been used primarily against animals, were now increasingly applied against people, and total war became a permanent institutional feature.
Neolithic excavations offer little or no evidence of fortification or arma- ment. The first fortifications are associated with urban centres, while heaps of cracked sculls - early evidence of organized murder - do not appear until kingship. Neolithic art did not glorify warriors and leaders. It left us no wall paintings of massacres and prisoners. It never built tombs in which lesser mortals were sacrificed for the afterlife of rulers. These aesthetic manifesta- tions emerged only when humanity embarked on its 'civilized' power trip to control nature and, most importantly, people. 2
2 The contrast between the authoritarian drive of power civilization and the democratic impulse of Neolithic technology is well illustrated by the fundamental difference between the ancient royal scripts on the one hand and the alphabet on the other. The former were used in the hierarchical administration of taxation, material stocks and masses of human beings. But beyond their practical role, they also served as a means of instilling institutional privation, fear and awe. Their structures were exceedingly if not deliberately complicated. Egyptian hieroglyphics, Mesopotamian cuneiform and Chinese logography all have hundreds and often many thousands of symbols. Studying these scripts required many years of harsh schooling and systematic harassment that would put to shame even the best public schools of the British Empire (Kramer 1963). Their impenetrable structure helped sustain hierarchy and prevent entry. It made broad learning impossible, deterred innovation and fixed the cosmos against subversion. It was a technology of sabotage, par excellence.
The democratic invention of the alphabet destroyed this exclusivity and opened up a world of freedom. The first known alphabet was written on the walls of the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, sometime during the fifteenth or fourteenth century BCE. The writers were probably the western-Semitic Apiru (or Amurru) who worked there as periodic zapping labour. Both the Bible and Egyptian evidence suggest that the royal administrators did not like these guest workers.
Unlike the peasants of the Nile Valley, they were quasi-nomadic tribes who hadn't been civilized into complete docility. Perhaps in defiance of their employers who had cheated them, they invented a new script and used it to record their names and work days. This script, known as Proto-Sinaitric, simplified the Egyptian hieroglyphs, reducing them to only 40 symbols. Two hundred years later, Proto- Sinaitric became an alphabet with 24 symbols (Giveon 1978; Naveh 1987). In due course, this democratic act, having decimated the sabotage of exclusive reading and writing, would open the door to philosophy, history, science and democracy - feats of autonomy and creativity that were inconceivable in the early power civilizations.
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The mega-machine
According to Mumford, the first power machine was social. In attempting to emulate the perfect cosmic order so as to annul their own mortality, kings turned to design, assemble and operate a human mega-machine. Absolute con- trol of this mega-machine served as evidence of supernatural power, and the machine's most fantastic output - megalomaniacal graves - were supposed to open the gate to immortality.
The mega-machine of the early kingships typically comprised three prin- cipal components: a labour machine of peasant conscripts to erect public works; a military machine to impose internal discipline and engage in external war; and a bureaucratic machine to keep the accounts. Control was in the hands of a tight caste comprising the royal court and the high priesthood - the former maintaining a monopoly over physical force, the latter over knowledge and ideology. Division of labour and advanced specialization (Egyptian mining expeditions, for instance, had up to 50 different job descrip- tions), strict regimentation, uncompromising discipline and tough punish- ment turned the workers, soldiers and officials of these organizations into mere mechanical components. Initiative was all but forbidden and flexibility disallowed. Taken as whole, these organizations formed 'a combination of resistant parts, each specialized in function, operating under human control, to utilize energy and to perform work'. In short, they fulfilled all the requirements of Franz Reuleaux's classic definition of a machine (Mumford 1967: 191).
The fusion of rational insight and highly irrational aspirations resulted in a massive explosion of what political economists now call 'productivity'. Seen from a material standpoint, the technological achievements of the early mega- machine, particularly the construction of the pyramids, remained unparal- leled until our own epoch. But according to Mumford, the more significant contribution was the construction of the human mega-machine itself. It was here that the three basic principles of mechanization - complex coordination, de-humanization, and remote control - were first applied. In other words, the original object of mechanization was society itself. And in due course, just as the cosmic worldview was a necessary prerequisite for the adoption of universal weights, coins, the calendar and the clockwork, the human mega- machine became the ultimate model for subsequent non-human mechan- ization.
The mega-machine enabled human beings, for the first time, to transcend some of their own biological limitations. The principles of universality, order and predictability opened the door to a continuous expansion of knowledge. Urban amalgamations assembled by the first mega-machines opened new horizons for human interaction, triggering occasional flurries of creativity difficult to achieve in small and disjoined Neolithic settlements.
