Converting Assets to Data: Tributarianism

The value of anything owned, which is to say, how much money someone will pay for it, is discounted against expected future earnings. This is simple and generative formulation of Bichler and Nitzan’s Capital as Power. The formulation assumes that things can be owned, which means a relatively stable property regime; it assumes the quantification of value in money, which also assumes a currency creating and maintaining regime. How stable the regime is will determine how one is going to project calculated expectations—and, of course, those calculations can in turn affect the stability of the regime. Part of the point of Capital as Power, though, is that the form of the property regime, and of the currency creating and maintaining regime, are determined by the owners of capital, in constant struggle with each other. This is a very obvious conclusion to arrive at once we jettison the distinction between state and market, private and public—all of the things that even the most orthodox economists must assume as preconditions of the “market economy” are sites of intervention by the participants in that economy. Once we acknowledge that, we must also acknowledge that the creation of profit by producing goods and services that a sufficient portion of the consuming public will buy at a price higher than went into producing them is necessarily subordinate to the struggles over the legal and political conditions that give one capitalist, or one sector of capital, an advantage over others. We can even assign a date to the emergence of capitalism, and a place: late 17th century England, when, as Christine Desan shows in her Making Money: Coin, Currency and the Coming of Capitalism, the state authorized banks to create money by funding the national debt, replacing the state as the creator and distributor of money and introducing the radical new idea of individual self-interest as the source of economic growth and therefore public good. Whatever adds to the wealth of the bank adds to the potential wealth of the state, and what adds to the wealth of the bank is loaning money to enterprises with the highest rate of expected future earnings, at least on the face of it, but one can imagine other imperatives entering into loaning and investing that might involve nothing more than increasing the comparative advantage of one firm or sector relative to others.

Capital is completely dependent upon the juridical form, because that is the only way in which its property can de determined and therefore expected future earnings can be calculated—the state continues to play this traditional role, as capitalists struggle over the formulation and enforcement of the juridical form. It must be relevant that it is at this point that we see the emergence of what must be the first “two-party system” in the West (or anywhere): Whigs vs Tories, as a peaceful stabilization of the two sides in the recently concluded civil war (the first civil war explicitly fought over the existence of monarchy, in which a king was put on trial, convicted and executed). So, it’s the beginning of what we can recognize as “politics,” which means that politics is nothing more than the extension of the juridical form to the figure occupying the center. Elections are trials of the incumbents, carried out in place of a civil war in which each side would place the other on trial for treason—while also continuing to project the specter of civil war, if the expanded juridical form proves unable to provide for satisfying mock trials of the incumbents. This would explain why political observers consider a regular rotation of the parties in power, regardless of the policies or personnel of the respective parties, to be intrinsically valuable. You would think that it’s at least conceivable that one party would govern better than the other, be more popular than the other and integrate its agenda so thoroughly through social institutions as to be the de facto ruling party for an indefinite period. And you would think that disinterested observers would have to acknowledge that this, in fact is a good thing, and really the ideal result of an electoral system—to settle on the best government and keep it. But you would be wrong—the liberal political thinker considers this a very dangerous state of affairs, anti-democratic to the core (even if the party in power continues to hold elections and allows for the free participation of other parties while simply winning convincingly all the time) precisely because the continual staging of the trial of the incumbents must issue in regular “convictions” for the process to be recognizable (“legitimate”).

