If all firms push their sales up, the consequence is an overall loss of
business
control over industry and a resulting drop in the overall profit share of income.
Nitzan Bichler - 2012 - Capital as Power
They do not even seem to restrict industry.
For the most part, their path is clean and detached.
And the reason is simple: they operate not directly, but indirectly, through the fundamental unit of the capi- talist order: price.
From price taking to price making
According to received liberal dogma, firms are 'price takers': they accept whatever price mother market gives them. The reality, though, seems to
16 A similar non-linear pattern emerges if we substitute the official rate of 'economic growth' for the rate of unemployment (on an inverted scale). However, given our mistrust of 'real' measurements, we forgo this illustration.
? 240 Bringing power back in
suggest the exact opposite. The standard practice, documented extensively and repeatedly since the 1930s, shows that most modern firms are 'price makers': they set their own price and then sell as much as possible at that price.
Neoclassicists have fought tooth and nail to deny this inverted reality. They had no other choice: to recognize price making would have pulled the rug from under conventional price theory and brought down the rest of economics. Substantively, their counterattack was a failure. Although led by some of the heaviest guns, it hardly dented the facts: price making was here to stay. Pedagogically, though, the attack was highly successful. It managed to expunge the whole debate from introductory economics textbooks, with the result that today's students know little or nothing about the controversy. A brief outline therefore seems appropriate. 17
The first to question seriously the competitive price-taking model and to emphasize the tendency toward oligopoly and monopoly was Veblen. 18 During the roaring twenties his interventions were duly ignored; but by the 1930s, with the Great Depression having opened the door to intellectual dissent, his insights began to echo. Within a few years, the neoclassicists found themselves confronted with two sets of challenges. The first were the theories of 'imperfect competition' (by Robinson 1933) and 'monopolistic competition' (by Chamberlin 1933). Many neoclassicists considered these deviations scandalous, but in due course they managed to domesticate and absorb them into their creed. Their task, though, wasn't nearly as easy with the second set of challenges. These were empirical, and they proved impos- sible to tame.
The debate opened with Gardiner Means' path-breaking work on indus- trial prices in the United States (1935a; 1935b). Means showed that there were in fact not one but two types of prices. The first were the familiar 'market prices': relatively flexible, moving up and down with supply and demand and prevalent in competitive industries. But there was also a second and hereto- fore unfamiliar type of 'administered prices': relatively inflexible, changing only infrequently, responding slowly to market conditions and typical of concentrated industries.
This duality had two far-reaching implications. The first was that prices were intimately connected to crisis - and in more than one way. Means showed that during the Great Depression, competitive industries saw massive declines in their market prices, but only moderate drops in their output and employment. The situation in concentrated industries, though, was exactly
17 For critical reviews of the pricing debate, see Blair (1972: Part IV), Lee (1984), Nitzan (1990) and Lee and Irvin-Lessmann (1992).
18 '[I]t is very doubtful if there are any successful business ventures within the range of the modern industries from which the monopoly element is wholly absent. They are, at any rate, few and not of great magnitude. And the endeavor of all such enterprises that look to a permanent continuance of their business is to establish as much of a monopoly as may be' (Veblen 1904: 54).
? Accumulation and sabotage 241
the opposite: prices declined slightly, while production and payroll collapsed, sometimes by as much as 80 per cent. In other words, the Great Depression occurred mostly in concentrated industries whose prices proved relatively inflexible. Seen from a Veblenian perspective, administered prices were nothing but a mechanism of industrial sabotage.
The second implication was theoretical and general. Profit maximization requires that firms make the best out of the circumstances they face. Administered prices, though, respond only partly or not at all to market conditions. This discrepancy means that companies that set such prices do not make the best out of the circumstances, and, therefore, that they do not maxi- mize their profit. The conclusion was simple and painful: the more prevalent administered prices become, the greater the irrelevance of standard price dogma. And since, according to study after study, most prices are adminis- tered, the agony must be considerable. 19
The markup and the target rate of return
The first explicit confirmation of this painful conclusion came a few years later, with the publication of Hall and Hitch's work on business behaviour (1939). Whereas Means focused on the pattern of prices, Hall and Hitch investigated those who set them. They interviewed company officials in Britain, asking them to explain how they determined prices. And their conclu- sions were stunning, at least by neoclassical standards. It turned out that firms did not follow the neoclassical recipe of equating marginal revenues and cost; that they did not know what these marginal magnitudes meant; and, most embarrassingly, that they did not care about profit maximization to begin with. The process that firms did follow was totally different: they started by calculating what they considered to be 'normal' unit cost (namely the cost at 'normal' levels of output); they tacked onto this cost a 'conven- tional' markup; and they kept the resulting price stable in the face of cyclical variations in demand.
Later on, these findings were augmented by the notion of a 'target rate of return'. According to the empirical research of Kaplan, Dirlam and Lanzillotti (1958), modern firms, particularly the leading ones, begin with a long-term target rate of profit, and then back-calculate the markup necessary to realize this rate of return over the longer haul. 20
This method seems straightforward - and it probably is for the price- setting firm. But not so for the theorist. Whereas the former merely has to act,
19 For up-to-date surveys of the evidence, see Blinder et al. (1998) and Fabiani et al. (2006).
20 For instance, a firm that wants to achieve an average 20 per cent return on an investment of $1 billion needs to earn an average of $200 million in profit. If the 'normal' volume is 100 million units and the 'normal' unit cost is $20, the firm needs to add a 10 per cent markup and set its unit price at $22. With these assumptions, keeping the price fixed while letting
? sales fluctuate with demand will yield the target rate of return over the longer term.
242 Bringing power back in
the latter has to reason. And as it turns out, the pricing formula cannot be 'explained' easily. The main problem is the 'target rate of return' and the asso- ciated 'conventional' markup: since these no longer obey the rules of profit maximization, there is no way to find their unique values. In theoretical parlance, they become 'indeterminate'. Hall and Hitch (1939: 28) tried to solve the problem by making the markup a reflection of the 'community of outlook' of businessmen, while others, such as Eichner (1976), anchored the target rate of return in the firms' 'investment plans'. However, conventional economic theory does not know how to theorize airy concepts such as the 'community of outlook' and 'investment plans', as a result of which 'economic science has not yet solved its first problem - what determines the price of a commodity? ' (Robinson 1966: 79).
A possible way out of this puzzle was pointed out by Michal Kalecki (1943a), whom we have mentioned in Chapter 4. For Kalecki, the markup was not simply a vague social convention, but a measure of power: he called it the 'degree of monopoly'. 21 Monopoly power, like every other form of power, can be known only by its consequences. And for Kalecki, that consequence was the markup: the higher the markup and its associated rate of return, the greater the implied power of those who set it, and vice versa.
Pricing and incapacitating
And so the circle closes and sabotage becomes invisible. The vast majority of modern capitalists (or their managers) are 'price makers': they fix the price of their product and then let 'market forces' do the rest for them. To the naked eye they all seem keen on producing and selling as much as possible, but beyond the fac? ade the picture is very different. The specific level at which they set the price already embodies the power to incapacitate. On the one hand, the profit target and markup built into the price reflect the firm's power, while, on the other hand, that power, exercised by the high price, serves to restrict industry below its full capacity. The sabotage and the power to inflict it remain concealed, but their consequences are very real.
Is free competition free of power?
Now, up to this point, our discussion has been limited to the mainstream of administered prices. It should be added, however, that even in those isolated cases where 'free competition' is said to reign, the power to incapacitate is not at all absent. To see why this is so, consider a neoclassical 'perfectly com- petitive' firm - but instead of focusing on what it does, think of what it is unwilling to do. For illustration, take the case of mining, where prices are presumably set by global supply and demand. A reader schooled in
? 21 The precise definition was a bit more involved, but that should not detract us here.
Accumulation and sabotage 243
neoclassical theory may be tempted to conclude that, at least in such cases, the presence of market prices excludes sabotage. But it ain't necessarily so.
Mining output, much like any other output, is controlled by business. The actual production of a single firm and the number of firms in operation there- fore are bounded not by the state of industrial arts, but by what can be sold at a 'reasonable' profit. In fact, this is exactly what standard neoclassical manuals tell the owner of a perfectly competitive firm: in the long-run, have your company produce only if you expect to earn at least the normal rate of return. Otherwise, shut down.
