Abstract
The recent shift from global villageism to the new wars revealed a deep crisis in heterodox political economy. The popular belief in neoliberal globalization, peace dividends, fiscal conservatism and sound finance that dominated the 1980s and 1990s suddenly collapsed. The early 2000s brought rising xenophobia, growing military budgets and policy profligacy. Radicals were the first to identify this transition, but their attempts to explain it have been bogged down by two major hurdles: (1) most writers continue to apply nineteenth century theories and concepts to twenty-first century realities; and (2) few seem to bother with empirical analysis. This paper offers a radical alternative that is both theoretically new and empirically grounded. We use the new wars as a stepping stone to understand a triple transformation that altered the nature of capital, the accumulation of capital and the unit of capital. Specifically, our argument builds on a power understanding of capital that emphasizes differential accumulation by dominant capital groups. Accumulation, we argue, has little to do with the amassment of material things measured in utils or abstract labor. Instead, accumu-lation, or capitalization, represents a commodification of power by leading groups in society. Over the past century, this power has been restructured and concentrated through two distinct regimes of differential accumulationbreadth and depth. A breadth regime relies on proletarianization, on green-field investment and, particularly, on mergers and acquisitions. A depth regime builds on redistribution through stagflationthat is, on differential inflation in the midst of stagnation. In contrast to breadth which presupposes some measure of growth and stability, depth thrives on accumulation through crisis. The past twenty years were dominated by breadth, buttressed by neoliberal rhetoric, globalization and capital mobility. This regime started to run into mounting difficulties in the late 1990s, and eventually collapsed in 2000. For differential accumulation to continue, dominant capital now needs inflation, and inflation requires instability and social crisis. It is within this broader dynamics of power accumulation that the new wars need to be understood.
Highlights
The recent shift from ‘global villageism’ to the ‘new wars’ revealed a deep crisis in heterodox political economy
Our argument builds on a power understanding of capital that emphasizes differential accumulation by dominant capital groups
We have argued that differential accumulation by dominant capital—namely, the ability of dominant capital to have its profit and capitalization grow faster than the average—is sustained mainly though merger and through stagflation
Summary
The new wars of the early 2000s mark a significant turning point in world affairs. During the 1980s and 1990s, it was popular to talk about the return of ‘unregulated capitalism.’ It was the dawn of a new era, many said, the era of ‘neoliberal globalization.’ The hallmarks of this new-old order appeared unmistakable. Accumulation, which during the nineteenth century was anchored largely in proletarianization and technical advances, has come to depend more and more on corporate amalgamation and inflationary pricing To deal with these new dimensions, this paper offers an alternative conceptualization of capital, understood not as a material entity but as a power institution. Driven by the quest for power, the goal of these dominant capital groups is not absolute accumulation, but differential accumulation They try not to maximize profit, but to beat the average and exceed the normal rate of return. Success and failure are a matter of differential profit Their goal is to ‘beat the average,’ and that makes them judge the world based on relative earnings. On the notions of explicate and generative orders, see Bohm and Peat ( ) and Bohm ( )
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