This also means that those theorists who consider capitalism, liberalism and democracy to be intrinsically linked are correct—“authoritarian” experiments in capitalist governance always turn out to be forms of emergency rule that eventually revert back to multi-party systems—Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s distinction between the “authoritarian” and the “totalitarian” acknowledges this reality. A central figure who was exempt from being placed on trial could oppose himself to capital; one who is put on perpetual trial must always negotiate with one faction of capital against others. This poses the central problem of what I’d rather not, for reasons clear from my discussion, call “politics,” but, let’s say, restoring the center. This problem transcends all culture war issues and is in fact at the root of them; at the same time, all of the “distracting” culture war issues represent forms of assetization which—and this is the innovation of “neoliberalism”—reaches down into and seizes any practice, in any institution whatsoever. I’ve put a lot of emphasis on the civil rights regime as the origin of our “victimary” or “woke” politics, which is also to say as the further corrosion from within of the juridical form. If anything, I’d put that more strongly now—turning the attention of the law to the determination of whether an employer has “discriminated” against one of a selected menu of groups destroys the law by turning into the permanent war crimes trial of “dominant” social groups. As opposed to a proper juridical order, where an actual conflict that might have otherwise led to violence, is brought before a magistrate, here the guilty parties are always already known in advance and it's therefore only a question of when one or another accomplice can be arraigned in such a way as to coordinate with the placing on trial of a more central figure. But it is even more important to note that the permanent war crimes trial against “majority” groups intervenes in the process of assetization, that is, creates new forms of ownership of “objects” whose price can be discounted against expected future earnings. A firm that can render itself relatively exempt from the rolling war crimes trial by anticipating expected future charges and immunizing itself against them through preferential hiring, an active HR division, properly vetted diversity training, etc., increases its own value significantly relative to firms incapable of establishing such a regime. Hence, “woke capital”—but we still have another piece to add.

England is the origin of capital, of the multi-party system and, of course, the distinctly modern form of imperialism. Here, I would agree with those (I’ll mention the twitter feed “scientism”) who see “liberal democracy” as a conquering creed: if you can open other countries to markets, first of all, you allow the competition between your own capitalists to extend onto a larger field, and if you impose liberal institutions, whether they be the multiparty system, private enterprise, an “independent media,” and so on, you create an open field for intervention in and control of the country you dominate—without having to expend much in the way of military force. (Of course, all of these strategies—capitalization, liberalization, woke-ification and imperialism are imperfect and subject to various pitfalls and crises.) We have also known for a while that the American civil rights agenda was an imperialist one, as America took over the imperialist mantle from England—racial discrimination provided fodder for Soviet propaganda and subversion while hindering America’s quest for vassal states in the postcolonial world. The formalization and elevation to transcendent status of, first of all, liberal rights to speech, assembly, property, etc., and the application of these rights to place opposing states on trial (drawing upon the precedent set in the Nuremberg trials) enabled the US to undermine the USSR, but the broader civil rights agenda, to which new grievances and identities can be continually added has added significantly to America’s imperial arsenal.

Anything you can invest in is an asset—a lot of the public-private ventures replacing public services from the 90s on were means of generating assets. You invest in a private prison, or a health insurance company that contracts with the state to provide certain services: insofar as that contract with the state is maintained, the expected future earnings of your investment remain high, and you have an interest in intervening politically or supporting others who do to maintain the political conditions of such contracts. There are limits, presumably to what can be assetized, but I doubt we’ve gotten anywhere near them. This means that markers of compliance with the civil rights regime are assets, and assets on the global marketplace, because compliance with the regime—having yourself certified as diverse, gay and trans-friendly, etc.—even buys you a little piece of the global American regime. In accord with the logic of capital as power, what matters is not whether people want the products created as markers of compliance, but whether the owners of those assets can drive all their competitors out of the system, or subjugate them within it. And that’s the state’s job, and a fairly easy one since competitors can simply be deemed illegal, or criminals, or enemies. I don’t say this is an efficient regime, or one likely to last, or the one the American ruling class, if it could have considered things coolly and from a long-term perspective would have chosen, but that’s not the way these things work. If you’re building an imperial order under conditions of intense international competition and resistance (and under what other conditions could you do so?), you have to target the most immediate obstacles to the construction of that order, even if you will inevitably get a lot of things wrong and provide material for books written decades later on how stupid you were.