For neoclassicists who insist on equating the normal rate of return with the marginal revenue product of capital, this stipulation simply assures efficient resource allocation. From a Veblenian standpoint, though, this unwillingness to produce for less than some conventional rate of return is the very mani- festation of industrial sabotage. Thus, although 'perfectly competitive' firms may not set prices, their productive activity - individually and in the aggre- gate - nevertheless is limited by the imperative of earning a normal rate of return.
The capitalist norm
The normal rate of return and the natural rate of unemployment
The normal rate of return of course is a fuzzy magnitude, a convention that varies among business owners and over time. The important point, however, is that this normal rate exists in the first place. With the gradual penetration of capitalist institutions, owners have come to believe that the flow of profit is a natural, orderly phenomenon. As such, profit is seen as having a more or less predetermined mean growth rate and a dispersion that varies with circumstances (expressed by the standard deviation from this mean).
According to Veblen, this development is hardly trivial. Until a few hundred years ago, profit was seen more as a coincidence than a regular feature of ownership. The main goal was to retain property, and owners of land, slaves or gold rarely expected their assets to grow 'on their own'. But under capitalism, where the business limitation of industry grows increasingly universal, the consequent profit is regarded as natural and its rate of expan- sion as normal. In this way, the strategic limitation of industry can prevail even in the absence of explicit binding arrangements.
The normality of profit has been so thoroughly accepted that the industrial limitation from which it derives is no longer self-evident. Consider the fact that since 1890, the first year for which aggregate data are available, the official US rate of unemployment averaged 7 per cent (5. 7 per cent without the 1930s). Economists, however, remain unimpressed by this fact. Indeed, that is exactly what they expect. Given that this average rate has been associ- ated with 'business as usual', most now take it to represent 'the natural rate of unemployment'. In an unconscious Orwellian bent, modern textbooks
244 Bringing power back in
casually talk about the 'full employment unemployment rate', 'unemploy- ment equilibrium' and 'over-full employment' - generally without quotation marks (see for example Parkin and Bade 1986: 282-83; and Branson 1989: 188). Even Carlyle could not have foreseen the dismal state of a society subju- gated to the economic science.
Antecedents: return and sabotage in antiquity
The power features of the capitalist normal rate of return are not without precedent. Their origins can be traced to the early emergence of the rate of interest in the Middle East some 4,500 years ago. The ancient interest rate, just like today's normal rate of return, was a matter of power and sabotage. But its institutional and societal underpinnings were radically different and are worth exploring so as to put our discussion in context. 22
The roots of the pecuniary standard are inherently negative. In almost every language, the concept of debt is associated with guilt and sin. Originally, proto-money was used for the settling of obligations, including reparations ('pay' and 'pacify' share the same root in both English and Hebrew), marriage debts, communal fines, religious offerings and, eventually, royal taxes. The ma? s? - the Sumerian term for interest - means 'kid' and 'calf', a term that developed from the earlier religious proto-tax of the ma? s? -fee. Mikneh in Hebrew means 'herd' narrowly and 'moveable property' more broadly. Similarly, the words 'pecuniary', 'fee' and 'feudal' all derive from the Latin pecus - a concept that later came to denote 'cattle', but that originally referred more broadly to 'personal chattels' and 'moveable wealth'.
Livestock etymologies and growth metaphors have led neoclassicists to conclude that ancient interest payments on debt were natural returns on productive agricultural yield. This is an erroneous interpretation for two reasons. First, although debt (along with many other concepts) was often counted in 'pastoral' units, it was considered barren throughout antiquity. Second and more straightforwardly, most lending in antiquity had nothing to do with 'investment' and therefore had no 'return' from which to deduct interest.
The institution of interest was first invented in Sumer during the third millennium BCE, from where it later spread to the Eastern Mediterranean, Greece and Rome. From their very inception, debt, credit and interest were matters of organized power. The Sumerian proto-monetary architecture was fundamentally statist. 23 It developed as a royal method of administration and accounting, a system with which the palace and temple allocated material
22 Our account of the origin of interest in this subsection draws on the work of Michael Hudson (1992; 2000a; 2004).
23 A proper, coin-denominated 'monetary system' appeared much later, in Lydia of the seventh century BCE. The term 'money' is even more recent, coming from the Roman temple of Juno Moneta, where silver and gold coins were minted during the Punic Wars.
? Accumulation and sabotage 245
provisions, organized production and collected taxes. Commercial and long- term trade accounting, wherever they existed, were part and parcel of this statist architecture.
The Sumerian debt system was very different from the capitalist one. Capitalist borrowers are usually thought of positively, as entrepreneurs who leverage their own money in order to make more money. By contrast, most Sumerian borrowers were farmers in distress, on-the-brink subjects whose dire circumstances forced them to 'mortgage' (or death-pledge) their cattle and even family members just to make ends meet. These peasants did not 'invest' their loans; they used them simply to stay alive. And since the borrowers made no productive advances, there was no reason for the interest they paid to bear any relationship to the 'efficiency' of their chattel or the 'yield' of their fields. 24
And, indeed, contrary to the ever-fluctuating capitalist normal rate of return, the standard Sumerian rate of interest never changed. It was fixed at 1/60 per month, or 20 per cent annually, and did not budge for more than a millennium. The Greek interest rate of 1/10 per annum and the Roman rate of 1/12 - although not nearly as durable as the Sumerian - were also set for long periods of time. The stability of these ancient rates reflected the pattern of agricultural seasons, a system of mathematical fractions and a set of reli- gious myths - a combination that the ruling elites gradually synthesized and locked into an inflexible architecture of pecuniary rules.
This pre-capitalist architecture, just like the capitalist one, was rooted in organized power and inflicted plenty of damage. Exorbitant interest rates dispossessed and enslaved numerous borrowers. In fact, the sabotage was so severe that ancient rulers had to announce periodic debt moratoriums, or Clean Slates, to avoid social disintegration. But this is where the similarity ends.
Pecuniary power: ancient versus capitalist
In antiquity organized power was enforced directly by royal decree and increased by the open use of force. Wealth was a subset of power, an entity whose magnitude depended on the whim of gods and the dose of violence. It had no predetermined pace of growth, positive or negative, natural or reli- gious. And whatever its erratic rate of expansion, it obviously could not have depended on a fixed rate of the interest. The latter was seen primarily as an administrative device. The ancients even forbade its compounding.
24 It seems that many poor farmers are still unable to internalize the neoclassical entrepre- neurial spirit. In India, small peasants, squeezed between high input prices and low output prices, continue to borrow simply to make ends meet. Just like their Sumerian predeces- sors, they do not invest their loans 'properly'. And since that makes them unable to meet their interest payments, many thousands end up killing themselves every year (Meeta and Rajivolochan 2006).
? 246 Bringing power back in
The capitalist order puts this logic on its head. On the surface, organized power seems to have vanished. With autonomous, growth-seeking agents engaged in voluntary transactions, the normal rate of return no longer connotes destitution and enslavement. But this is no more than an optical illusion. Paraphrasing Anatole France, the main novelty is that now 'every- one is free to sleep under the bridge'. Organized power is still very much there, albeit in a totally different form. Instead of open violence administered by state rulers, we have administered prices openly imposed by private absentee owners. On the consensual surface of the market, no one seems to hold that power. But the unshaken belief in the normal rate of return and its associated natural rate of unemployment attests to the omnipresence of power.
Unlike its ancient predecessor, the normal rate of return is no longer a mere administrative device. Whereas in antiquity the rate of interest was a subsidiary of state power, under the system of business enterprise the capi- talist state itself is gradually subsumed by the logic of the normal rate of return. Government deliberations and decisions are constantly under the long shadow of the bond market, and even central bankers, who ostensibly 'deter- mine' the short-term 'risk-free' rate of interest, in fact take their cue from the 'market'. 25 The normal rate becomes a central feature of the capitalist nomos. It is the yardstick on which capitalization is based and the principal evidence that not only the level of organized power, but also its augmentation, is natural, inherent and just.
