The Bichler & Nitzan Archives

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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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Open Access
2016 Capital as Power Essay Prize
(2016) Muzio, Tim Di
The Review of Capital as Power (RECASP) announces an annual essay prize on the subject of capital as power. The best paper will receive a prize of $2000. A prize of $500 will be awarded to the second best contribution, while a $300 prize will be given to the third best article. Submitted articles should not have been published in a refereed journal or book before. The particular topic is open. The paper can be theoretical, historical or empirical, and it may support or critique the capital as power framework. Winning essays will be published (with revisions, if necessary) in the Review of Capital as Power. DEADLINE: January 31, 2017
Open Access
2017 Capital as Power Essay Prize
(2017) Muzio, Tim Di
The Review of Capital as Power (RECASP) announces an annual essay prize on the subject of capital as power. The best paper will receive a prize of $2000. A prize of $500 will be awarded to the second best contribution, while a $300 prize will be given to the third best article. Submitted articles should not have been published in a refereed journal or book before. The particular topic is open. The paper can be theoretical, historical or empirical, and it may support or cri-tique the capital as power framework. Winning essays will be pub-lished (with revisions, if necessary) in the Review of Capital as Power. DEADLINE: January 31, 2018
Open Access
2018 Capital as Power Essay Prize
(2018) Muzio, Tim Di
The Review of Capital as Power (RECASP) announces an annual essay prize on the subject of capital as power. The best paper will receive a prize of $1000. A prize of $500 will be awarded to the second best contribution, while a $300 prize will be given to the third best article. Submitted articles should not have been published in a refereed journal or book before. The particular topic is open. The paper can be theoretical, historical or empirical, and it may support or critique the capital as power framework. Winning essays will be published (with revisions, if necessary) in the Review of Capital as Power. DEADLINE: January 31, 2019
Open Access
A Brief History of the Buy-to-Build Indicator
(2021) Fix, Blair
Let’s talk about Nitzan and Bichler’s ‘buy-to-build’ indicator. If you’re not familiar, this is an indicator that quantifies the portion of ‘investment’ spent buying other corporations....
Open Access
A CasP Model of the Stock Market
(2016) Bichler, Shimshon; Nitzan, Jonathan
Most explanations of stock market booms and busts are based on contrasting the underlying 'fundamental' logic of the economy with the exogenous, non-economic factors that presumably distort it. Our paper offers a radically different model, examining the stock market not from the mechanical viewpoint of a distorted economy, but from the dialectical perspective of capitalized power. The model demonstrates that (1) the valuation of equities represents capitalized power; (2) capitalized power is dialectically intertwined with systemic fear; and (3) systemic fear and capitalized power are mediated through strategic sabotage. This triangular model, we posit, can offer a basis for examining the asymptotes, or limits, of capitalized power and the ways in which these asymptotes relate to the historical and ongoing transformation of the capitalist mode of power.
Open Access
A CasP Model of the Stock Market
(2016) Bichler, Shimshon; Nitzan, Jonathan
Most explanations of stock market booms and busts are based on contrasting the underlying ‘fundamental’ logic of the economy with the exogenous, non-economic factors that presumably distort it. Our paper offers a radically different model, examining the stock market not from the mechanical viewpoint of a distorted economy, but from the dialectical perspective of capitalized power. The model demonstrates that (1) the valuation of equities represents capitalized power; (2) capitalized power is dialectically intertwined with systemic fear; and (3) systemic fear and capitalized power are mediated through strategic sabotage. This triangular model, we posit, can offer a basis for examining the asymptotes, or limits, of capitalized power and the ways in which these asymptotes relate to the historical and ongoing transformation of the capitalist mode of power.
