22 Ideas to Fix the World: Conversations with the World's Foremost Thinkers

18. SHIMSHON BICHLER AND JONATHAN NITZAN: “Capitalism as a mode of power”

326 ◆ ◆ ◆ 18 “Capitalism as a mode of power” SHIMSHON BICHLER AND JONATHAN NITZAN in conversation with Piotr Dutkiewicz Shimshon Bichler teaches political economy at colleges and universities in Israel. Jonathan Nitzan teaches political economy at York University , Toronto. In a unique two-pronged dovetailing discussion, frequent collaborators and coauthors Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler discuss the nature of contemporary capitalism. Their central argument is that the dominant approaches to studying the market—liberalism and Marxism —are as flawed as the market itself. Offering a historically rich and analytically incisive critique of the recent history of capitalism and crisis, they suggest that instead of studying the relations of capital to power we must conceptualize capital as power if we are to understand the dynamics of the market system. This approach allows us to examine the seemingly paradoxical workings of the capitalist mechanism, whereby profit and capitalization are divorced from productivity and machines in the so-called real economy. Indeed Nitzan and Bichler paint a picture of a Photo courtesy of Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan. Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan ◆ ◆ ◆ 327 strained system whose component parts exist in an antagonistic relationship . In their opinion, the current crisis is a systemic one afflicting a fatally flawed system. However, it is not one that seems to be giving birth to a unified opposition movement or to a new mode of thinking. The two political economists call for nothing short of a new mode of imagining the market, our political system, and our very world. PD: Let’s start from a fairly general big picture of the economic system. Please look around and tell me what you see as the key features of the current market system. SB: Although it may not seem so at first sight, your question is highly loaded. For me to describe the current economic system and market system is to accept these terms as objective entities, or at least as useful concepts. But are they? PD: So what terms would you use? Is there an alternative approach? SB: Yes, there is an alternative approach, but before getting to that approach, we need to identify the problem with the conventional one. In my view, terms such as economic system and market system are misnomers. They are irrelevant and misleading. Nowadays they are employed more as ideological slogans rather than as scientific concepts. Those who use them often end up concealing rather than revealing the capitalist reality. Of course, this wasn’t always the case. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when capitalism was just taking hold, there was nothing apologetic about the market. On the contrary, the market was seen as the harbinger of progress: a powerful institution that heralded liberty, equality, and tolerance. “Go to the London Exchange,” wrote Voltaire. “A place more dignified than many a royal court. There you will find representatives of every nation quietly assembled to promote human welfare. There the Jew, the Mahometan and the Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same religion. They call no man Infidel unless he be bankrupt.”1 328 ◆ ◆ ◆ Respond to the Economic Crisis The market has had a dramatic impact on European history, partly because it emerged in a seemingly unlikely setting. After the nomadic invasions and the fall of the imperial civilization of the first millennium ad, Europe developed a highly fractured social regime we now call feudalism. This regime was based on self-sufficient rural estates, cultivated by peasant-serfs, and ruled by a violent aristocracy. Technical know-how during that period was limited, the agricultural yield meager, and trade almost nonexistent. Power relations were legitimized by the sanctified notion of a “triangular society,” comprising prayers, warriors, and tillers (or, in a more political lingo, priests, nobles, and peasants). Merchants and financiers had no place in that scheme. But not for long. The feudal order began to disintegrate during the first half of the second millennium ad, and this decline was accompanied —and to some extent accelerated—by the revival of trade and the growth of merchant cities such as Bruges, Venice, and Florence. These developments signaled the beginning of a totally new social order: an urban civilization that gave rise to a new ruling class known as the “bourgeoisie,” an unprecedented civilian-scientific revolution, and a novel culture we now call “liberal.” Because of the specifically European features of this process, the market came to symbolize the...