The differential underpinnings of universal sabotage
Where does the capitalist normal rate of return come from? Paradoxically, the universality of profit and the regularity of its expansion are based on the specific institutions of differential sabotage. Indeed, a normal rate of return can exist only because owners are never satisfied with it. What owners believe they are entitled to under normal circumstances is not what they seek in prac- tice. The primal drive of modern business enterprise is not to meet but to beat the average. Business performance is denominated in relative, not absolute terms, and it is 'getting ahead of the competition' that constitutes the final aim of all business undertakings. This compelling desire to outperform - to earn more, to grow larger, to expand faster than others - is perhaps the most fundamental urge of contemporary business. In that sense, even members of the tightest oligopolistic coalition are fiercely competitive.
Paul Johnson (1983: Ch. 1) associates this relativism with the twentieth- century vulgarization of Einstein's theory. In his view, the misplaced social-
25 This subjugation is illustrated by the fact that, since the 1980s, the fund rate set by the U. S. Federal Reserve Board and the three-month rate on government T-bills have both followed rather than led the 'market-determined' yield on long-term bonds.
? Accumulation and sabotage 247
ization of physics ushered in a total meltdown of the absolute values, both religious and ethical, that characterized the nineteenth century. But such cultural emphasis, however appealing, misses the structural imperative of accumulation. Understood as a power institution, capital is inherently differ- ential, a crucial aspect to which we turn below. For the moment, though, our focus is on how the differential limitation of industry forms the basis for the normal rate of return.
Differential returns mean above-average profit growth. Such returns usually require raising one's own profit growth - though that in itself is rarely feasible without also limiting the average growth of profit. The problem is simple. Profit is a product of sales and the profit share in sales. Individual firms can try to raise their sales volume faster than the average; but that alone will not guarantee differential profit growth, since sales and the profit share are not independent.
If all firms push their sales up, the consequence is an overall loss of business control over industry and a resulting drop in the overall profit share of income. The conclusion - well known since antiquity but broadly institutionalized only since the late nineteenth century - is the imperative of restricted access: for the profits of one owner (or a coalition of owners) to beat the average, others must be prevented from accessing the same earnings. Whereas the conventional logic of profit maximization focuses only on the capitalist's own lot, the quest for differential profit also involves the lot of other capitalists.
The means of achieving this differential end are numerous, transcending both business and politics and spanning the societal spectrum from the indi- vidual to the global. These means include direct limitations, such as predatory pricing, formal and informal collusion, advertising and exclusive contracts. They also include broader strategies like targeted education, patent and copyright laws, industrial policies, financial regulations, preferential tax treatment, legal monopolies, labour legislation, trade and investment pacts and barriers and, of course, the use of force, including military, for differen- tial business ends.
The negative industrial impact here is often indirect. For the benefiting owner, the differential gain accrues because the necessary industrial limi- tation is borne by other owners. For instance, historically the large petroleum companies have gained from expanding world demand at least partly because they have been politically able to keep smaller 'independent' companies largely out of the loop (Blair 1976). On the other hand, when exclusion cannot be ensured, like in the case of software development or the manufacturing of microchips, soaring production often overshoots into excess capacity and falling profits. In general, then, the negative impact of business on industry is both indirect and non-linear: while profits usually correlate posi- tively with one's owned industrial activity, beyond a certain point this corre- lation is maintained only insofar as the production controlled by others is contained.
248 Bringing power back in In sum
Business profits are possible because absentee owners can strategically limit industry to their own ends. Such control is carried out routinely, either by pricing products toward earning a target rate of return at some standard capacity utilization, or by making industrial activity conditional on earning a normal rate of return. Underlying these universal business principles are numerous differential practices, with owners, individually or in groups, trying to redistribute income via institutional and organizational change. The specific aim of most (though not all) differential tactics is to restrict the indus- trial activity controlled by existing or potential rivals. Their aggregate conse- quence is dissonance that undermines the industrial community at large, yielding a natural rate of unemployment on the one hand and a corre- sponding normal rate of return on the other.
The link between differential and universal industrial sabotage is closely related to the twin conflicts pervading the regime of business enterprise - one between absentee owners and the industrial community, the other between absentee owners themselves. These two conflicts resemble Marx's distinction between the class struggle and intra-capitalist competition - but with a big difference. Whereas for Marx the class struggle was conceptually prior to the intra-class relationship among capitalists, in our view they are two sides of the same process: the dominance of capital over society depends on a pecking order among capitalists themselves, and vice versa. On a disaggregate level, the distribution of profit among absentee owners is roughly related to the balance of business damage they can inflict on each other. And on the aggre- gate level, the overall industrial sabotage arising from their internal business warfare determines their overall profit share (although not in any linear way and along with other factors). In other words, the goals of business owners revolve around the distribution of profit, while the methods of business sabo- tage ensure that such profit is made available in the first place.
Capital and the corporation
Capital as negation
One reason why Veblen's analysis never became too popular is that it made business capital a negative industrial magnitude. This view of the business- industry nexus is alien to both neoclassical and Marxian thinking. For neoclassicists, who emphasize harmony and equilibrium, the positive social value of capital is hardly in doubt. Contrary to this view, Marx accentuated the antagonistic social basis of capital, linking accumulation to exploitation. However, just like his liberal counterparts, he too stressed the relentless pres- sure to improve productivity - pressure that stems not from the lure of monopoly and imperative of power, but from the discipline of competition. And so despite the antagonism - or perhaps because of it - capitalists according to Marx must use their capital in the most productive way possible.
Even British contributors to the Cambridge Controversy were still
Accumulation and sabotage 249
ambiguous on the industrial footing of capital. As Joan Robinson (1971) pointed out, Sraffa broke the 'conspiracy of silence' by destroying the presumption that the profit rate measured the contribution of investment to national income, let alone to human welfare; by calling into question the positive connotation of both accumulation and growth; and by refocusing attention on distribution. But although Robinson later realized that Veblen had anticipated much of this critique, she never took the next step to explore the possibility that distributive power and industrial production were not simply uncorrelated, but negatively correlated (1967: 60; 1975: 115-16).
The difference is subtle but crucial: while the Cambridge Controversy raised the possibility that capital could be unproductive, Veblen contended that, from an industrial point of view, it was necessarily counterproductive.
This claim is not easy to dismiss. Business, like other power institutions throughout history, can force people to act, but it cannot make them pro- ductive. Moreover, productivity as such, being socially hologramic and there- fore open and unrestricted, cannot generate a profit. The only way for capitalists to profit from productivity is by subjugating and limiting it. And since business earnings hinge on strategic sabotage, their capitalization repre- sents nothing but incapacitation. In this particular sense, capital, by its very construction, is a negative industrial magnitude.
The rise of the modern corporation
The emergence of capital as a business limitation of industry was greatly facilitated by the rise of the modern corporation and the larger use of credit as ownership. Now, on the face of it, this claim sounds counterintuitive. In fact, most readers would probably expect the exact opposite to be true - namely, that the corporation emerged precisely because of its productivity. But as with many other productivist categories, there is more here than meets the eye.
Perhaps the first to contemplate the broad social significance of incorpor- ation was Karl Marx. Prescient as usual, he suggested that the corporation may mark the dawn of a new capitalist regime: 'The capitalist stock compa- nies as well as the co-operative factories', he wrote, 'may be considered as forms of transition from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one' (Marx 1909, Vol. 3: 521). Yet, in his opinion, this transition was driven by the imperative of efficiency. The corporation helped concentrate the means of production and in so doing enabled capitalists to further increase productivity and hasten accumulation.
The liberal view is different, but not by much. According to mainstream economics, the corporation is the most effective way for society - not just its capitalists - to reap the benefits of large-scale production. The following pronouncement by Samuelson Inc. is typical:
Large-scale production is technically efficient, and a large corporation is an advantageous way for investors to pool the irreducible risks of
250 Bringing power back in
business life. Without limited liability and the corporation, a market economy simply could not reap the benefit that comes when large supplies of capital need to be attracted to efficient-sized corporations. . . .
(Samuelson, Nordhaus, and McCallum 1988: 453)
From a Veblenian standpoint, though, this productivist logic makes no sense. The corporation is a business institution, not an industrial unit, and so the reason for its emergence and continuous success must go beyond econo- mies of scale and scope.
