The Bichler & Nitzan Archives

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https://hdl.handle.net/10315/39724
The Bichler & Nitzan Archives contain works by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, as well as related publications by others. Most works in the archives deal with the theory of Capital as Power, or CasP for short. CasP offers a radical alternative to mainstream and Marxist theories of value and capitalism. It argues that capital symbolizes and quantifies not utility or labour, but organized power, and that capitalism is best understood and challenged not as a mode of production and consumption, but as a mode of power.

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Browsing The Bichler & Nitzan Archives by Subject "Blair Fix"

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    Inflation as Redistribution. Creditors, Workers, Policymakers
    (2023) Bichler, Shimshon; Nitzan, Jonathan
    This paper is part of a dialogue with Blair Fix on how inflation redistributes income between creditors and workers and the way in which monetary policy affects this process. In his 2023 paper, ‘Inflation! The Battle Between Creditors and Workers’, Fix shows, first, that the impact of U.S. inflation on creditor-worker distribution has been historically contingent (favouring workers during some periods and creditors in others); and second, that since the 1970s, Fed policy to combat inflation with higher interest rates boosted the yield of creditors relative to the wage rate of workers. Our own research suggests that these conclusions might be too general. We point out that creditors are not a monolithic class and that different types of creditors are affected differently, and often inversely, by the rate of interest. We illustrate that, contrary to bank depositors, bondholders tend to lose from inflation. And we show that monetary policy, at least in the United States, appears to follow rather than determine market yields. More generally, since most capitalists nowadays are lenders as well as borrowers, and given that ‘dominant capital’ profits from the full spectrum of investment instruments, we wonder if ‘creditors’ is still a useful category for analysing redistribution in general and inflationary redistribution in particular.

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