Considering how great the #Russia #war on #Ukraine is doing for the #arms and #energy industries, why would Ukraine's sponsors want anything but to keep the war going with just enough ups, downs and uncertainty? Victory or defeat would just dry up the milking cow.

#Economy #Finance #CapitalAsPower #Capital

משקיעות שקראו כבר ב-2001 (שמונה שנים לפני "תחילת שיטות המדידה") את "מרווחי מלחמה לדיבידנדים של שלום" מאת שמשון ביכלר ויונתן ניצן, או את ספרם Capital as Power, או מכירים את התאוריה שעל שמה הוא קרוי, לא הופתעו מהמחזור הנוכחי: קואליציית עסקי השלום נחלשת, קואליציית האנרגיה-מלחמה מתחזקת.

הספר, גם במהדורה העברית, להורדה חינם (כמו רוב רובם של פרסומי הצמד) באתר שלהם:
https://bnarchives.yorku.ca/229/

וכאן במסטודון אפשר לעקוב אחרי
@blair_fix

#CapitalAsPower
#כלכלה #קפיטל #קפיטליזם #מניות #השקעות #גלובלי

משקיעות שקראו כבר ב-2001 (שמונה שנים לפני "תחילת שיטות המדידה") את "מרווחי מלחמה לדיבידנדים של שלום" מאת שמשון ביכלר ויונתן ניצן, או את ספרם Capital as Power, או מכירים את התאוריה שעל שמה הוא קרוי, לא הופתעו מהמחזור הנוכחי: קואליציית עסקי השלום נחלשת, קואליציית האנרגיה-מלחמה מתחזקת.

הספר, גם במהדורה העברית, להורדה חינם (כמו רוב רובם של פרסומי הצמד) באתר שלהם:
https://bnarchives.yorku.ca/229/

וכאן במסטודון אפשר לעקוב אחרי
@blair_fix

#CapitalAsPower
#כלכלה #קפיטל #קפיטליזם #מניות #השקעות #גלובלי

משקיעות שקראו כבר ב-2001 (שמונה שנים לפני "תחילת שיטות המדידה") את "מרווחי מלחמה לדיבידנדים של שלום" מאת שמשון ביכלר ויונתן ניצן, או את ספרם Capital as Power, או מכירים את התאוריה שעל שמה הוא קרוי, לא הופתעו מהמחזור הנוכחי: קואליציית עסקי השלום נחלשת, קואליציית האנרגיה-מלחמה מתחזקת.

הספר, גם במהדורה העברית, להורדה חינם (כמו רוב רובם של פרסומי הצמד) באתר שלהם:
https://bnarchives.yorku.ca/229/

וכאן במסטודון אפשר לעקוב אחרי
@blair_fix

#CapitalAsPower

When most people think of capitalism, they think of companies like Apple, or Amazon, or Tesla, but they rarely extend their analysis to areas such as film. But film is one of the most important areas for capitalists to control, because people dont listed to facts, they listen to stories. And when you control what gets said in the stories, you control the culture that emerges from the consumption of those stories.

"In the interests of profit, capitalists attempt to control the scope and capacity of social creativity through the rights of ownership, which is a type of authority that rests on the greater social system of private property."
- @notes_on_cinema

https://notesoncinema.com/2021/12/14/making-culture-rational-with-power/

#CapitalAsPower

The basis for authority under feudalism was religion. Kings and their subsequent hierarchies were vested with power because religious institutions maintained that a deity had prescribed that it should be so.

Under Capitalism, the basis for authority can be found in the twin dominators of legal and economic ideology, but as the economic ideology wanes, rather than being replaced by liberatory ideologies, we are seeing the resurgence of religious language in everyday life, and this does not bode well for the future if what we seek is freedom. Because rather than religions of indigenous or marginalized communities, we are seeing the resurgence of the dominant organized religions, especially Christianity.

"If you take away the opiate of wealth, however, people will quickly return to their religious drug of choice. It happened after the Soviet Union collapsed (Pankhurst, 2012). And it seems to be happening within anglophone countries today. The growth engine has slowed and the gains that remain are going almost exclusively to the rich. If these trends continue (and the linguistic patterns that go with them), the future may look less like a post-capitalist utopia, and more like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale."
- @blair_fix

https://capitalaspower.com/2022/12/fix-have-we-passed-peak-capitalism/

#CapitalAsPower

When prices increase (which is not some magical phenomenon of markets, but the direct action of companies SETTING prices) Capitalist firms are engaging in a depth cycle, and in order for this to help them accumulate power, economic growth must be stagnant. But the measures for both economic growth, and inflation, are deeply flawed, and obfuscate the actual dynamics of this process. Fortunately Bichler & Nitzan, and Blair Fix have taken steps to elucidate these complexities.

