Where have all the
fractions
gone?
Nitzan Bichler - 2012 - Capital as Power
This is what accountants call 'book value'.
Consciously or not, there is an attempt here to separate the portion attribut- able to social power from the so-called 'true' value of the asset as measured by its historical cost.
As it turns out, though, even this presumably 'objective' convention is unable to expunge power from prices.
The reason is that, at any point in time, the very cost of producing plant and equipment is already a manifestation of systemic conflict and struggle. Consider again our example of tanker vessels. If ownership of such tankers confers large profits, some of these will likely be appropriated by the compa- nies producing them (as well as by their workers, depending on their own bargaining position). The acquiring shipping line will record the book value of the vessel as an undifferentiated quantum, a 'cost' item stripped of any power consideration. But this cost already reflects a redistributional power struggle that enabled the shipyard to up the price of the newly launched vessel to begin with. Moreover, even in the unlikely absence of differential earning capacity, the cost of producing tangible equipment already embodies the normal rate of return and therefore the average limitation of industry by business.
To sum up, the distinction between stocks and bonds is rooted in power considerations, not industrial circumstances. Both forms of capital rest on power, though the nature of power is different in each case. Most generally, equity capitalizes the firm's differential ability to restrict industry for its own benefit, whereas debt capitalizes the average ability of all owners to limit industry at large.
The maturity of capitalism
The power distinction between debt and equity can also be viewed by contrasting their respective returns and the industrial limitations from which
30 The list of assets affected by oil prices can easily be extended. The efficiency of oil traders, for instance, does not change much faster than that of sea vessels; their 'human capital', though, measured by their sign-on fees, fluctuates, as if by magic, with the price of oil and the Baltic Dirty Tanker Index (Morrison 2006). Similarly for the governments of oil- producing countries: their oil-drilling expertise changes only gradually, while the value of
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they derive: interest on debt represents average sabotage, while profit on equity denotes differential sabotage. From this viewpoint, long-term swings in the ratio of interest to profit can be interpreted as a proxy for the 'maturity' of capitalism.
Our notion of maturity here refers loosely to the strength and solidity of existing power institutions; and this strength and solidity, we argue, is inti- mately linked to the nature of earning expectations and their associated forms of capitalization. Frankel (1980) sees the basic difference between equity and debt as a question of trust: the former represents an expected return, the latter a promise of return. But then, under business enterprise, the degree of trust among owners depends on the 'normalization' of their power. 31
For this reason, we can expect that as capitalism matures and industrial control increasingly petrifies into accepted institutions, perceptions of risk decline, trust rises and debt becomes an increasingly acceptable form of accu- mulation. Conversely, when changing circumstances work to loosen the previous grip of existing conventions and understandings (and in that sense 'invigorate' capitalism), debt becomes relatively more difficult to issue and the more risky equity investment again is used as the primary vehicle of capi- talization. Seen in this light, the maturity of capitalism does not develop linearly, and in fact has no preset direction. It may increase as well as decrease, depending on the trajectory of it power institutions, organizations and processes.
Following this logic, we expect the maturity of capitalism, approximated by the ratio of interest to profit, to be positively correlated with the extent of industrial sabotage. And, indeed, as illustrated in Figure 12. 4, this correlation seems to exist in the United States. Since the 1930s, our index of maturity has been closely correlated with the unemployment rate, a readily available (albeit imperfect and partial) proxy for industrial limitation.
At first sight, the relationship may seem intuitive and not particularly significant. After all, economic fluctuations affect profit more than interest, so when unemployment rises so should the ratio of interest to profit. How- ever, this triviality holds only in the short term. In the longer haul, interest payments are much more flexible, so there is no technical reason for the interest-to-profit ratio to correlate positively with unemployment. Note that Figure 12. 4 smoothes the two series as 5-year moving averages. In this light, the fact that their long-term gyrations are so similar is highly significant.
their sovereign wealth funds swells and contracts with the ups and downs of petroleum
prices (Farrell and Lund 2008).
31 It is perhaps worth noting here that the terms 'commitment' and 'trust' have rather violent
origins. The anarchy of private warfare during the early period of Medieval feudalism left little public space and eliminated any semblance of personal security. This context gave rise to armed gangs of inge? nue in obsequio - free men under the protection and at the service of a military chieftain. The armed retainers of the Frankish king were initially known as comi- tatus and later as trustis (Ganshof 1964: 3-5).