But the unleashing of such positive forces was neither the intended purpose nor the most important consequence of the mega-machine. According to
The capitalist mode of power 269
Mumford, the ultimate goal of human organization on a large scale was and remains negative: exerting social power for its own sake. The use of brute force is more than a means of exacting obedience; it is the very manifestation of a power civilization. Human sacrifice, although pre-dating kingship, became a central preoccupation of civilized societies, slowly becoming institutional- ized, perhaps unconsciously, in the form of war. In its extreme incarnation, argued Mumford, kingship was a 'man eating device', and the cannibalistic lust of earlier kings has repeatedly resurfaced in subsequent appearances of social mega-machines (1967: 184). Even today, monetized property (capital) and the death penalty (capital punishment) remain linked to the same root, caput.
To sum up, Mumford put the power orientation of the mega-machine model in sharp contrast to the democratic features of Neolithic society. With the mega-machine, Neolithic dispersion was replaced by power concentra- tion; ecological production by mechanization; lack of specialization by a life- long division of labour; limited local violence by the institutionalization of total war; cooperation by exploitation, forced labour and slavery; and egali- tarianism by a class structure.
The mega-machine resurrected: capital
Eventually, the early mega-machines of the great deltas crumbled under their own weight. For all their external might, they were internally vulnerable: de- humanization and obedience stifled initiative, while preoccupation with power and death were bound to undermine legitimacy. And when the 'myth of the machine' died - that is, when the power structure no longer fulfilled the Pharaoh's promise of 'life, prosperity and wealth' - the social pyramid was liable to falter.
But according to Mumford, the 'myth of the machine', much like Neolithic culture before it, has outlived its first historical incarnation, and in the sixteenth century centralized power once more emerged to control human consciousness. Nothing seemed to escape this renewed preoccupation with organized power. The most significant sign was the resurrection of the sky gods and the growing assimilation of Galileo's mechanical world picture. Every social innovation - from Venetian music and French diplomacy to Newtonian physics and Hobbesian politics - was marked by mechanical rationalism. And indeed, within only a few centuries, mechanization had once again taken command - so much so that in 1933 the entrance to the World's Fair at Chicago could proudly boast: 'Science explores: Technology executes: Man Conforms'. This announcement, together with the title of the fair - 'The Century of Progress' - attests to the extent to which the 'myth of the machine' has been restored (Mumford 1970: 213).
Extending Mumford, we argue that the new mega-machine has become much more powerful than the old - though for reasons that Mumford him- self did not explore. In his analysis, Mumford focused mainly on the newly
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resurrected institution of kingship and its successor, the sovereign state. But lurking within the cocoon of the state - and soon emerging to define the very meaning of the state - was a new and very specific logic that Mumford largely ignored: the nomos of capital.
In our view, capital fulfils all the characteristics of a mega-machine. Based on the universal ritual of capitalization and a fundamental belief in the 'normal rate of return', capital is a symbolic crystallization of power exercised over large-scale human organizations, typically by a small group of large absentee owners intertwined with key government officials.
The underlying driving force of large-scale capitalist organizations is not fundamentally different from that which propelled the rulers of earlier power regimes: they all seek to control nature and, ultimately, human beings. But the structures of these power regimes - their architectures, institutions and processes - are fundamentally different. These differences, we argue, make the capitalist mega-machine more potent than any of its real or imagined predecessors - more than Genghis Khan's rolling war machine, more than Orwell's party state, perhaps even more than Huxley's human reproduction line. There are several key reasons for this greatly enhanced power:
1 Universality. Although capital appears fractured by complex production chains and fragmented ownership stakes, in fact it is highly universal. The power symbols of earlier mega-machines were largely culture- specific, relying on the physical display of public works, armies, sacrifice, flags and emblems. Capital, by contrast, is reduced to one symbol: capi- talization. By the early twenty-first century, this symbol has been effec- tively abstracted down to electronic flickers, computer bits and bytes that make people the world over march to the invisible command of capital.
2 Cohesion. The unifying belief in the normal rate of return as the ultimate yardstick for social action is all embracing. It penetrates government, business, mass communication and culture, gradually taking over their very articulation and development. By providing a common language, this belief helps unite the various elites into a cohesive, if not seamless, ruling class of absentee owners, making opposition all the more difficult.