First, although incorporation certainly reduces risk, as we have argued in Chapter 11 and will show further in Chapter 13, risk reduction has more to do with power than with efficiency. In fact, the focus on power was there from the very start. The purpose of the proto-corporations that first emerged in Italy of the tenth century was to bypass or at least mitigate feudal sabotage and the dangers of piracy. These early 'investment brotherhoods' had two basic structures - one maritime, the other landed. The maritime organization, known as the commenda, was a short-lived joint venture between an 'investor' (commendator) and an operator. Its whole terminology connotes power: the voyage itself was called taxedion, meaning a 'military expedition'; the task of the leader was called procertari, meaning 'to engage in struggle'; and the investments were called iactare, meaning 'rolling the dice'. The comparable landed organization was the compagnia, meaning 'sharing of bread'. In contrast to the one-time commenda, here the investment was locked for a number of years and ostensibly was less risky. But many compagnia owners, such as the Perruzis of Florence, were pulled into the lucrative business of princely war finance, a highly unproductive enterprise whose business conse- quences often proved far more disastrous than the hazards of the sea (Pirenne 1937: 122-23; Lopez 1967: 141-42, 295-98).
The second difficulty with the common rationale is that large-scale produc- tion is a sound business practice only if it serves to raise profits - yet contrary to popular conviction one does not necessarily imply the other. Since the 1890s, the modern corporation has outgrown its largest industrial unit, suggesting that economies of scale are no longer the paramount determinant of business size, if they ever were (Scherer 1975: 334-36; Edwards 1979: 217- 18). A typical modern firm now owns numerous, in some cases hundreds of industrial establishments, often in unrelated industries. And while the corpo- ration continues to grow in size, its industrial units do not. 26 The fact that
26 According to the Statistics of U. S. Business program (SUSB), the size of establishments (defined as production locations) does not differ much between super-large firms (with over 10,000 employees) and medium-sized ones (with 100-999 employees): in 2005, both groups had an average establishment size of 52 employees. The real difference was in the number of establishments: in that year, a typical large firm owned an average of 658 establish- ments, whereas its medium-sized counterpart had only 4. 6 (U. S. Department of Commerce. Bureau of the Census).
? Accumulation and sabotage 251
industrial size is not a necessity for business success has been demonstrated forcefully with the growing significance of outsourcing. Many of today's corporate giants have successfully reinstated the putting out system of the industrial revolution, with the typical result being rising profit coupled with falling payroll.
The rise of the corporation of course is related to the emergence of large- scale industry, but causality may well run opposite to what mainstream economics argues: the corporation emerged not to enable large-scale industry, but rather to prevent it from becoming 'excessively' productive.
In the case of the United States, this rationale is illustrated by the two prin- cipal processes charted in Figure 12. 3. Between 1790 and the Civil War, population growth averaged 3 per cent annually. With the conquering of the western frontier, this rate fell to 2. 2 per cent between the Civil War and the turn of the twentieth century, and further down to 1. 6 per cent between the turn of the century and the onset of the Great Depression. The second significant development occurring at the same time was a rapid acceleration
5
4
3
2
1
0
1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s
Figure 12. 3 The productivity threat
* Measured labour productivity in manufacturing, based on the Frickey Index spliced with the FRB index and divided by the number of manufacturing production workers. The average productivity growth during the 1910s was zero per cent.
Source: U. S. Department of Commerce.
? ? ? ? US Productivity * US Population
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? www. bnarchives. net www. bnarchives. net
? ? ? Annual % Change
252 Bringing power back in
in (officially measured) labour productivity. In manufacturing, the growth of output per employee rose from less than 1/2 per cent in the 1860s to over 3 per cent by the turn of the century. 27
The crucial intersection of these two opposing trends occurred during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Until then, with population expanding faster than productivity, the main concern for individual firms was how to satisfy soaring demand. Sales could therefore grow at maximum potential without threatening markups and profitability. This was the golden age of 'free competition'. But then things began to change. After the Civil War, the state of the industrial arts benefited from improved transportation and communication, an unprecedented increase in the use of new raw materials, the development and assimilation of numerous innovations, new production techniques and growing product diversity. The net result was a marked acceleration in the growth of productive capacity. Given that this process coincided with slowing population growth, the threat was that sooner or later the industrial system would become 'inordinately productive', as Veblen would have put it. If the earlier pattern of competitive production were to continue, industry would tend to generate much more output than could be profitably sold, bringing pricing down and business enterprise to a halt.
It was at this point that the modern business corporation as we know it came into its own. Until then, business combination largely took the form of pools and trusts whose primary purpose was to constrain aggregate output to 'what the traffic could bear' at profitable prices. Yet as Olson (1965; 1982) convincingly argues, collaboration is usually difficult and often impossible in large groups, and an excessive number of firms was indeed a primary reason for the relative fragility of these early combinations (Cochran and Miller 1961: 140-46; Chandler 1977: 317-18). There was a pressing need to reduce the number of firms, and the most effective method was merger. Mergers, however, were not only structural transformations, but also financial transac- tions. They involved buying and selling capital, which in turn meant that firms had to have a pecuniary value. In short, capital itself had to be made vendible.
The developments that followed were quick and swift. During the 1890s, the United States saw the widespread incorporation of business firms, the rapid growth of stock and bond markets and the expanding use of credit as a form of ownership. It was during that period that the separation of business from industry was finally completed. Firms were turned into corporations and investors into absentee owners of discounted future earnings. From then on, the predicament of excess capacity remained a more or less permanent feature of US capitalism. As Figure 12. 3 shows, official productivity growth continued to run ahead of population growth. Industrial limitation therefore
27 The precise productivity growth figures are dubious for the reasons outlined in Chapter 8, but the quantum technological leaps that underlay them were very real.
? Accumulation and sabotage 253 remained a business necessity, carried out by progressive corporate central-
ization and the relentless restructuring of broader power institutions.
Productive wealth and corporate finance
Equity versus debt
With the corporation seen as a means of limiting industrial activity for busi- ness gain, accumulation can no longer be understood in terms of the under- lying productive apparatus of the firm. We have already seen the temporal dimension of this rupture. As a forward-looking entity, capital accumulates upfront - that is, before the profit is earned and usually before any material equipment is created. But the rupture persists even without the timing issue. Simply put, rising capacity brings more industrial production - but then too much industrial production is bad for business and disastrous for accumu- lation.
This 'twisted' link between accumulation and production becomes evident from a closer examination of equity and debt. For the archaic 'captain of industry', capital meant equity; debt did not provide the direct control neces- sary to run industry. For the modern 'captain of solvency', however, the difference is no longer clear cut. As an absentee owner, the contemporary investor views both equity and debt as undifferentiated, self-expanding claims on the asset side of the balance sheet, universal capitals qualified only by their risk/reward profiles.
Although entries on the liabilities side of the balance sheet do not stand against specific entries on the assets side, it is generally accepted that equity capitalizes mostly the corporation's 'immaterial assets', whereas debt discounts mainly its 'material assets'. The conventional accounting creed is that both assets are valuable because of their productivity. The former repre- sents the company's unique knowledge, client loyalty and other aspects of its supposed industrial superiority; the latter denotes its undifferentiated plant and equipment. We shall now see that these accounting conventions hold little water, even on their own terms.
Immaterial assets
Consider first the 'immaterial assets'. The popular conception is that these represent the unique productivity of the firm's own industrial apparatus. But do they? Take inventions and innovations. Both are deemed productive - though given the hologramic nature of knowledge, it isn't easy to sort out how much of this productivity 'originates' in the firm that owns them. 28
Think of a Microsoft software package. This package - essentially a coded
28 For the sake of simplicity we treat here the firm and its employees as synonymous. Insofar as they are not, the 'origin' of knowledge becomes even fuzzier.
? 254 Bringing power back in
set of ideas - could not have been developed without similar codes having been written by others - or indeed without computer languages, the micro- chip, semi-conductivity, binary logic, mathematical functions or human language for that matter. Such knowledge owes its existence to society at large; much of it was invented for its own sake, often with no immediate 'applications'; and all of it is available free of charge. In this sense, most of Microsoft's inventions and innovations are not really Microsoft's - and this delinking means that the 'productivity' of these innovations, whatever it may be, isn't Microsoft's either and therefore cannot account for its 'immaterial assets'. In fact, had Microsoft followed the productivity doctrine of distribu- tion to the letter, paying royalties on the use of such knowledge, it would probably have no 'immaterial assets' whatsoever and an infinitely large debt.
In practice, though, none of this matters. The real issue is not whether Microsoft's knowledge 'originates' inside or outside the company, but whether that knowledge - whatever its source - can be protected. Note that on its books, Microsoft - like any other corporation - capitalizes not the invention itself, but the patent or copyright that defends it. And by now the reason shouldn't be surprising: unless the innovation is protected, everyone can use it, and what everyone can use nobody can profit from.