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100 ? ? ? ? ? 100. 00
10. 00
10 ? ? ? ? ? 1. 00
0. 10
1 ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 0. 01 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
Figure 12. 4 Business trust and industrial sabotage in the United States
Note: Series are expressed as 5-year moving averages. The ratio of net interest to corporate profit
compares the already smoothed series.
Source: U. S. Department of Commerce through Global Insight (series codes: RUC for the rate of unemployment; INTNETAMISC for net interest and miscellaneous payments; ZBECON for pre-tax corporate profit with capital consumption allowance and inventory valuation adjustment).
The 1930s and 1940s were marked by great turbulence. As the figure indi- cates, during the Great Depression business control over industry had become 'excessive', while later, with the war-induced boom, it became 'too loose' (see also Figure 12. 2). The 1950-1980 period was much more stable. Business slowly regained control over industry, boosting confidence in the regular flow of capital income and trust among lenders and borrowers. The consequence was a gradual rise in unemployment on the one hand and a shift from profit to fixed income on the other. Since the mid-1980s, however, the trend seems to have reversed. The increasing globalization of business enter- prise and the progressive opening of the US political economy have put existing business institutions under duress and transformed the very way in which business controls industry. And as the promise of return weakened relative to the mere expectation of return, unemployment fell together with the 'maturity' ratio of interest to capital income.
? ? ? ? log scale
Unemployment
(%, left)
log scale
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Ratio of Net Interest to Corporate Profit (right)
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Fractions of capital
The institution of absentee ownership and the notion that profit and accumu- lation derive from business limitations on industry suggest that all capital is intrinsically unproductive. This view contrasts sharply with Marx's 'fraction' taxonomy, a logic that differentiates productive from unproductive capitals. According to Marx, capital accumulates through a circulation scheme:
1. M? C? P? P? ? C? ? M?
In this scheme, financial capital (money M), turns into commercial capital (commodities C), to be made into industrial capital (work in progress, or productive capital P), producing more industrial capital (P? ), converted again into commercial capital (more commodities C? ) and finally into financial capital (more money M? ).
Although the circulation of capital is a single process, during the nine- teenth century each stage appeared to be dominated by a different group, or fraction of the capitalist class: the conversion of M? M? 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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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.
The reason is that, at any point in time, the very cost of producing plant and equipment is already a manifestation of systemic conflict and struggle. Consider again our example of tanker vessels. If ownership of such tankers confers large profits, some of these will likely be appropriated by the compa- nies producing them (as well as by their workers, depending on their own bargaining position). The acquiring shipping line will record the book value of the vessel as an undifferentiated quantum, a 'cost' item stripped of any power consideration. But this cost already reflects a redistributional power struggle that enabled the shipyard to up the price of the newly launched vessel to begin with. Moreover, even in the unlikely absence of differential earning capacity, the cost of producing tangible equipment already embodies the normal rate of return and therefore the average limitation of industry by business.
To sum up, the distinction between stocks and bonds is rooted in power considerations, not industrial circumstances. Both forms of capital rest on power, though the nature of power is different in each case. Most generally, equity capitalizes the firm's differential ability to restrict industry for its own benefit, whereas debt capitalizes the average ability of all owners to limit industry at large.
The maturity of capitalism
The power distinction between debt and equity can also be viewed by contrasting their respective returns and the industrial limitations from which
30 The list of assets affected by oil prices can easily be extended. The efficiency of oil traders, for instance, does not change much faster than that of sea vessels; their 'human capital', though, measured by their sign-on fees, fluctuates, as if by magic, with the price of oil and the Baltic Dirty Tanker Index (Morrison 2006). Similarly for the governments of oil- producing countries: their oil-drilling expertise changes only gradually, while the value of
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they derive: interest on debt represents average sabotage, while profit on equity denotes differential sabotage. From this viewpoint, long-term swings in the ratio of interest to profit can be interpreted as a proxy for the 'maturity' of capitalism.