3 Expandability. Unlike the power of kings and sovereign governments, capital power is vendible. And the fact that capital can be bought and sold means that the power it represents can be expanded on an ever- increasing scale. For the first time in history, it seems that the sky is the limit. As Mr Collins, the oil magnate in Traven's The White Rose, puts it, 'There isn't any land anywhere in the world that I can't get if I want it . . . even if it's on Jupiter - I get it - as sure as death' (Traven 1929: 34).
4 Intensity. The focus on profit enables capitalists to deepen as well as broaden their power. The ancient mega-machine was a relatively well- defined organization. Power was exercised mostly over the organization itself and in that sense was 'organization augmenting': to have more of it
The capitalist mode of power 271
required a bigger organization. The capitalist mega-machine is a much broader construct. It consists not of the corporation per se, but of the entire scope of capitalistic reproduction. As we elaborate in the final part of the book, control over this totality is proportionate to the various capitalized profit shares. A capitalist group can increase this share directly by expanding its own corporate organization; but it can also do so indirectly, by raising its profit per 'unit of organization' so as to become 'leaner and meaner'.
5 Absorptiveness. Any process of power that systematically affects the expected level and pattern of profit is quickly capitalized (non-systematic effects usually get classified as better-to-ignore 'extraordinary items'). The discounters are constantly on the lookout, scanning the power landscape. They look to see whether education increases the relative wages of women, whether environmental policies raise the effective penalty for polluters, whether the use of military force alters the price of raw materials, whether television makes workers easier to predict, whether religious missions pacify indigenous populations, whether economic policy redistributes income, whether elections alter taxation, and so on - all with the aim of assessing the impact of these processes on profitability. Any regular effect on profit is instantly discounted into present value, and the power process this effect emanates from hence- forth becomes part of capital.
6 Flexibility. By virtue of its universality, cohesion, expandability, intensity and absorptiveness, capital has become the most flexible power structure in history. Contrary to earlier mega-machines that depended mainly on punishment, oppression, violence and terror, capital relies also - and often far more so - on reward. This ability to use both carrot and stick makes capital suppler and therefore more resilient than either kingship or sovereign government. And even when this richer menu of power occa- sionally fails, giving rise to losses and bankruptcy, large-scale capitalist organizations are usually able to resurrect themselves through merger, restructuring and the securitization of debt. Indeed, this flexibility is what makes capital accumulation possible in the first place. This last point can hardly be overstated. If orthodox economics were right and capital was indeed a physical amalgamation of 'machines' or 'production lines', its immobility and rigidity would have made accumulation impossible. By contrast, if we treat capital as a human mega-machine, a structure of social control, capitalization and re-capitalization become possible as business organizations adapt to and change reality. Literally, capital can be accumulated only because it is not a physical entity.
To sum up: the myth of the mega-machine enables us to think of capital
not as a material-productive apparatus, but as a symbolic architecture of social power. Operating through the price system, this architecture quantifies
272 Bringing power back in
and reduces qualitatively diverse power processes into the universal language of capitalization, and by so doing absorbs them into the process of accumu- lation. Very little remains out of reach: power that can be priced is power that can be capitalized.
Yet it is precisely this encompassing feature that makes the capitalist mega- machine difficult to reconcile with existing theories of society. For if capital tends to absorb and internalize other forms of organized power, how can we differentiate it - and, indeed, should we differentiate it - from bureaucratic organization in general and the state in particular?
Consequent to these ambiguities, the historical ascent of the capitalist mega-machine has been grossly misunderstood - often to the point of putting the whole process on its head. The first misunderstanding concerns the sepa- ration of accumulation from organization within the corporation. The second, broader misunderstanding involves the relationship between corpo- rations and capital on the one hand and governments and state on the other. We deal briefly with the former and then turn to the latter.
Owners and technocrats
Begin with the inner compass of the corporate unit. As we saw in Chapter 4, the Weberians latched onto social mechanization as evidence that 'capital' - an entity that they erroneously equated with machines and productive artefacts - was actually on the decline, and that class analysis therefore had become irrelevant if not totally misleading.
For John Kenneth Galbraith (1967; 1983), a famous voice of this school, mechanization spelled the ascent of a new social strata: the 'technostructure'. Following the conventional creed, his starting assumption was that 'property' applies only to capital goods as distinct from organizations: the capitalist proprietors still own the physical productive apparatus, but not the organiza- tion and management of knowledge. And since in his view production has grown more dependent on the latter relative to the former, it follows that property owners must have lost their primacy to corporate technocrats and government regulators. Galbraith himself provided no evidence that this transformation had indeed occurred - although, following The Modern Corporation and Private Property by Berle and Means (1932) and The Managerial Revolution by Burnham (1941), he was not alone in inferring that ownership was becoming increasingly separate from control.
