The Bichler & Nitzan Archives provides free access to publications, reviews, interviews, conferences, lectures, courses, data and audio-visual material related to the ‘capital-as-power’ approach to political economy, or CasP.
CasP offers a radical alternative to mainstream and Marxist theories of value and capitalism. It argues that capital symbolizes and quantifies not utility or labour, but organized power writ large, and that capitalism is best understood and challenged not as a mode of production and consumption, but as a mode of power.
By conceptualizing capital as a symbolic quantification of power and capitalism as a mode of power, CasP challenges the foundational bifurcations of politics/economics, real/nominal and state/capital upon which conventional theories of capitalism rest. And by recasting accumulation as a process of differential capitalization, it offers research tools for exploring capitalism empirically – something that liberal and Marxist theories, anchored in problematic units of ’utility’ and ’abstract labour’, have difficulty providing.
This combined emphasis on theoretical and empirical research helps democratize the knowledge we need to pursue a better future.