Скачать или смотреть CAPITAL-STATE (I) -- Max Grubman, Philip Leech and Gibin Hong (September 2016)

4th Forum on Capital as Power: Broadening the Vista
September 28-30, 2016, York University, Toronto
http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/478/

2A. Normalizing a Benchmark: The Case of the Global Energy Sector

Max Grubman, Tel Aviv University

This research looks into the socially constructed perceptions of risk and the normal rate of return, examining the capitalization of energy assets and the implications of neoclassical analysis of debt and capital costs, and how both of these affect pricing and regulation in the Israeli natural gas industry. Through the examination of the separate elements that determine the discount rate, from geological-technical exploration risk to the prospects of government intervention, I try to delineate the different power processes that shape the energy sector’s business conventions. Analyzing a disaggregated discount rate from a power perspective might provide a starting point for politicizing capitalist value calculations, which in turn may offer alternative asset-pricing methods for public planning.

2B. After ‘Statebuilding’: Wither Palestinian Political Economy?

Phillip Leech, University of Ottawa

In spite of various high-profile moves (at the UN and elsewhere), there has been little change in terms of the subjugation of Palestinians. Though Israel’s occupation remains the most obvious cause of this subjugation, Palestinians’ agency is also contained and constrained by a range of forces including Palestinian elites and the global hierarchy of power.

In this context, control over Palestinian access to capital remains an integral part of maintaining the status quo. Following Nitzan and Bichler (2002), Bullion (2004), Hanieh (2011; 2013; 2015), Khalidi (2012) and Khalidi and Samour (2011), this paper addresses how capital is used as power in contemporary Palestine. It highlights the following: (a) the use of donor funding to support “statebuilding as counterinsurgency” (Turner 2014); (b) the hierarchical nature of Palestinian politics and the domination of the – albeit moribund – private sector by a few elite interests; and (c) the adoption and then relaxation of austerity-focused neoliberal reforms by the PA since 2009 that have disproportionately targeted the already vulnerable.

More broadly, it presents an alternative to the apparently ubiquitous ‘one-’ or ‘two-state solution’, which has become a conceptual horizon, by offering an interpretation of power based on a Gramscian understanding of a “war of position”. This paper’s findings are based on detailed primary research undertaken in 2007-15.

2C. The Fascist Origin of the Japanese Capital-Control-Complex, 1932-1944

Gibin Hong, Global Political Economy Institute, Seoul

This paper traces the origin of the Japanese type of capitalism to the fascist regime during the 1930s and 1940s. The national form of Japanese capitalism, especially its widely practiced cross-shareholding and ‘main bank’ system, is frequently explained as a legacy of its past of illiberal capitalism and/or by the logic of ‘path dependency’. However, this explanation ignores the apparent fact that there were several radical breaks in both corporate ownership/governance structures and the way the financial system was organized between 1930s and 1960s, and that those breaks were always an integral part of the transformation of the ‘historical bloc’ of Japanese capitalism as a whole. I suggest the concept of the Capital-Control-Complex in order to capture this dynamics of power that conditions and sometimes even determines the transformation of the institutional form of a national capitalism. The Capital-Control-Complex consists of the ruling bloc, the corporate ownership/governance structure, and the financial system, and it views the varieties of national capitalism as a product of the process of historical bloc formation in different countries. This paper investigates the nature and process of the reform of the corporate ownership/governance structure and the financial system under the hegemony of the fascist ruling bloc before 1945 as a prelude to the rise of postwar Japanese capitalism. In the process, it also offers some critical reflections on the ability of ‘path dependency’ theory to explain a nationally specific form of capitalism. We that believe this focus on power is a crucial factor in explaining not only the process of capital accumulation, but also the institutional form of the capitalism in which it takes place.

Conference page: http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/478/