Open Access
A CasP Model of the Stock Market -- Video and Chartbook
(2016) Bichler, Shimshon; Nitzan, Jonathan
Most explanations of stock market booms and busts are based on contrasting the underlying, ‘fundamental’ logic of the economy with the exogenous, non-economic factors that presumably distort it. Our paper offers a radically different model, examining the stock market not from the mechanical viewpoint of a distorted economy, but from the dialectical perspective of capitalized power. The model demonstrates that (1) the valuation of equities represents capitalized power; (2) capitalized power is dialectically intertwined with systemic fear; and (3) the connection between capitalized power and systemic fear is mediated by strategic sabotage. This triangular model, we posit, can offer a basis for examining the asymptotes, or limits, of capitalized power and the ways in which these asymptotes relate to the historical and ongoing transformation of the capitalist mode of power. Video duration: 1:53 hours WHERE: Room 280N in York Lanes, Keele Campus, York University WHEN: Thursday, September 29, 2016, 2:15-4:00 pm
Open Access
A Global Bond: Explaining the Safe-Haven Status of US Treasury Securities
(2016) Hager, Sandy Brian
This article offers new theoretical and empirical insights to explain the resilience of US Treasury securities as the world’s premier safe or “risk-free” asset. The standard explanation of resilience emphasizes the relative safety of US Treasuries due to a shortage of safe assets in the global political economy. The analysis here goes beyond the standard explanation to highlight the importance of domestic politics in reinforcing the safe status of US Treasury securities. In particular, the research shows how a formidable “bond” of interests unites domestic and foreign owners of the public debt and works to sustain US power in global finance. Foreigners, who now own roughly half of the US public debt, have something to gain from their domestic counterparts. The top 1% of US households, which dominate domestic ownership of US Treasuries, has considerable political clout, thus alleviating foreign concerns about the creditworthiness of the US federal government. Domestic owners, in turn, benefit from the seemingly insatiable foreign appetite for US Treasury securities. In supplying the US federal government and US households with cheap credit, foreign investors in US Treasuries help to deflect challenges to the top 1% within the wealth and income hierarchy.
Open Access
A Hierarchy Model of Income Distribution
(2018) Fix, Blair
Based on worldly experience, most people would agree that firms are hierarchically organized, and that pay tends to increase as one moves up the hierarchy. But how this hierarchical structure affects income distribution has not been widely studied. To remedy this situation, this paper presents a new model of income distribution that explores the effects of social hierarchy. This ‘hierarchy model’ takes the limited available evidence on the structure of firm hierarchies and generalizes it to create a large-scale simulation of the hierarchical structure of the United States economy. Using this model, I conduct the first quantitative investigation of hierarchy’s effect on income distribution. I find that hierarchy plays a dominant role in shaping the tail of US income distribution. The model suggests that hierarchy is responsible for generating the power-law scaling of top incomes. Moreover, I find that hierarchy can be used to unify the study of personal and functional income distribution, as well as to understand historical trends in income inequality.
Open Access
A New Cosmology for Analyzing Capitalism and the Global Order. Review of Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder
(2019) Warren, Bill
FROM THE REVIEW: Capital as Power is a fascinating book because it dares to challenge conventional wisdom while offering a coherent and persuasive theory as a replacement. This is especially what I liked about this book. It's easy enough to criticize the world and say that things are terrible. That seems to be a favorite pastime for just about everybody nowadays. But it's far more difficult to offer a comprehensive alternative that plausibly explains, through engaging theoretical and empirical analysis, how much of the world works. That's what Nitzan and Bichler have done with this masterpiece. […] This is one of the greatest works in political economy to have come out in this century. I especially like that they analyze economics as a social construct rather than as an objective scientific discipline, which it most certainly is not. Having said that, I don't agree with Nitzan and Bichler on everything. For one, they have a basic causality problem: if all human history simply boils down to a power process, then what explains the power process itself? Where does that come from, what are its causal antecedents? You cannot really answer this question without stepping, one way or another, into the material realm of energy flows and conversions. In other words, you can't explain the causation of a social process by repeatedly invoking some other social process, because that leads to an infinite regress. Eventually there has to be something outside of human society that has a powerful impact on the evolution of society itself. There must be a series of bridges between the ecological realm and human civilization, but Nitzan and Bichler don't really bother with any of that. Their central theory, however persuasive, will always remain provisional and incomplete until a more comprehensive theory comes along that integrates changes in the natural world with changes in human societies.
