In various writings Karl Marx made references to an 'aristocracy of finance' in Western Europe and the United States that dominated ownership of the public debt. Drawing on original research, this article offers the first comprehensive analysis of public debt ownership within the US corporate sector. The research shows that over the past three decades, and especially in the context of the current crisis, a new aristocracy of finance has emerged, as holdings of the public debt have become rapidly concentrated in favor of large corporations classified within Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE). Operationalizing Wolfgang Streeck's concept of the 'debt state', the article goes on to demonstrate how concentration in ownership of the public debt reinforces patterns of social inequality and proceeds in tandem with a shift in government policy, one that prioritizes the interests of government bondholders over the general citizenry.
From the 1980s to the present, Hollywood's major distributors have been able to redistribute U.S. theatrical attendance to the advantage of their biggest blockbusters and franchises. At the global scale and during the same period, Hollywood has been leveraging U.S. foreign power to break ground in countries that have historically protected and supported their domestic film culture. For example, Hollywood's major distributors have increased their power in such countries as Mexico, Canada, Australia and South Korea. This paper will analyze a pertinent test case' for Hollywood's global power: China and its film market. Not only does China have a film-quota policy that restricts the number of theatrical releases that have a foreign distributor (∼ 20 to 34 films per year), the Communist Party has helped the Chinese film business grow to have steady film releases and its own movie star system. Theoretically, China would be a prime example of a film market that would need to be opened with the assistance of the U.S. government. Empirically, however, the case of Chinese cinema might be a curious exception; we can investigate how a political economic strategy rooted in explicit power is reaching a limit. Hollywood is, potentially without any other option, taking a more friendly, collaborative approach with China's censorship rules and its quota and film-production laws.
From the 1980s to the present, Hollywood's major distributors have been able to redistribute U.S. theatrical attendance to the advantage of their biggest blockbusters and franchises. At the global scale and during the same period, Hollywood has been leveraging U.S. foreign power to break ground in countries that have historically protected and supported their domestic film culture. For example, Hollywood's major distributors have increased their power in such countries as Mexico, Canada, Australia and South Korea (Jin, 2011). This paper will analyze a pertinent "test case" for Hollywood's global power: China and its film market. Not only does China have a film-quota policy that restricts the number of theatrical releases that have a foreign distributor (~ 20 to 34 films per year), the Communist Party has also nurtured a Chinese film business that has steady film releases and its own movie star system. Theoretically, China would be a prime example of a film market that would need to be opened with the assistance of the U.S. government. Empirically, however, the case of Chinese cinema might be a curious exception; we can investigate how a political economic strategy rooted in explicit power is reaching a limit. Hollywood is, potentially without any other option, taking a more friendly, collaborative approach with China's censorship rules and its quota and film-production laws.
[This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution + Noncommercial + NoDerivatives 3.0 license. Copyright is retained by the author(s)] FROM THE BACK COVER: Who are the dominant owners of US public debt? Is it widely held, or concentrated in the hands of a few? Does ownership of public debt give these bondholders power over our government? What do we make of the fact that foreign-owned debt has ballooned to nearly 50 percent today? Until now, we have not had any satisfactory answers to these questions. Public Debt, Inequality, and Power is the first comprehensive historical analysis of public debt ownership in the United States. It reveals that ownership of federal bonds has been increasingly concentrated in the hands of the 1 percent over the past three decades. Based on extensive and original research, Public Debt, Inequality, and Power will shock and enlighten. "These days, the topic of America's debt stirs heated political debate. But one of the most important facts in this discussion has hitherto been obscured: who actually owns that debt inside America? Hager has done some fascinating and pathbreaking research to answer that question and concluded that the ownership pattern is surprisingly concentrated—and unequal—and that this may have implications for how the entire debt debate develops in the coming years. This is an illuminating work that deserves wide attention." (GILLIAN TETT, Financial Times) "The relationship between the ownership structure of government debt and economic inequality—between public finance and the class structure of modern capitalism—is one of several central concerns of political economy that has been almost completely neglected in recent decades. Sandy Brian Hager's book returns to the subject with theoretical and empirical bravado." (WOLFGANG STREECK, Director Emeritus, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies) "Money is power, and US Treasury debt is the world's single largest financial instrument. Hager's insightful book fills an enormous hole in our knowledge of who owns this debt and how the power flowing from that increasingly concentrated ownership affects US and global politics." (HERMAN M. SCHWARTZ, author of Subprime Nation: American Power, Global Capital, and the Housing Bubble) *** SANDY BRIAN HAGER is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. He has published in various journals, including New Political Economy and Socio-Economic Review.
For more than a century, political economists have sought to understand the nature of capital. The prevailing wisdom is that there must be something 'real' – some productive capacity – that underpins capitalized values. This thinking, I argue, is a mistake. Building on Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler's theory of capital as power, I argue that capitalization is an ideology. It is a quantitative ritual for converting earnings into present value. Although the ritual is arbitrary, it gives rise to astonishing empirical regularities, reviewed here.