From price taking to price making
According to received liberal dogma, firms are 'price takers': they accept whatever price mother market gives them. The reality, though, seems to
16 A similar non-linear pattern emerges if we substitute the official rate of 'economic growth' for the rate of unemployment (on an inverted scale). However, given our mistrust of 'real' measurements, we forgo this illustration.
? 240 Bringing power back in
suggest the exact opposite. The standard practice, documented extensively and repeatedly since the 1930s, shows that most modern firms are 'price makers': they set their own price and then sell as much as possible at that price.
Neoclassicists have fought tooth and nail to deny this inverted reality. They had no other choice: to recognize price making would have pulled the rug from under conventional price theory and brought down the rest of economics. Substantively, their counterattack was a failure. Although led by some of the heaviest guns, it hardly dented the facts: price making was here to stay. Pedagogically, though, the attack was highly successful. It managed to expunge the whole debate from introductory economics textbooks, with the result that today's students know little or nothing about the controversy. A brief outline therefore seems appropriate. 17
The first to question seriously the competitive price-taking model and to emphasize the tendency toward oligopoly and monopoly was Veblen. 18 During the roaring twenties his interventions were duly ignored; but by the 1930s, with the Great Depression having opened the door to intellectual dissent, his insights began to echo. Within a few years, the neoclassicists found themselves confronted with two sets of challenges. The first were the theories of 'imperfect competition' (by Robinson 1933) and 'monopolistic competition' (by Chamberlin 1933). Many neoclassicists considered these deviations scandalous, but in due course they managed to domesticate and absorb them into their creed. Their task, though, wasn't nearly as easy with the second set of challenges. These were empirical, and they proved impos- sible to tame.
The debate opened with Gardiner Means' path-breaking work on indus- trial prices in the United States (1935a; 1935b). Means showed that there were in fact not one but two types of prices. The first were the familiar 'market prices': relatively flexible, moving up and down with supply and demand and prevalent in competitive industries. But there was also a second and hereto- fore unfamiliar type of 'administered prices': relatively inflexible, changing only infrequently, responding slowly to market conditions and typical of concentrated industries.
This duality had two far-reaching implications. The first was that prices were intimately connected to crisis - and in more than one way. Means showed that during the Great Depression, competitive industries saw massive declines in their market prices, but only moderate drops in their output and employment. The situation in concentrated industries, though, was exactly
17 For critical reviews of the pricing debate, see Blair (1972: Part IV), Lee (1984), Nitzan (1990) and Lee and Irvin-Lessmann (1992).
18 '[I]t is very doubtful if there are any successful business ventures within the range of the modern industries from which the monopoly element is wholly absent. They are, at any rate, few and not of great magnitude. And the endeavor of all such enterprises that look to a permanent continuance of their business is to establish as much of a monopoly as may be' (Veblen 1904: 54).
? Accumulation and sabotage 241
the opposite: prices declined slightly, while production and payroll collapsed, sometimes by as much as 80 per cent. In other words, the Great Depression occurred mostly in concentrated industries whose prices proved relatively inflexible. Seen from a Veblenian perspective, administered prices were nothing but a mechanism of industrial sabotage.
The second implication was theoretical and general. Profit maximization requires that firms make the best out of the circumstances they face. Administered prices, though, respond only partly or not at all to market conditions. This discrepancy means that companies that set such prices do not make the best out of the circumstances, and, therefore, that they do not maxi- mize their profit. The conclusion was simple and painful: the more prevalent administered prices become, the greater the irrelevance of standard price dogma. And since, according to study after study, most prices are adminis- tered, the agony must be considerable. 19
The markup and the target rate of return
The first explicit confirmation of this painful conclusion came a few years later, with the publication of Hall and Hitch's work on business behaviour (1939). Whereas Means focused on the pattern of prices, Hall and Hitch investigated those who set them. They interviewed company officials in Britain, asking them to explain how they determined prices. And their conclu- sions were stunning, at least by neoclassical standards. It turned out that firms did not follow the neoclassical recipe of equating marginal revenues and cost; that they did not know what these marginal magnitudes meant; and, most embarrassingly, that they did not care about profit maximization to begin with. The process that firms did follow was totally different: they started by calculating what they considered to be 'normal' unit cost (namely the cost at 'normal' levels of output); they tacked onto this cost a 'conven- tional' markup; and they kept the resulting price stable in the face of cyclical variations in demand.
Later on, these findings were augmented by the notion of a 'target rate of return'. According to the empirical research of Kaplan, Dirlam and Lanzillotti (1958), modern firms, particularly the leading ones, begin with a long-term target rate of profit, and then back-calculate the markup necessary to realize this rate of return over the longer haul. 20
This method seems straightforward - and it probably is for the price- setting firm. But not so for the theorist. Whereas the former merely has to act,
19 For up-to-date surveys of the evidence, see Blinder et al. (1998) and Fabiani et al. (2006).
20 For instance, a firm that wants to achieve an average 20 per cent return on an investment of $1 billion needs to earn an average of $200 million in profit. If the 'normal' volume is 100 million units and the 'normal' unit cost is $20, the firm needs to add a 10 per cent markup and set its unit price at $22. With these assumptions, keeping the price fixed while letting
? sales fluctuate with demand will yield the target rate of return over the longer term.
242 Bringing power back in
the latter has to reason. And as it turns out, the pricing formula cannot be 'explained' easily. The main problem is the 'target rate of return' and the asso- ciated 'conventional' markup: since these no longer obey the rules of profit maximization, there is no way to find their unique values. In theoretical parlance, they become 'indeterminate'. Hall and Hitch (1939: 28) tried to solve the problem by making the markup a reflection of the 'community of outlook' of businessmen, while others, such as Eichner (1976), anchored the target rate of return in the firms' 'investment plans'. However, conventional economic theory does not know how to theorize airy concepts such as the 'community of outlook' and 'investment plans', as a result of which 'economic science has not yet solved its first problem - what determines the price of a commodity? ' (Robinson 1966: 79).
A possible way out of this puzzle was pointed out by Michal Kalecki (1943a), whom we have mentioned in Chapter 4. For Kalecki, the markup was not simply a vague social convention, but a measure of power: he called it the 'degree of monopoly'. 21 Monopoly power, like every other form of power, can be known only by its consequences. And for Kalecki, that consequence was the markup: the higher the markup and its associated rate of return, the greater the implied power of those who set it, and vice versa.
Pricing and incapacitating
And so the circle closes and sabotage becomes invisible. The vast majority of modern capitalists (or their managers) are 'price makers': they fix the price of their product and then let 'market forces' do the rest for them. To the naked eye they all seem keen on producing and selling as much as possible, but beyond the fac? ade the picture is very different. The specific level at which they set the price already embodies the power to incapacitate. On the one hand, the profit target and markup built into the price reflect the firm's power, while, on the other hand, that power, exercised by the high price, serves to restrict industry below its full capacity. The sabotage and the power to inflict it remain concealed, but their consequences are very real.
Is free competition free of power?
Now, up to this point, our discussion has been limited to the mainstream of administered prices. It should be added, however, that even in those isolated cases where 'free competition' is said to reign, the power to incapacitate is not at all absent. To see why this is so, consider a neoclassical 'perfectly com- petitive' firm - but instead of focusing on what it does, think of what it is unwilling to do. For illustration, take the case of mining, where prices are presumably set by global supply and demand. A reader schooled in
? 21 The precise definition was a bit more involved, but that should not detract us here.
Accumulation and sabotage 243
neoclassical theory may be tempted to conclude that, at least in such cases, the presence of market prices excludes sabotage. But it ain't necessarily so.
Mining output, much like any other output, is controlled by business. The actual production of a single firm and the number of firms in operation there- fore are bounded not by the state of industrial arts, but by what can be sold at a 'reasonable' profit. In fact, this is exactly what standard neoclassical manuals tell the owner of a perfectly competitive firm: in the long-run, have your company produce only if you expect to earn at least the normal rate of return. Otherwise, shut down.