Open Access
A Podcast Interview with Sandy Hager on Public Debt and Inequality
(2016) Hager, Sandy Brian; Beasley, Betsy; Stein, David
Who owns the U.S. public debt? Why is it such an important commodity in global capitalism? Why does public debt provoke such intense political debate? And how can the quantitative data on the ownership structure of public debt provide insights into these topics? Our guest today, Sandy Hager, reveals answers to all of these questions and more. Duration: 41 minutes
Open Access
A Portrait of Esther Alexander and Her Time (דיוקן לאסתר אלכסנדר ולתקופתה)
(2005) Bichler, Shimshon
אסתר אלכסנדר הייתה אחת הבודדות בישראל שניסתה להתמודד, ברצינות ובאופן מקורי, עם תופעת הסטגפלציה. היא עשתה זאת תוך שימוש מרבי בכלים המסורתיים של המתודה הקיינסיאנית, כשהיא משלבת זאת בגירסת ינקותה המרקסיסטית.
Open Access
A Power Theory of Personal Income Distribution - Video and Working Paper
(2017) Fix, Blair
Due in no small part to the work of Thomas Piketty, the empirical study of income inequality has flourished in the last decade. But this plethora of new data has not led to a corresponding theoretical revolution. Why? The problem, I believe, is an unwillingness to question and test the basic assumptions on which current theory rests. Most theories of personal income distribution are deeply wedded to the assumption that income is proportional to productivity. However, this approach has a simple, but little discussed problem: income is distributed far more unequally than documented differentials in human labor productivity. But if not productivity, then what explains income? I propose that income is explained most strongly by social power, as manifested by one’s rank in an institutional hierarchy. Using a novel array of evidence, I show (for the first time) that there is a strong quantitative relation between income and hierarchical power. Moreover, I show that hierarchical power affects income more strongly than any other factor. I conclude that this is evidence for a power theory of personal income distribution. Refreshment will be served and everyone is welcome. WHERE: Verney Room, South 674 Ross Building, Keele Campus, York University WHEN: 2:30 - 5:30 pm, Tuesday, 17 October 2017
Open Access
A Reading List for Economic Heretics
(2019) Fix, Blair
FROM THE REVIEW: Few books offer both a compelling critique of mainstream economics and a bold alternative vision for political economy. But in Capital as Power, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler have the audacity to do just that [...] Capital as Power represents everything that I look for in a paradigm-shifting work of science. It presents a compelling critique of existing orthodoxies, offers an alternative approach to political economy, and grounds this approach in innovative empirical research. Read Capital as Power and have your worldview forever changed.
Open Access
A Requiem for Carbon Capitalism?
(2021) Hager, Sandy Brian
The fossil fuels business has fallen on hard times. For years the sector has been mired in a slump due to stubbornly low oil and gas prices, concerns over climate change, as well as technological breakthroughs in renewable energy technologies. With the Covid-19 pandemic dealing a further blow to their fortunes, some media pundits claim that fossil fuels companies are entering a phase of terminal decline. News of the immanent demise of companies responsible for a significant portion of global greenhouse gas emissions might sound like a boon for efforts to avert climate breakdown. But just how bad is the outlook for fossil fuels? In this research note, I offer a preview of findings from a new research project on the financial performance of the fossil fuels sector on a global scale. My research shows that the share of oil, gas and coal companies in global profit and capitalization has steadily decreased over the past half century, while that of alternative energy companies has jumped since 2018. But despite falling distributive shares, what we also find is that the overall magnitude of oil, gas and coal profit and capitalization currently dwarfs that of the alternative energy companies. All signs indicate that capitalists are still, as Tim Di Muzio observed a decade ago, capitalizing a future unsustainable.