"the evidence leans in favor of the stagflation thesis. Among the 114 countries studied here, energy growth correlates negatively with inflation among 74 of them — about two thirds of the sample. And overall, the average energy-inflation correlation is negative, at roughly -0.1"
- @blair_fix

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/01/17/is-stagflation-the-norm/

#CapitalAsPower

it's funny how so many opposed to the concept of degrowth, don't oppose it from a political economy standpoint, but from a colloquial standpoint.

Too often i've seen arguments being made that degrowth somehow = de-evolving as a species.

Growth is an economic concept driven by political factors. It is primarily a measure of the accumulation of capital. It is not an indicator of societal progress. Every single correlation you've seen that attempts to link GDP or per capita income growth to societal progress, is bunk.

We have made progress as a society IN SPITE OF growth, not because of it. In fact, if it weren't for economic growth, we would be a lot better off as a society

https://bnarchives.yorku.ca/639/4/20200500_bn_growing_through_sabotage_web.htm

#CapitalAsPower

it's funny how so many opposed to the concept of degrowth, don't oppose it from a political economy standpoint, but from a colloquial standpoint.

Too often i've seen arguments being made that degrowth somehow = de-evolving as a species.

Growth is an economic concept driven by political factors. It is primarily a measure of the accumulation of capital. It is not an indicator of societal progress. Every single correlation you've seen that attempts to link GDP or per capita income growth to societal progress, is bunk.

We have made progress as a society IN SPITE OF growth, not because of it. In fact, if it weren't for economic growth, we would be a lot better off as a society

https://bnarchives.yorku.ca/639/4/20200500_bn_growing_through_sabotage_web.htm

#CapitalAsPower

The handwaving of neoclassical and mainstream economists for subjects like inflation, and corporate pay gaps, is becoming more laughable by the day, and that's saying something because they were laughable to begin with. It's almost getting to the point where we can't laugh anymore. These tears are no longer tears of laughter.

"... firms are not units of production; they are units of power. Firms are hierarchical organizations shrouded in the cloak of corporate law. And today’s corporate rulers — like all elites before them — use their power to enrich themselves. On that front, the Song evidence suggests that US elites have recently upped their game, sending a torrent of income from the bottom to the top of the corporate hierarchy. In short, US firms have become more despotic."
@blairfix

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/11/19/firming-up-hierarchy/

#CapitalAsPower

The pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality is not only a problem because it pretends that hard work is what is needed in order to be financially successful. A more insidious aspect is that it encourages participation in a capitalist system by selling the idea that everyone can have a share of the pie, when in reality, Capitalists WILL NEVER SHARE THE POWER PIE!

" there is no better way to maintain power than to convince society that there is room for everybody on the financial bandwagon"
- Yuri Di Liberto

https://capitalaspower.com/2022/04/di-liberto-hype-the-capitalist-degree-of-induced-participation/

#CapitalAsPower

The State of Capital pretends to be the rational alternative to disorganized chaos, but really it is an autocatalytic sprawl of power thar self-reinforces along the logic of accumulation for the sake of creordering society according to the will of the powerful.

"The self-referential application of rationality as an end in itself plus hubris is the ‘mastery’ aspect of rational mastery. We propose that there are two modes of rational mastery:
(a) the extension of property and its monetary quantification, or capitalization; and
(b) procedural rationality institutionalized as bureaucracy: an organization’s rational goals are calculated and implemented using formal procedures by a hierarchical organization that is created according to allegedly rational principles.

The two modes exist side by side—indeed, capitalizing organizations like corporations are typically internally organized as bureaucratic hierarchies—and there are feedback mechanisms between the two modes"
- Ulf Martin

https://capitalaspower.com/2019/10/the-autocatalytic-sprawl-of-pseudorational-mastery/

#CapitalAsPower

The problem with thinking that capitalism = private ownership of the means of production, instead of power, is that we will inevitably use the wrong strategies to oppose capitalism. 150 years of failure to end capitalism should be enough evidence to understand that the Marxist economic strategy cannot work.

