Stop Me Before I Vote Again

A comment some ways back prompted a splendid discovery: the Bichler and Nitzan oeuvre.

What a gas, to uncover just for my own personal sole self, this wondrously un-novel brightly grease-painted nicely slap-shoed buffoons' cavort. This two-reindeer flying-sled act represents the confluence of two mighty milky rivers of intellactation: one from the attic lumber room of the tundra campus of the Comedia del Nortica Titanica, and one from a sort of academic Bedouin who flits from college to college in... Israel! (That's the Canadian gent, Nitzan, above center, holding forth at his alma mater, Harvard. Bichler seems to be camera-shy.)

Is there a message gist? Why yes: Capital is... power, quantified. Let the silver bells ring out, eh?

I really should stop there, and I will, more or less; maybe Father, ever so fond of aeoli furiosi in extenso pedantico(*) will let it suffice, only attaching this blurb from their magnum -- or is it jeroboam -- opus' back cover:

"Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists both think of capital as an 'economic' entity that they count in universal units of ‘utils’ or 'abstract labour', respectively. But these units are totally fictitious. Nobody has ever been able to observe or measure them, and for a good reason: they don’t exist. Since liberalism and Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters most – the accumulation of capital.

This book offers a radical alternative. According to the authors, capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. It has little to do with utility or abstract labour, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Capital, the authors claim, represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape – or creorder – their society.

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(*) Dead languages seem to be obligatory these days for SMBIVA posts, and even comments: I'll see your Hebrew apophthegm and raise you a Hittite limerick. Can Sumerian be far behind? And what comes next? Proto-Indo-European, complete with laryngeals? (Father Smiff knows how to pronounce 'em, or so he says).