Despite their popularity, though, the 'separation thesis' and the conse- quent belief that capital was on the decline were founded on pretty shaky grounds. As Maurice Zeitlin (1974) convincingly showed, the direct evidence, including in Berle and Means's own study, was dubious from the very start: the separation of ownership from control was never much more than a 'pseu- dofact'. Neither the earlier data nor those furnished by subsequent attempts, he argued, showed that such separation had actually taken place, a claim that
The capitalist mode of power 273
has since been corroborated by numerous writers. 3 Other, less hostile critiques, like those of Baran and Sweezy (1966) and more recently Screpanti (1999), accepted that ownership was increasingly separate from day-to-day control. But in their view, this separation only subjugated executives to the rigid dictates of accumulation, turning the corporation into an even more effective 'profit machine'. 4
This last point is certainly confirmed by the evidence. As we shall see later in the chapter, when the European bourgeoisie took the lead from the declining feudal nobility, its ascent was manifested through a marked redistribution from landed income to pecuniary return on investment. If capitalists were indeed losing ground to the technostructure as Galbraith and others have argued, we would expect to see a similar redistribution - this time from profit and interest to the salaries of technocrats and professionals. And yet this redistribution never happened. Indeed, judging by the facts, capital seems to have grown stronger, not weaker.
Figure 13. 1 pertains to the United States, for which there are systematic historical data going back to the late 1920s. The series in the chart shows the income share of capitalists, measured by the proportion of pre-tax profit and interest in national income. The historical picture painted here is unambig- uous. First, we can see that the income share of capitalists has trended upward, from an average of 12 per cent in the 1930s to 16 per cent recently. 5 Second, the chart shows that the volatility of the income share, indicated by the narrowing distance between the upper and lower dotted lines, has declined. Given that capitalization is boosted by higher earnings and lower risk, the combination of these two processes attests to the extent to which the mega-machine of capital has strengthened its grip over society. 6
3 According to Zeitlin, Berle and Means used an excessively high ownership cut-off point. They considered as managerial a corporation whose lead owner has less than a 20 per cent equity stake, while in fact effective control often can be exercised with as little as 10 or 5 per cent. They then went on to make a bad situation worse by overstating the number of firms that actually fulfilled this already loose criterion.
4 For more analyses of the 'separation thesis' and evidence on ownership and control, see Moore (1983), Scott (1997), La Porta et al. (1999) and Morck (2005).
5 The share of after-tax profit and interest in national income followed a similar trajectory. After the Second World War, sharp increases in corporate taxation reduced this share, which fell to 6 per cent in the mid-1940s. Subsequently, though, the effective tax rate drifted down- wards - a reduction that helped the corporate share of after-tax national income reach nearly 15 per cent by the mid-2000s.
6 As noted in footnote 15 in Chapter 12, unlike many radical political economists we do not consider rent and the earnings of unincorporated business as capitalist income. The US national-income share of these two components has declined from 20 per cent in the late 1920s to 10 per cent presently, causing the overall share of non-labour income to fall from 37 per cent to 27 per cent. This drop gives the impression that capital has been losing ground, while in fact the very opposite is true.
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20
18
16
14
12
10
8 6 4
1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
Figure 13. 1 Capital's share of income in the United States
Source: U. S. Department of Commerce through Global Insight (series codes: ZBECON for
pre-tax corporate profit; INTNETAMISC for interest; YN for national income).
Evidently, then, knowledge of production techniques is not a prerequisite for exacting obedience. In the final analysis, it is not the engineers and bureaucrats, but the capitalists who are in the driver seat. The ultimate drive of their corporate organizations is not 'continuity', 'security', or 'sales growth' as the managerialists would have us believe, but accumulation. And whether the capitalists are absent or present, the logic of their mega-machine seems to enforce this accumulation on society with increasing mechanical exactitude.
State and capital
Still, even with this evidence, students of capital have remained uncertain about how to link it to power. The main reason is simple enough. As Marx pointed out, historically, the regime of capital emerged together with the nation-state. Yet, as we have seen earlier in the book, theoretically, this joint emergence was fractured from the very start. The conventional bifurcation of 'politics' and 'economics' associated capital with production, leaving the state, and power more broadly, at the mercy of political scientists. Therefore,
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