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
Converting Assets to Data: Tributarianism
Converting Assets to Data: Tributarianism
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