---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Bichler & Nitzan: "Notes on the State of
Capital"
From: "Jonathan Nitzan"
<nitzan@yorku.ca>
Date: Wed, March 24, 2010 8:28 pm
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"Notes on the State of Capital"
by Shimshon
Bichler & Jonathan Nitzan
Jerusalem and Montreal, March 2010
These notes are transcribed from a commentary on a paper by Sean
Starrs,
titled 'State and Capital: False Dichotomy But Still
Inter-Related'.
Both the paper and the commentary were presented as
part of an
integrated panel series on 'Capital as Power', held at
the 36th Annual
Conference of the Eastern Economic Association in
Philadelphia, February
26-28, 2010.
Sean Starrs claims
that we need to discard our notion of the 'state of
capital'. The
gist of his argument is simple enough. Capitalist
societies, he
says, involve a myriad of power relations, many of them
very
important. These relationships, although often linked to the logic
of capital, are distinct from that logic and therefore cannot be reduced
to it. And since we are talking about separate social processes, we
cannot encompass them all under the same rubric. His conclusion: the
notion of a totalizing mode of power – which we call the state
of
capital – must be dispensed with.
The notes
attempt to clarify. They seek to explain, first, what we mean
by a
'mode of power', and, second, why we use this concept in the first
place. The sequence of our presentation is as follows. We begin by
contrasting two spatial conceptions of the state. We then explain the
notion of capitalization, which in our view represents the logic of
the
state of capital. And, finally, we flesh out the argument with a
series
of historical examples.
FULL TEXT: http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/282/
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Received on Thu Mar 25 08:33:56 2010
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