[Second of a two-paper series] Class struggle, Bichler and Nitzan observe, is a part of all hierarchical societies. But capitalism is the first social order to quantify this struggle. It does so through prices, which Bichler and Nitzan propose indicate power. Stock prices, Bichler and Nitzan argue, indicate the power of owners to earn income. If we're interested in class struggle, we want to compare this capitalist power to the power of workers. Here's a simple way to do so. We compare the price of stocks to the price of wage labor. Bichler and Nitzan call this ratio the 'power index'. My goal here is to test Bichler and Nitzan's thesis. Does the power index quantify US class struggle? Although a simple ratio of two prices, the power index, Bichler and Nitzan claim, tells us about class conflict at large. When the power index falls, workers are winning the struggle. When the power index rises, capitalists are winning. Is Bichler and Nitzan's claim true? In this post, I look at the evidence. I test how three different indicators of class struggle relate to the power index. Here's what I find. When workers strike more, win a living minimum wage, and get government to progressively tax the rich, the stock market declines relative to wages. My conclusion is that Bichler and Nitzan are onto something. The history of class struggle does seem to be written on the stock market. [The first paper, 'Stocks are Up. Wages are Down. What Does it Mean?' (September 4,, 2020), is here: http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/657/]
U.S. debt is center stage of federal, state and local politics. For a deeper grasp of the nation's indebtedness, and why that matters we turn to Sandy Brian Hager, a Fellow of International Political Economy in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He received his Ph.D. in 2013 from the Department of Political Science at York University in Toronto. His research examines the political economy of public debt, corporate taxation and financial regulation.
In 1887 Henry Carter Adams produced a study demonstrating that the ownership of government bonds was heavily concentrated in the hands of a 'bondholding class' that lent to and, in Adams's view, controlled the government like dominant shareholders control a corporation. The interests of this bondholding class clashed with the interests of the masses, whose burdensome taxes financed the interest payments on government bonds. Since the late nineteenth century there has been plenty of debate about the ownership of the public debt. But the empirical evidence offered to support the various arguments has been scant. As a result, political economists have few answers to questions first raised by Adams over a century ago: how has the pattern of public debt ownership changed? Can we still speak of a powerful 'bondholding class'? Does public debt redistribute income from taxpayers to public creditors? This article develops a new framework to address these questions. Anchored within a 'capital as power' approach, the research indicates a staggering pattern of concentration in the ownership of US public debt in the hands of the top one per cent of US households over the past three decades. Accordingly, the bondholding class is still alive and well in contemporary US capitalism.
In the wake of the current crisis there has been an explosive rise in the level of the US public debt. These massive levels of public indebtedness are expected to keep growing unless there are drastic changes to existing budgetary policies. According to a recent series in the Financial Times, the US now faces a 'debt dilemma' over whether the country should bring its fiscal house in order through tax hikes on the rich or cuts to entitlement programs. This apparent dilemma has sparked a debate over which groups should bear the burden of debt repayment and fiscal adjustment. However, one crucial question remains unasked: whose powerful interests are served by the public debt? Mapping the share of federal bonds holdings of and interest to the top 1%, my research uncovers a staggering trend towards concentration over the past three decades and shows that federal income taxes and transfer payments have done little to offset this regressive distribution. Increases to the public debt without progressive redistributive policies are likely to aggravate an already explosive situation characterized by inequality, while decreases to the privately held portion of the public debt are likely to encounter resistance from the top 1%. This is America's real debt dilemma.
Who owns the U.S. government debt and why does it matter? Sandy Brian Hager talks about the concentration of debt ownership, regressive transfer payments, and the class logic behind the 'fix-the-debt' campaign. Original research that bites. Duration: 26 minutes.
This paper seeks to explain why Hollywood's dominant firms are narrowing the scope of creativity in the contemporary period (1980–2015). The largest distributors have sought to prevent the art of filmmaking and its related social relations from becoming financial risks in the pursuit of profit. Major filmed entertainment, my term for the six largest distributors, must discount expected future earnings to present prices with the forward-looking logic of capitalisation; and uncertainty about where creativity in cinema is going can produce financial uncertainty about the future earning potential of new film projects. Conversely, a degree of confidence in the expected future earnings of Hollywood cinema can increase when the art of filmmaking and broader social world of mass culture are ordered by capitalist power [Nitzan, J. and Bichler, S., 2009. Capital as power: a study of order and creorder. New York: Routledge]. For the period of 1980–2015, major filmed entertainment lowered its risk relative to the period before, 1960–79. This historical process of risk reduction is the effect of major filmed entertainment making the wide-release strategy (a.k.a., saturation booking) more predictable through an aggressive implementation of the blockbuster style and the high concept standard.