If capitalists are focused on the capitalization of power, then we must be equally focused on the decapitalization of power.

"The men and women of action, teetering on the verge of praxis, look for clear guidance. They want an ‘objective’ template to tell them what is to be done. But this objective template is nowhere to be found. The old theoretical scriptures no longer offer unequivocal instructions. Having been sanctified, immortalized and fossilized, they shed less and less light on the rapidly changing world. They can no longer be simply read and followed. They need to be deconstructed, interpreted and adjusted to the ever-changing reality."

https://capitalaspower.com/2018/10/theory-and-praxis-theory-and-practice-practical-theory/

#CapitalAsPower

Neoclassical Economists want us to believe that markets are able to achieve dynamic equilibrium where supply, and demand meet at an optimal point that satisfies buyers and sellers. The problem is, it's all bullshit.

"In practice, demand, supply and equilibrium do not and cannot explain any, let alone all, markets simply because they are unknown. They can be guessed through interviews but interview-based curves are logically dubious, statistically inadequate and, most importantly, empirically unverifiable. In this sense, the 1-2-3 toolbox is not almost empty, it is entirely empty."

https://bnarchives.yorku.ca/722/

#CapitalAsPower

The myth that the public owns a nation's public debt, should have died a few decades ago and yet it persists. More and more, the public debt is owned by a small handful of Dominant Capital households and corporations, and when a crisis comes, it is the owners of the debt that get to decide what policies that nation will follow. And those policies have pretty consistently been about protecting the interests of the owners of the debt.

"Over the past three decades, and especially in the context of the current crisis, the ownership of federal bonds and federal interest has become rapidly concentrated in the hands of dominant owners, the top 1 per cent of households and the 2,500 largest corporations [while] the federal income tax system has done little to progressively redistribute the federal interest income received by dominant owners"
- Sandy Hager

https://bnarchives.yorku.ca/382/

#CapitalAsPower

Since it is Christmas, I thought I would talk briefly about standards of living. Many people attribute the high standards of living in the developed world, to capitalism. But the amount of energy the State of Capital must plug into maintaining its power, far outweighs the amount of energy that goes into improving the lives of people. From guard labour, to policing, insane military, we see the constant enforcing of the power structures that dominate our lives. And that's not even counting the maintenance of copyright laws, or shelving of beneficial inventions, or the non-payment of most care work, or any of the thousands of ways in which power is maintained through social sabotage.

"in hierarchical societies, a good chunk of the captured energy is earmarked not for material gain, livelihood and wellbeing, but for sustaining and fortifying the hierarchical structure itself. Moreover, and as we shall see below, the split between the portions going to hierarchy and livelihood is never fixed. In fact, it is bound to vary, both across societies and over time, and this variability means that, in practice, there is no one-to-one mapping between the overall energy capture of society and the ‘livelihood’ of its population: for any given level of energy capture, there can be a whole range of ‘standards of living’.

https://bnarchives.yorku.ca/639/4/20200500_bn_growing_through_sabotage_web.htm

#CapitalAsPower

An interesting debate on the ritual of capitalization, discount rates and the meaning of the trailing price-earnings ratio.

#capitalaspower

https://capitalaspower.com/casp-forum/topic/effective-discount-rate-or-the-reciprocal-of-the-trailing-p-e/

If you're not already there, and you enjoy my CasP content, I highly recommend joining the Capital as Power forum where we have hundreds of discussions about CasP theory, and all the myriad subjects related to CasP theory

https://capitalaspower.com/casp-forum/

#CapitalAsPower

When someone challenges your uninspected beliefs, the cognitive dissonance you experience can cause you to reject an uncomfortable truth in favour of a comfortable lie. Don't be that person who refuses to engage with solid critique, just because your pre-conceived ideas give you the warm-and-fuzzies.

"There is no joy more intense than that of coming upon a fact that cannot be understood in terms of currently accepted ideas."
—Cecilia Payne

https://bnarchives.yorku.ca/259/

#CapitalAsPower

When someone challenges your uninspected beliefs, the cognitive dissonance you experience can cause you to reject an uncomfortable truth in favour of a comfortable lie. Don't be that person who refuses to engage with solid critique, just because your pre-conceived ideas give you the warm-and-fuzzies.

"There is no joy more intense than that of coming upon a fact that cannot be understood in terms of currently accepted ideas."
—Cecilia Payne

https://bnarchives.yorku.ca/259/

#CapitalAsPower