For neoclassicists who insist on equating the normal rate of return with the marginal revenue product of capital, this stipulation simply assures efficient resource allocation. From a Veblenian standpoint, though, this unwillingness to produce for less than some conventional rate of return is the very mani- festation of industrial sabotage. Thus, although 'perfectly competitive' firms may not set prices, their productive activity - individually and in the aggre- gate - nevertheless is limited by the imperative of earning a normal rate of return.
The capitalist norm
The normal rate of return and the natural rate of unemployment
The normal rate of return of course is a fuzzy magnitude, a convention that varies among business owners and over time. The important point, however, is that this normal rate exists in the first place. With the gradual penetration of capitalist institutions, owners have come to believe that the flow of profit is a natural, orderly phenomenon. As such, profit is seen as having a more or less predetermined mean growth rate and a dispersion that varies with circumstances (expressed by the standard deviation from this mean).
According to Veblen, this development is hardly trivial. Until a few hundred years ago, profit was seen more as a coincidence than a regular feature of ownership. The main goal was to retain property, and owners of land, slaves or gold rarely expected their assets to grow 'on their own'. But under capitalism, where the business limitation of industry grows increasingly universal, the consequent profit is regarded as natural and its rate of expan- sion as normal. In this way, the strategic limitation of industry can prevail even in the absence of explicit binding arrangements.
The normality of profit has been so thoroughly accepted that the industrial limitation from which it derives is no longer self-evident. Consider the fact that since 1890, the first year for which aggregate data are available, the official US rate of unemployment averaged 7 per cent (5. 7 per cent without the 1930s). Economists, however, remain unimpressed by this fact. Indeed, that is exactly what they expect. Given that this average rate has been associ- ated with 'business as usual', most now take it to represent 'the natural rate of unemployment'. In an unconscious Orwellian bent, modern textbooks
244 Bringing power back in
casually talk about the 'full employment unemployment rate', 'unemploy- ment equilibrium' and 'over-full employment' - generally without quotation marks (see for example Parkin and Bade 1986: 282-83; and Branson 1989: 188). Even Carlyle could not have foreseen the dismal state of a society subju- gated to the economic science.
Antecedents: return and sabotage in antiquity
The power features of the capitalist normal rate of return are not without precedent. Their origins can be traced to the early emergence of the rate of interest in the Middle East some 4,500 years ago. The ancient interest rate, just like today's normal rate of return, was a matter of power and sabotage. But its institutional and societal underpinnings were radically different and are worth exploring so as to put our discussion in context. 22
The roots of the pecuniary standard are inherently negative. In almost every language, the concept of debt is associated with guilt and sin. Originally, proto-money was used for the settling of obligations, including reparations ('pay' and 'pacify' share the same root in both English and Hebrew), marriage debts, communal fines, religious offerings and, eventually, royal taxes. The ma? s? - the Sumerian term for interest - means 'kid' and 'calf', a term that developed from the earlier religious proto-tax of the ma? s? -fee. Mikneh in Hebrew means 'herd' narrowly and 'moveable property' more broadly. Similarly, the words 'pecuniary', 'fee' and 'feudal' all derive from the Latin pecus - a concept that later came to denote 'cattle', but that originally referred more broadly to 'personal chattels' and 'moveable wealth'.
Livestock etymologies and growth metaphors have led neoclassicists to conclude that ancient interest payments on debt were natural returns on productive agricultural yield. This is an erroneous interpretation for two reasons. First, although debt (along with many other concepts) was often counted in 'pastoral' units, it was considered barren throughout antiquity. Second and more straightforwardly, most lending in antiquity had nothing to do with 'investment' and therefore had no 'return' from which to deduct interest.
The institution of interest was first invented in Sumer during the third millennium BCE, from where it later spread to the Eastern Mediterranean, Greece and Rome. From their very inception, debt, credit and interest were matters of organized power. The Sumerian proto-monetary architecture was fundamentally statist. 23 It developed as a royal method of administration and accounting, a system with which the palace and temple allocated material
22 Our account of the origin of interest in this subsection draws on the work of Michael Hudson (1992; 2000a; 2004).
23 A proper, coin-denominated 'monetary system' appeared much later, in Lydia of the seventh century BCE. The term 'money' is even more recent, coming from the Roman temple of Juno Moneta, where silver and gold coins were minted during the Punic Wars.
? Accumulation and sabotage 245
provisions, organized production and collected taxes. Commercial and long- term trade accounting, wherever they existed, were part and parcel of this statist architecture.
The Sumerian debt system was very different from the capitalist one. Capitalist borrowers are usually thought of positively, as entrepreneurs who leverage their own money in order to make more money. By contrast, most Sumerian borrowers were farmers in distress, on-the-brink subjects whose dire circumstances forced them to 'mortgage' (or death-pledge) their cattle and even family members just to make ends meet. These peasants did not 'invest' their loans; they used them simply to stay alive. And since the borrowers made no productive advances, there was no reason for the interest they paid to bear any relationship to the 'efficiency' of their chattel or the 'yield' of their fields. 24
And, indeed, contrary to the ever-fluctuating capitalist normal rate of return, the standard Sumerian rate of interest never changed. It was fixed at 1/60 per month, or 20 per cent annually, and did not budge for more than a millennium. The Greek interest rate of 1/10 per annum and the Roman rate of 1/12 - although not nearly as durable as the Sumerian - were also set for long periods of time. The stability of these ancient rates reflected the pattern of agricultural seasons, a system of mathematical fractions and a set of reli- gious myths - a combination that the ruling elites gradually synthesized and locked into an inflexible architecture of pecuniary rules.
This pre-capitalist architecture, just like the capitalist one, was rooted in organized power and inflicted plenty of damage. Exorbitant interest rates dispossessed and enslaved numerous borrowers. In fact, the sabotage was so severe that ancient rulers had to announce periodic debt moratoriums, or Clean Slates, to avoid social disintegration. But this is where the similarity ends.
Pecuniary power: ancient versus capitalist
In antiquity organized power was enforced directly by royal decree and increased by the open use of force. Wealth was a subset of power, an entity whose magnitude depended on the whim of gods and the dose of violence. It had no predetermined pace of growth, positive or negative, natural or reli- gious. And whatever its erratic rate of expansion, it obviously could not have depended on a fixed rate of the interest. The latter was seen primarily as an administrative device. The ancients even forbade its compounding.
24 It seems that many poor farmers are still unable to internalize the neoclassical entrepre- neurial spirit. In India, small peasants, squeezed between high input prices and low output prices, continue to borrow simply to make ends meet. Just like their Sumerian predeces- sors, they do not invest their loans 'properly'. And since that makes them unable to meet their interest payments, many thousands end up killing themselves every year (Meeta and Rajivolochan 2006).
? 246 Bringing power back in
The capitalist order puts this logic on its head. On the surface, organized power seems to have vanished. With autonomous, growth-seeking agents engaged in voluntary transactions, the normal rate of return no longer connotes destitution and enslavement. But this is no more than an optical illusion. Paraphrasing Anatole France, the main novelty is that now 'every- one is free to sleep under the bridge'. Organized power is still very much there, albeit in a totally different form. Instead of open violence administered by state rulers, we have administered prices openly imposed by private absentee owners. On the consensual surface of the market, no one seems to hold that power. But the unshaken belief in the normal rate of return and its associated natural rate of unemployment attests to the omnipresence of power.
Unlike its ancient predecessor, the normal rate of return is no longer a mere administrative device. Whereas in antiquity the rate of interest was a subsidiary of state power, under the system of business enterprise the capi- talist state itself is gradually subsumed by the logic of the normal rate of return. Government deliberations and decisions are constantly under the long shadow of the bond market, and even central bankers, who ostensibly 'deter- mine' the short-term 'risk-free' rate of interest, in fact take their cue from the 'market'. 25 The normal rate becomes a central feature of the capitalist nomos. It is the yardstick on which capitalization is based and the principal evidence that not only the level of organized power, but also its augmentation, is natural, inherent and just.
The differential underpinnings of universal sabotage
Where does the capitalist normal rate of return come from? Paradoxically, the universality of profit and the regularity of its expansion are based on the specific institutions of differential sabotage. Indeed, a normal rate of return can exist only because owners are never satisfied with it. What owners believe they are entitled to under normal circumstances is not what they seek in prac- tice. The primal drive of modern business enterprise is not to meet but to beat the average. Business performance is denominated in relative, not absolute terms, and it is 'getting ahead of the competition' that constitutes the final aim of all business undertakings. This compelling desire to outperform - to earn more, to grow larger, to expand faster than others - is perhaps the most fundamental urge of contemporary business. In that sense, even members of the tightest oligopolistic coalition are fiercely competitive.