To possess an asset—home ownership is an obvious example—is to make a prediction about the future. You’re claiming to have knowledge, however you may have come by it—insofar as you’re holding on to your home you’re assuming it will maintain or increase its value for years or decades. If you thought it would lose 90% of its value a year from now you’d sell it as fast as you could (hopefully to someone less informed regarding the conditions causing such a precipitous drop). How much you can do to make your prediction come true is a certain marker of your power; we could even say that, since your prediction depends upon the actions of those who can make their predictions come true, your knowledge of those actions and your ability to predict them is also a marker of your power. Capitalism enables us to reduce power to knowledge, because only those with access to specific levers of power can know how and when to pull them, and there is no other form of power now: even the development of weaponry assumes knowledge of the operation of that weaponry on a field of expected future weaponry of others, including the “soft” weaponry of media and intelligence agency subversion. Capitalism has also coincided with—relied upon and accelerated—the transformation of knowledge into prediction, and therefore eventually the computerization of knowledge. The juridical and the disciplines have been capitalized, which means assetized. Everything you do you do is an asset, or a bearer of assets, or an obstacle to assetization. The world of assets is a world of knowledge, of a particular kind: how will the centralization of power, now globally, through the organization of show and actual trials against occupants of the center, lead to shifts in expected future earnings? The vast machinery of algorithmic calculation is ultimately devoted to supplying this knowledge to those who can use it, i.e., those who can change the shape of the “object” of knowledge itself.

But the juridical and the disciplinary can never be completely assetized if for no other reason than that the calculation of expected future earnings also requires some degree of continuity and reliability of institutions, Resistance to capitalized liberalism would have to involve de-assetizing juridical institutions, and all institutions insofar as they have a juridical dimension (which is all institutions) and the disciplines (all the sciences, physical and human). This means turning all the data now churned out and recycled through the surveillance, financial, entertainment, surveying, advertising, etc., industries and rehabilitating it and remixing it with data generated by uncapitalizable results in juridical and disciplinary institutions and practices. The engagement with politics can’t be eschewed here—full spectrum conversion of assets into data is required. Why leave any field unoccupied? But it should be a politics undertaken with the intent to serve as the highest judge, the court of appeal, including regarding who can compete for positions that would “prosecute” the occupant of the center. Enormous attention would have to be devoted to legal and monetary regimes, to convert them from sources of data that provide information regarding shifts in expected future earnings to sources of data predicting and enacting the creation of a center immune to trial. Instead of market signals, the ebbs and flows of prices of assets provide signals regarding weaknesses in the existing regime and opportunities to leverage one or another institution or company to take over control of the data of other institutions or companies. This can ultimately only be done from within those institutions—all of them—which means what is coming to replace politics is intelligence, in all senses of the word: central intelligence, gathered and generated from within the institutions to be transformed and replaced (in which case their assets are transferred to another owner who will convert them into something other than assets). What, exactly, in capitalist relations is compatible with juridical and disciplinary forms—even if the answer turns out to be “quite a bit,” there is no doubt that creating legal regimes that provide standing to hold firms and individuals accountable for fraud, breach of contract and damages in consistent ways, on the one hand, and facilitating scientific inquiry without regard to profit, on the other hand, would set us on the road to converting property into formalized responsibilities. A “politics” can be devoted to determining what kind of figure at the center would put this question to the test, and to prepare for various possible results.

Whatever the specific juridical and currency practices of such a politics, “prediction” would gradually resolve itself into laying the groundwork for articulated and distributed responsibility for issuing imperatives across specific fields. Instead of predicting the alignment of power and how that alignment would show up in various indicators, we would speak in terms of having a man ready to move into position there and then. Futurity is bound up in succession. I haven’t said anything about the “spiritual” or “transcendent” dimension—what about God (or gods), ritual, sacrifice, and so on. I transfer all these questions to the literary, in the broadest sense, including both aesthetic and scriptural. Writing has its origins in recording property transactions, marking property, and chronicling dynasties and lineages; out of these inscriptive practices come law, moral and political reflection on law, narratives regarding transgressions of ritual and laws, which is to say epics and scripture and novelistic satire—inscriptive practices should commemorate these genealogies. Broader scenic design practices rooted in the transitions from ritual to drama are commemorated in the daily performances of succession constitutive of institutions—here we have public celebrations and expressions of the community, ceremonies marking originary figures located at various foundational events of the order, contests and displays, and anything else that traditionalist would wish to recover from more self-present orders. This will all be geared toward the data exchange that replaces capitalism, as systems of subscriptions to providers linked in networks with other providers circling back to the provided for as contributors in a festive participation with computational and other non-human forms of intelligence.