Milton Friedman už viac ako desaťročie nie je medzi nami, ale stále nás prenasleduje jeho duch. V 60-tych rokoch Friedman vyhlásil, že inflácia je "vždy a všade monetárnym fenoménom" – problém spočíva v tlačení priveľa peňazí. Odvtedy so železnou pravidelnosťou, vždy keď začne strašiť inflácia, určite sa nájde niekto, kto vyvoláva Friedmanovho ducha a obviňuje vládu, že má priveľké výdavky. Keby to však s infláciou bolo také jednoduché. Ako mnohé závery ekonomickej teórie, aj toto Friedmanovské myslenie vyzerá na prvý pohľad rozumne. Inflácia je všeobecný rast cien. A keďže ceny nevyjadrujú nič iné, len peňažné transakcie, keď je v obehu viac peňazí, znamená to, že ceny musia byť vyššie. Preto inflácia je "vždy a všade monetárny fenomén". Je smola, že pri podrobnejšom preskúmaní tohto fenoménu musíme toto myslenie zavrhnúť. Hlavný problém je v tom, že s infláciou narába ako s rovnomerným zvýšením cien. Toto je pohodlné pre teóriu, ale empiricky to nie je pravda. V reálnom svete je inflácia veľmi nerovnomerná. Napríklad v určitom čase si všimneme, že cena jabĺk stúpla o 5 %, ale zároveň cena áut o 50 %, pritom cena oblečenia mohla klesnúť o 20 %. Ak chceme pochopiť skutočnú podstatu inflácie, nesmieme študovať ekonomické učebnice, ale si musíme všímať údaje z reálneho sveta. Presne toto urobil začiatkom 90-tych rokov politický ekonóm Jonathan Nitzan počas svojej práce na PhD. Jej výsledkom bola dizertácia Inflation As Restructuring (Inflácia ako reštrukturalizácia). Nitzan si všimol, že v skutočnom svete sa ceny menia veľmi rozdielne, čo znamená, že vždy na tom niekto získa a niekto stratí. V dôsledku toho inflácia nie je len "monetárny fenomén", ako prehlásil Milton Friedman. Inflácia reštrukturalizuje sociálne usporiadanie. Práve táto vlastnosť inflácie je v reálnom svete najdôležitejšia, lebo jej pričinením inflácia signalizuje zmenu v mocenskej štruktúre spoločnosti. Podľa očakávania, práve tento jav z reálneho sveta ekonómovia hlavného prúdu ignorujú – do veľkej miery preto, že to nezodpovedá ich úhľadnej ...
Milton Friedman has been dead for more than a decade, but his ghost still haunts us. In the 1960s, Friedman declared that inflation is 'always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon' — a problem of printing too much money. Since then, whenever inflation rears its head, you can count on someone to reanimate Friedman's ghost and blame the government for spending too much. If only inflation were so simple. Like much of economic theory, Friedman's thinking appears plausible on first glance. Inflation is a general rise in prices. And since prices are nothing but the exchange of money, more circulating money means prices must increase. Hence, inflation is 'always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon'. Unfortunately, this thinking falls apart on further inspection. The problem is that it treats inflation as a uniform rise in prices. That's theoretically convenient, but empirically false. In the real world, inflation is wildly divergent. At the same time that the price of apples rises by 5%, the price of cars could grow by 50%, and the price of clothing might fall by 20%. To understand inflation as it actually exists, we must look not to economics textbooks, but to real-world data. That's what political economist Jonathan Nitzan did during his PhD research in the early 1990s. His work culminated in a dissertation called Inflation As Restructuring. In the real world, Nitzan observed, price change is always 'differential', meaning there are winners and losers. The consequence is that inflation is not purely a 'monetary phenomenon', as Milton Friedman claimed. Inflation restructures the social order. It is this real-world feature of inflation that is most important, because it means that inflation signals a change in society's power structure. Predictably, it is this real-world feature that mainstream economists ignore — largely because it conflicts with their tidy theory of inflation as a 'monetary phenomenon'. Fortunately, the evidence is clear. Inflation is (and has always been) overwhelmingly differential. Inflation is restructuring. Today, as inflation fears return and Friedman's ghost is resurrected, it's worth reminding ourselves of the real-world facts.
סמדלי באטלר היה מייג'ור-גנראל בצבא ארה"ב, ואחד מחייליו המעוטרים ביותר. בשנת 1933 הוא נשא נאום בוטה נגד מה שהוא חשד ככוונותיו של הממשל האמריקני לחזור למעורבות צבאית ברחבי העולם. בשנת 1935 הוא פרסם ספר קצר שכותרתו "מלחמה היא שוד". קטעים מהספר מתורגמים במאמר זה. דבריו של באטלר שהתבססו בעיקר על נסיונו במעורבות ארה"ב במלחמת העולם הראשונה, מהדהדים כאילו נכתבו היום על ידי מתנגד חריף לפלישה אל עירק, ולכוונותיו של הממשל להשליט סדר אמריקני ברחבי העולם
FROM THE ARTICLE: . . . what many critics of the war on terror or US imperialism have so far failed to appreciate is how this project would be impossible without the capitalisation of the state. In this article, I therefore want to suggest that Marx's re-theorisation of the concept of primitive accumulation, combined with a non-Marxist theorisation of state power offered by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, can help us account for the intimate connection between ongoing primitive accumulation and the capitalisation of the US government. . . . I try to show that we can accept their novel theory of capital as a capitalised and commodified form of power, but argue that the concept of primitive accumulation still has considerable analytical value for theorising the extension and depth of capitalist social property relations within and across political jurisdictions.