Paul Johnson (1983: Ch. 1) associates this relativism with the twentieth- century vulgarization of Einstein's theory. In his view, the misplaced social-
25 This subjugation is illustrated by the fact that, since the 1980s, the fund rate set by the U. S. Federal Reserve Board and the three-month rate on government T-bills have both followed rather than led the 'market-determined' yield on long-term bonds.
? Accumulation and sabotage 247
ization of physics ushered in a total meltdown of the absolute values, both religious and ethical, that characterized the nineteenth century. But such cultural emphasis, however appealing, misses the structural imperative of accumulation. Understood as a power institution, capital is inherently differ- ential, a crucial aspect to which we turn below. For the moment, though, our focus is on how the differential limitation of industry forms the basis for the normal rate of return.
Differential returns mean above-average profit growth. Such returns usually require raising one's own profit growth - though that in itself is rarely feasible without also limiting the average growth of profit. The problem is simple. Profit is a product of sales and the profit share in sales. Individual firms can try to raise their sales volume faster than the average; but that alone will not guarantee differential profit growth, since sales and the profit share are not independent.
If all firms push their sales up, the consequence is an overall loss of business control over industry and a resulting drop in the overall profit share of income. The conclusion - well known since antiquity but broadly institutionalized only since the late nineteenth century - is the imperative of restricted access: for the profits of one owner (or a coalition of owners) to beat the average, others must be prevented from accessing the same earnings. Whereas the conventional logic of profit maximization focuses only on the capitalist's own lot, the quest for differential profit also involves the lot of other capitalists.
The means of achieving this differential end are numerous, transcending both business and politics and spanning the societal spectrum from the indi- vidual to the global. These means include direct limitations, such as predatory pricing, formal and informal collusion, advertising and exclusive contracts. They also include broader strategies like targeted education, patent and copyright laws, industrial policies, financial regulations, preferential tax treatment, legal monopolies, labour legislation, trade and investment pacts and barriers and, of course, the use of force, including military, for differen- tial business ends.
The negative industrial impact here is often indirect. For the benefiting owner, the differential gain accrues because the necessary industrial limi- tation is borne by other owners. For instance, historically the large petroleum companies have gained from expanding world demand at least partly because they have been politically able to keep smaller 'independent' companies largely out of the loop (Blair 1976). On the other hand, when exclusion cannot be ensured, like in the case of software development or the manufacturing of microchips, soaring production often overshoots into excess capacity and falling profits. In general, then, the negative impact of business on industry is both indirect and non-linear: while profits usually correlate posi- tively with one's owned industrial activity, beyond a certain point this corre- lation is maintained only insofar as the production controlled by others is contained.
248 Bringing power back in In sum
Business profits are possible because absentee owners can strategically limit industry to their own ends. Such control is carried out routinely, either by pricing products toward earning a target rate of return at some standard capacity utilization, or by making industrial activity conditional on earning a normal rate of return. Underlying these universal business principles are numerous differential practices, with owners, individually or in groups, trying to redistribute income via institutional and organizational change. The specific aim of most (though not all) differential tactics is to restrict the indus- trial activity controlled by existing or potential rivals. Their aggregate conse- quence is dissonance that undermines the industrial community at large, yielding a natural rate of unemployment on the one hand and a corre- sponding normal rate of return on the other.
The link between differential and universal industrial sabotage is closely related to the twin conflicts pervading the regime of business enterprise - one between absentee owners and the industrial community, the other between absentee owners themselves. These two conflicts resemble Marx's distinction between the class struggle and intra-capitalist competition - but with a big difference. Whereas for Marx the class struggle was conceptually prior to the intra-class relationship among capitalists, in our view they are two sides of the same process: the dominance of capital over society depends on a pecking order among capitalists themselves, and vice versa. On a disaggregate level, the distribution of profit among absentee owners is roughly related to the balance of business damage they can inflict on each other. And on the aggre- gate level, the overall industrial sabotage arising from their internal business warfare determines their overall profit share (although not in any linear way and along with other factors). In other words, the goals of business owners revolve around the distribution of profit, while the methods of business sabo- tage ensure that such profit is made available in the first place.
Capital and the corporation
Capital as negation
One reason why Veblen's analysis never became too popular is that it made business capital a negative industrial magnitude. This view of the business- industry nexus is alien to both neoclassical and Marxian thinking. For neoclassicists, who emphasize harmony and equilibrium, the positive social value of capital is hardly in doubt. Contrary to this view, Marx accentuated the antagonistic social basis of capital, linking accumulation to exploitation. However, just like his liberal counterparts, he too stressed the relentless pres- sure to improve productivity - pressure that stems not from the lure of monopoly and imperative of power, but from the discipline of competition. And so despite the antagonism - or perhaps because of it - capitalists according to Marx must use their capital in the most productive way possible.
Even British contributors to the Cambridge Controversy were still
Accumulation and sabotage 249
ambiguous on the industrial footing of capital. As Joan Robinson (1971) pointed out, Sraffa broke the 'conspiracy of silence' by destroying the presumption that the profit rate measured the contribution of investment to national income, let alone to human welfare; by calling into question the positive connotation of both accumulation and growth; and by refocusing attention on distribution. But although Robinson later realized that Veblen had anticipated much of this critique, she never took the next step to explore the possibility that distributive power and industrial production were not simply uncorrelated, but negatively correlated (1967: 60; 1975: 115-16).
The difference is subtle but crucial: while the Cambridge Controversy raised the possibility that capital could be unproductive, Veblen contended that, from an industrial point of view, it was necessarily counterproductive.
This claim is not easy to dismiss. Business, like other power institutions throughout history, can force people to act, but it cannot make them pro- ductive. Moreover, productivity as such, being socially hologramic and there- fore open and unrestricted, cannot generate a profit. The only way for capitalists to profit from productivity is by subjugating and limiting it. And since business earnings hinge on strategic sabotage, their capitalization repre- sents nothing but incapacitation. In this particular sense, capital, by its very construction, is a negative industrial magnitude.
The rise of the modern corporation
The emergence of capital as a business limitation of industry was greatly facilitated by the rise of the modern corporation and the larger use of credit as ownership. Now, on the face of it, this claim sounds counterintuitive. In fact, most readers would probably expect the exact opposite to be true - namely, that the corporation emerged precisely because of its productivity. But as with many other productivist categories, there is more here than meets the eye.
Perhaps the first to contemplate the broad social significance of incorpor- ation was Karl Marx. Prescient as usual, he suggested that the corporation may mark the dawn of a new capitalist regime: 'The capitalist stock compa- nies as well as the co-operative factories', he wrote, 'may be considered as forms of transition from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one' (Marx 1909, Vol. 3: 521). Yet, in his opinion, this transition was driven by the imperative of efficiency. The corporation helped concentrate the means of production and in so doing enabled capitalists to further increase productivity and hasten accumulation.
The liberal view is different, but not by much. According to mainstream economics, the corporation is the most effective way for society - not just its capitalists - to reap the benefits of large-scale production. The following pronouncement by Samuelson Inc. is typical:
Large-scale production is technically efficient, and a large corporation is an advantageous way for investors to pool the irreducible risks of
250 Bringing power back in
business life. Without limited liability and the corporation, a market economy simply could not reap the benefit that comes when large supplies of capital need to be attracted to efficient-sized corporations. . . .
(Samuelson, Nordhaus, and McCallum 1988: 453)
From a Veblenian standpoint, though, this productivist logic makes no sense. The corporation is a business institution, not an industrial unit, and so the reason for its emergence and continuous success must go beyond econo- mies of scale and scope.
