Jonathan Nitzan, Shimshon Bichler: Capital as Power. A Study of Order and Creorder (2009)

Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists both think of capital as an ‘economic’ entity that they count in universal units of ‘utils’ or ‘abstract labour’, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious. Nobody has ever been able to observe or measure them, and for a good reason: they don’t exist. Since liberalism and Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters most – the accumulation of capital.

This book offers a radical alternative. According to the authors, capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. It has little to do with utility or abstract labour, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Capital, the authors claim, represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape – or creorder – their society.

Written in simple language, accessible to lay readers and experts alike, the book develops a novel political economy. It takes the reader through the history, assumptions and limitations of mainstream economics and its associated theories of politics. It examines the evolution of Marxist thinking on accumulation and the state. And it articulates an innovative theory of ‘capital as power’ and a new history of the ‘capitalist mode of power’.

Publisher Routledge, London and New York, 2009
RIPE Series in Global Political Economy
ISBN 0203876326, 9780203876329
463 pages
The electronic version of this work is protected by CreativeCommons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 2.5 Canada

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Alain Joxe: Empire of Disorder (2002)

“Globalization is quickly turning the world into a chaos, leading to an increasing disparity between rich and poor, the rise of an international, rootless ‘noble class,’ and an escalating number of endless cruel little wars. Yet the United States refuses to conquer the world and assume the protective imperial role for the societies it subjugates. Instead, it operates on a case-by-case basis, regulating disorder, repressing the symptoms of despair instead of attacking its cause. For the first time perhaps, humanity has embarked on an ocean of disorder with no final order in sight.”

Translated by Ames Hodges
Edited by Sylvère Lotringer
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2002
Active Agents series
ISBN 1584350164, 9781584350163
221 pages

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Fadaiat: Freedom of Movement – Freedom of Knowledge (2006) [Spanish/English/Arabic]

“The straits of Gibraltar is a mirror-territory of the transformations taking place in the world today: globalisation, migrations, borders, citizenship, network-society, communication, technologies… The border is a crossed-place, an extensive territory of life and mobile confinements where multiple social practices put pressure on established limits. New spaces and relationships emerge from and through the border between southern europe and northern africa.

The book and all it entails plays an important and irreplaceable role, but it is just a fragment of a process that goes far beyond it in terms of both time and subject matter. Here it opens new possible becomings that were mere conjectures until it was written; it is a line with relative autonomy running parallel to the other relatively autonomous part-projects and establishing fruitful exchanges among them, which in turn become an opportunity for new projects.

Through this process, and specially the publishing of this book, we want to contribute to the existence of new spaces of social and technological hybridisations that, by forging new paths, continually (re)invent world(s).”

A book was developed in connection to event Fadaiat: Freedom of Movement – Freedom of knowledge.

Authors: Pilar Monsell Prado, Pablo de Soto Suárez, Joan Escofet Planas, José Pérez de Lama, Marta Paz Naveiro, Mónica Lama Jiménez, Helena García Rodríguez, Sergio Moreno Páez
Published by Observatorio Tecnológico del Estrecho
209 pages
License: Aire Incodicional

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