Our notion of maturity here refers loosely to the strength and solidity of existing power institutions; and this strength and solidity, we argue, is inti- mately linked to the nature of earning expectations and their associated forms of capitalization. Frankel (1980) sees the basic difference between equity and debt as a question of trust: the former represents an expected return, the latter a promise of return. But then, under business enterprise, the degree of trust among owners depends on the 'normalization' of their power. 31
For this reason, we can expect that as capitalism matures and industrial control increasingly petrifies into accepted institutions, perceptions of risk decline, trust rises and debt becomes an increasingly acceptable form of accu- mulation. Conversely, when changing circumstances work to loosen the previous grip of existing conventions and understandings (and in that sense 'invigorate' capitalism), debt becomes relatively more difficult to issue and the more risky equity investment again is used as the primary vehicle of capi- talization. Seen in this light, the maturity of capitalism does not develop linearly, and in fact has no preset direction. It may increase as well as decrease, depending on the trajectory of it power institutions, organizations and processes.
Following this logic, we expect the maturity of capitalism, approximated by the ratio of interest to profit, to be positively correlated with the extent of industrial sabotage. And, indeed, as illustrated in Figure 12. 4, this correlation seems to exist in the United States. Since the 1930s, our index of maturity has been closely correlated with the unemployment rate, a readily available (albeit imperfect and partial) proxy for industrial limitation.
At first sight, the relationship may seem intuitive and not particularly significant. After all, economic fluctuations affect profit more than interest, so when unemployment rises so should the ratio of interest to profit. How- ever, this triviality holds only in the short term. In the longer haul, interest payments are much more flexible, so there is no technical reason for the interest-to-profit ratio to correlate positively with unemployment. Note that Figure 12. 4 smoothes the two series as 5-year moving averages. In this light, the fact that their long-term gyrations are so similar is highly significant.
their sovereign wealth funds swells and contracts with the ups and downs of petroleum
prices (Farrell and Lund 2008).
31 It is perhaps worth noting here that the terms 'commitment' and 'trust' have rather violent
origins. The anarchy of private warfare during the early period of Medieval feudalism left little public space and eliminated any semblance of personal security. This context gave rise to armed gangs of inge? nue in obsequio - free men under the protection and at the service of a military chieftain. The armed retainers of the Frankish king were initially known as comi- tatus and later as trustis (Ganshof 1964: 3-5).
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100 ? ? ? ? ? 100. 00
10. 00
10 ? ? ? ? ? 1. 00
0. 10
1 ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 0. 01 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
Figure 12. 4 Business trust and industrial sabotage in the United States
Note: Series are expressed as 5-year moving averages. The ratio of net interest to corporate profit
compares the already smoothed series.
Source: U. S. Department of Commerce through Global Insight (series codes: RUC for the rate of unemployment; INTNETAMISC for net interest and miscellaneous payments; ZBECON for pre-tax corporate profit with capital consumption allowance and inventory valuation adjustment).
The 1930s and 1940s were marked by great turbulence. As the figure indi- cates, during the Great Depression business control over industry had become 'excessive', while later, with the war-induced boom, it became 'too loose' (see also Figure 12. 2). The 1950-1980 period was much more stable. Business slowly regained control over industry, boosting confidence in the regular flow of capital income and trust among lenders and borrowers. The consequence was a gradual rise in unemployment on the one hand and a shift from profit to fixed income on the other. Since the mid-1980s, however, the trend seems to have reversed. The increasing globalization of business enter- prise and the progressive opening of the US political economy have put existing business institutions under duress and transformed the very way in which business controls industry. And as the promise of return weakened relative to the mere expectation of return, unemployment fell together with the 'maturity' ratio of interest to capital income.
? ? ? ? log scale
Unemployment
(%, left)
log scale
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Ratio of Net Interest to Corporate Profit (right)
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? www. bnarchives. net
Fractions of capital
The institution of absentee ownership and the notion that profit and accumu- lation derive from business limitations on industry suggest that all capital is intrinsically unproductive. This view contrasts sharply with Marx's 'fraction' taxonomy, a logic that differentiates productive from unproductive capitals. According to Marx, capital accumulates through a circulation scheme:
1. M? C? P? P? ? C? ? M?
In this scheme, financial capital (money M), turns into commercial capital (commodities C), to be made into industrial capital (work in progress, or productive capital P), producing more industrial capital (P? ), converted again into commercial capital (more commodities C? ) and finally into financial capital (more money M? ).
Although the circulation of capital is a single process, during the nine- teenth century each stage appeared to be dominated by a different group, or fraction of the capitalist class: the conversion of M? M? 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.