First, although incorporation certainly reduces risk, as we have argued in Chapter 11 and will show further in Chapter 13, risk reduction has more to do with power than with efficiency. In fact, the focus on power was there from the very start. The purpose of the proto-corporations that first emerged in Italy of the tenth century was to bypass or at least mitigate feudal sabotage and the dangers of piracy. These early 'investment brotherhoods' had two basic structures - one maritime, the other landed. The maritime organization, known as the commenda, was a short-lived joint venture between an 'investor' (commendator) and an operator. Its whole terminology connotes power: the voyage itself was called taxedion, meaning a 'military expedition'; the task of the leader was called procertari, meaning 'to engage in struggle'; and the investments were called iactare, meaning 'rolling the dice'. The comparable landed organization was the compagnia, meaning 'sharing of bread'. In contrast to the one-time commenda, here the investment was locked for a number of years and ostensibly was less risky. But many compagnia owners, such as the Perruzis of Florence, were pulled into the lucrative business of princely war finance, a highly unproductive enterprise whose business conse- quences often proved far more disastrous than the hazards of the sea (Pirenne 1937: 122-23; Lopez 1967: 141-42, 295-98).
The second difficulty with the common rationale is that large-scale produc- tion is a sound business practice only if it serves to raise profits - yet contrary to popular conviction one does not necessarily imply the other. Since the 1890s, the modern corporation has outgrown its largest industrial unit, suggesting that economies of scale are no longer the paramount determinant of business size, if they ever were (Scherer 1975: 334-36; Edwards 1979: 217- 18). A typical modern firm now owns numerous, in some cases hundreds of industrial establishments, often in unrelated industries. And while the corpo- ration continues to grow in size, its industrial units do not. 26 The fact that
26 According to the Statistics of U. S. Business program (SUSB), the size of establishments (defined as production locations) does not differ much between super-large firms (with over 10,000 employees) and medium-sized ones (with 100-999 employees): in 2005, both groups had an average establishment size of 52 employees. The real difference was in the number of establishments: in that year, a typical large firm owned an average of 658 establish- ments, whereas its medium-sized counterpart had only 4. 6 (U. S. Department of Commerce. Bureau of the Census).
? Accumulation and sabotage 251
industrial size is not a necessity for business success has been demonstrated forcefully with the growing significance of outsourcing. Many of today's corporate giants have successfully reinstated the putting out system of the industrial revolution, with the typical result being rising profit coupled with falling payroll.
The rise of the corporation of course is related to the emergence of large- scale industry, but causality may well run opposite to what mainstream economics argues: the corporation emerged not to enable large-scale industry, but rather to prevent it from becoming 'excessively' productive.
In the case of the United States, this rationale is illustrated by the two prin- cipal processes charted in Figure 12. 3. Between 1790 and the Civil War, population growth averaged 3 per cent annually. With the conquering of the western frontier, this rate fell to 2. 2 per cent between the Civil War and the turn of the twentieth century, and further down to 1. 6 per cent between the turn of the century and the onset of the Great Depression. The second significant development occurring at the same time was a rapid acceleration
5
4
3
2
1
0
1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s
Figure 12. 3 The productivity threat
* Measured labour productivity in manufacturing, based on the Frickey Index spliced with the FRB index and divided by the number of manufacturing production workers. The average productivity growth during the 1910s was zero per cent.
Source: U. S. Department of Commerce.
? ? ? ? US Productivity * US Population
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? www. bnarchives. net www. bnarchives. net
? ? ? Annual % Change
252 Bringing power back in
in (officially measured) labour productivity. In manufacturing, the growth of output per employee rose from less than 1/2 per cent in the 1860s to over 3 per cent by the turn of the century. 27
The crucial intersection of these two opposing trends occurred during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Until then, with population expanding faster than productivity, the main concern for individual firms was how to satisfy soaring demand. Sales could therefore grow at maximum potential without threatening markups and profitability. This was the golden age of 'free competition'. But then things began to change. After the Civil War, the state of the industrial arts benefited from improved transportation and communication, an unprecedented increase in the use of new raw materials, the development and assimilation of numerous innovations, new production techniques and growing product diversity. The net result was a marked acceleration in the growth of productive capacity. Given that this process coincided with slowing population growth, the threat was that sooner or later the industrial system would become 'inordinately productive', as Veblen would have put it. If the earlier pattern of competitive production were to continue, industry would tend to generate much more output than could be profitably sold, bringing pricing down and business enterprise to a halt.
It was at this point that the modern business corporation as we know it came into its own. Until then, business combination largely took the form of pools and trusts whose primary purpose was to constrain aggregate output to 'what the traffic could bear' at profitable prices. Yet as Olson (1965; 1982) convincingly argues, collaboration is usually difficult and often impossible in large groups, and an excessive number of firms was indeed a primary reason for the relative fragility of these early combinations (Cochran and Miller 1961: 140-46; Chandler 1977: 317-18). There was a pressing need to reduce the number of firms, and the most effective method was merger. Mergers, however, were not only structural transformations, but also financial transac- tions. They involved buying and selling capital, which in turn meant that firms had to have a pecuniary value. In short, capital itself had to be made vendible.
The developments that followed were quick and swift. During the 1890s, the United States saw the widespread incorporation of business firms, the rapid growth of stock and bond markets and the expanding use of credit as a form of ownership. It was during that period that the separation of business from industry was finally completed. Firms were turned into corporations and investors into absentee owners of discounted future earnings. From then on, the predicament of excess capacity remained a more or less permanent feature of US capitalism. As Figure 12. 3 shows, official productivity growth continued to run ahead of population growth. Industrial limitation therefore
27 The precise productivity growth figures are dubious for the reasons outlined in Chapter 8, but the quantum technological leaps that underlay them were very real.
? Accumulation and sabotage 253 remained a business necessity, carried out by progressive corporate central-
ization and the relentless restructuring of broader power institutions.
Productive wealth and corporate finance
Equity versus debt
With the corporation seen as a means of limiting industrial activity for busi- ness gain, accumulation can no longer be understood in terms of the under- lying productive apparatus of the firm. We have already seen the temporal dimension of this rupture. As a forward-looking entity, capital accumulates upfront - that is, before the profit is earned and usually before any material equipment is created. But the rupture persists even without the timing issue. Simply put, rising capacity brings more industrial production - but then too much industrial production is bad for business and disastrous for accumu- lation.
This 'twisted' link between accumulation and production becomes evident from a closer examination of equity and debt. For the archaic 'captain of industry', capital meant equity; debt did not provide the direct control neces- sary to run industry. For the modern 'captain of solvency', however, the difference is no longer clear cut. As an absentee owner, the contemporary investor views both equity and debt as undifferentiated, self-expanding claims on the asset side of the balance sheet, universal capitals qualified only by their risk/reward profiles.
Although entries on the liabilities side of the balance sheet do not stand against specific entries on the assets side, it is generally accepted that equity capitalizes mostly the corporation's 'immaterial assets', whereas debt discounts mainly its 'material assets'. The conventional accounting creed is that both assets are valuable because of their productivity. The former repre- sents the company's unique knowledge, client loyalty and other aspects of its supposed industrial superiority; the latter denotes its undifferentiated plant and equipment. We shall now see that these accounting conventions hold little water, even on their own terms.
Immaterial assets
Consider first the 'immaterial assets'. The popular conception is that these represent the unique productivity of the firm's own industrial apparatus. But do they? Take inventions and innovations. Both are deemed productive - though given the hologramic nature of knowledge, it isn't easy to sort out how much of this productivity 'originates' in the firm that owns them. 28
Think of a Microsoft software package. This package - essentially a coded
28 For the sake of simplicity we treat here the firm and its employees as synonymous. Insofar as they are not, the 'origin' of knowledge becomes even fuzzier.
? 254 Bringing power back in
set of ideas - could not have been developed without similar codes having been written by others - or indeed without computer languages, the micro- chip, semi-conductivity, binary logic, mathematical functions or human language for that matter. Such knowledge owes its existence to society at large; much of it was invented for its own sake, often with no immediate 'applications'; and all of it is available free of charge. In this sense, most of Microsoft's inventions and innovations are not really Microsoft's - and this delinking means that the 'productivity' of these innovations, whatever it may be, isn't Microsoft's either and therefore cannot account for its 'immaterial assets'. In fact, had Microsoft followed the productivity doctrine of distribu- tion to the letter, paying royalties on the use of such knowledge, it would probably have no 'immaterial assets' whatsoever and an infinitely large debt.
In practice, though, none of this matters. The real issue is not whether Microsoft's knowledge 'originates' inside or outside the company, but whether that knowledge - whatever its source - can be protected. Note that on its books, Microsoft - like any other corporation - capitalizes not the invention itself, but the patent or copyright that defends it. And by now the reason shouldn't be surprising: unless the innovation is protected, everyone can use it, and what everyone can use nobody can profit from.