Open Access
Accumulating through Food Crisis? Farmers, Commodity Traders and the Distributional Politics of Financialization
(2017) Baines, Joseph
This paper considers the domestic and international ramifications of financialization and grain price instability in the US agri-food sector. It finds that during the recent period of high and volatile prices, the average income of large-scale farms reached the earnings threshold of the top percentile of US households, and agricultural commodity traders markedly outperformed other corporate groups. In contrast, small-scale farms, particularly those involved in cattle and wheat production, have struggled to manage the uncertainty brought by price tumult. The paper goes on to examine the role that these uneven distributional dynamics play in debates around how hedging and speculation should be defined and regulated in the wake of the food crisis of 2007–08. It shows that a coalition of small-scale farmers has actively pushed for a far-reaching definition of speculation and concomitantly wide-ranging curbs on what they deem to be speculative activity. Conversely, the major commodity traders and a plurality of organizations representing large-scale grain producers have called for a narrower interpretation of speculation which leaves the extant regulatory regime largely in place. With these insights, I suggest that financialization and associated price volatility tend to reinforce inequality in rural America while possibly exacerbating social instability and hardship abroad.
Open Access
Accumulation through Crisis: Global Stagflation and the New Wars
(2008) Nitzan, Jonathan
A lecture on the capitalist hologram and the new patterns of mergers, stagflation and war. Video duration: 1 hour 45 minutes.
Open Access
Acumulación de capital: ficción y realidad
(2015) Bichler, Shimshon; Nitzan, Jonathan
¿Qué quieren decir los economistas cuando hablan de “acumulación de capital'? La respuesta es todo, menos clara. La opinión convencional es que hay dos tipos de capital: real y financiero, que deben guardar correspondencia y que, infortunadamente, la mayoría de las veces no se corresponden, pues el crecimiento del capital financiero tiende a desajustarse y a distorsionar la acumulación de capital real. El artículo muestra que esta “tesis del desajuste” y, por tanto, la capacidad de los economistas para explicar la acumulación, se construyó sobre bases deleznables. Argumenta que no pueden medir el capital real y que las proxies que elaboran con ese propósito los enreda en circularidades lógicas e imposibilidades empíricas.
Open Access
Aki and Friends
(2013) Bichler, Shimshon; Nitzan, Jonathan
Aki, a man enamoured with life and enchanted by animals – including humans of different varieties – pays a visit to his friend, the veterinarian. The vet tells him of two seniors who suffer from depression, and Aki is quick to raise their spirits and warm up their aching bodies. He hangs the boa constrictor on his neck and places the hairy tarantula on his head. There is no need to worry, he assures us. After all, why would two elderly creatures hurt an empathetic being so eager to help them? This view was typical of Aki. That is how he viewed the world, its history and conflicts – as well as the solutions for those conflicts. 'Just think about it logically', he says. 'Why would a Palestinian suddenly turn into a "terrorist"? What reason does he have to oppose "peace"? Why should he be eager to fight the "only democracy in the Middle East"? Is it his culture, religion or race? Is it "in his nature", as the Zionist propaganda machine reiterates?' Of course not, he answers. For more than a century, the Palestinians have confronted a Zionist movement whose colonial policies have gradually deprived them of their life, land and autonomy. As often happens with occupiers, the Israelis have preferred to blame their victim. Their fancy academic theories, spiced up with ideologies of culture, religion and race, prove, at least to themselves, that there can be no 'political solution'. The 'Arabs', they say, cannot be trusted. Like the boa constrictor and tarantula, it is 'their nature' to bite and strangle. Nowadays, these explanations have no traction. Most sensible observers around the world have come to accept Aki’s logic and reject the official Israeli line as self-serving, if not ludicrous. But that wasn’t always the case. Half a century ago, when Aki and his friends started their hazardous journey to explore the underlying logic of the conflict, they were considered illogical, if not weird, and branded as 'traitors' (although it was never clear exactly what or who they had 'betrayed').
Open Access
Aki and Friends (עקי וחברים)
(2013) Bichler, Shimshon; Nitzan, Jonathan
On Akiva (Aki) Orr, 1931-2013 על עקיבא (עקי) אור, 2013-1931