What characterizes capital as a mode of power is that it strains while confusing the juridical and scientific scenes. “Economic” practices used to be firmly located within juridical boundaries, whether it be within the essentially gift structure of feudal exchange, or the chartered markets regulated by monarchs and controlled by guilds. Capitalism took shape within the corporate form within which it continues to reside, but there’s no real way to contain finance within the juridical form—those agencies capable of generating currency and monetary wealth through debt, among other means are, creating the very terms which the justice system would seek to control. Bankruptcy law seems like a set of patches that aims to keep the system from falling apart. The money form must be identified as scenically constructive along with ritual, the juridical and the scientific scene, but all the money form does is posit possible future scenes—and so it must be engaged on those terms, as a formalization of what are yet to become more properly scientific scenes. Money, despite its endless circulation, ultimately derives from and circulates back to the center—central banks, the Federal Reserve, or whatever institution will set the terms of monetary exchange. Money therefore marks and measures what we can call, rather than “economic” processes and practices, tributary practices. Money issuing and creating would have to be directed first of all to designated central industries, determined in order of importance in securing data security, which means defense and infrastructure in the broadest sense. Perhaps such industries can have their own financial structure, like they can and should have their own intelligence operations. Discounting against and predicting the future should be continually reduced to staffing the future—firms ensuring the security of data that can be turned into a wide range of productive purposes would need to ensure the availability of raw materials, manufacturing, the education, care and training of personnel, and therefore the communal arrangements providing such personnel. It should then be distributing currency accordingly.

The more tightly interwoven the organization of data the more currency becomes the equivalent of company “scrip,” certificates and subscriptions privileging specific services and goods. Determinations by financial institutions of the degree of “instability” and possible return regarding investments gets replaced by continual updates in data security, with each update creating new potential weak links. As long as there is such a core of companies, national boundaries are a secondary consideration, and all kinds of more or less close alliances and “blocs” can be considered—but the way to progress is to mark anything that resists enclosure within juridical/scientific articulations and rework such “overflows” so that they can be enclosed. In a recent case that I noticed left-wingers on Twitter flipping out about, a conservative court ruled against the SEC being able to directly punish firms and individuals that violate regulations—they must, as the constitution demands, be given fair trials. The left complains that this is in effect the dismantling of the administrative state, and they are obviously right—the administrative state is a way of farming out state functions to “prosecutorial” extra-state agents who draw upon disciplinary knowledge to infiltrate the bureaucracy and blackmail those who concentrate wealth. Of course, though, the immediate effect of such a ruling will be to more directly empower capital, which won’t have to operate through elaborate protection rackets anymore. But the obvious response is to construct a genuinely juridical regime, one which revisits concepts of fraud, harm and standing, and which can construct an order of precedents grounded in transparent data collection that would provide such feedback to companies to ensure “socially responsible” behavior. This would require significant transformations in institutions and the corresponding dispositions of the people, which is the point, especially since those transformations would produce others in a virtuous circle. But, as with everything I argue for, this approach can be addressed directly and explicitly by presently existing political agencies—it implies easily composed “transition programs.” A political party could advance the process of de-assetization by aligning itself with central infrastructural companies, creating its own currency, job markets and even legal and physical defense for its members and working on changing the juridical order so as to make the expansion of such tributarianism possible.