3rd Annual Forum on Capital as Power: "Capitalizing Power: The Qualities and Quantities of Accumulation"

September 28-30, 2012, York University, Toronto

5. Global Weimarism: The Demise of Cohesive Global Power?

Jeffrey Harrod, University of Amsterdam (harsum@bart.nl)

The 1919 Weimar Republic in Germany collapsed when the political liberal government could not prevent the rise of the authoritarian right. There were three key elements in the Weimar situation -- the collapse of the elite aristocratic government, the immobilism of the political liberal Weimar government in power and the rise and success of the right populist party. This essay argues these three elements are currently found at the global level. The first element is represented by the attempt in the last quarter of the twentieth century to create a cohesive governing global elite centred on core banks and corporations. For reasons that will be explained, this attempt failed, and national and regional elites have returned to frankly imperial or aggressive competition over extraction from the different societies over which they have power. Current governments, almost all existing within a political liberal hegemony, have been unable to make the changes necessary to deal with the changed global power structure and prevent the third element of Weimar -- the rise of right populism -- especially in Europe. However, at the global level the emergence of a left populism in Latin America and elsewhere makes a global outcome similar to the failure of the Weimar Republic less certain.

6. Intellectual Property Rights, Collective Action, and the Continuing Power of 'Finance'

Herman Schwartz, University of Virginia (hms2f@virginia.edu)

The current system of economic governance in OECD countries clearly does not produce stability. Much like the great depressions of the 1870s and 1930s and the great inflation of the 1970s, the on-going global financial crisis has revealed the inadequacies and contradictions of existing institutions and social practices matching supply to demand and regulating accumulation at the macro-economic level. This paper asks three increasingly abstract questions about this instability. Why didn't 'main street' organize against an increasingly predatory financial sector? Can a new form of regulation -- in the French Regulation School sense -- emerge from the current crisis? What is the utility, if any, of an evolutionary economics perspective on the current and prior crises of regulation? I answer the first and second questions by pointing to the consequences that flow from having intellectual property rights as a major source of profit for 'main street' firms. The predominance of IPRs -- of 'franchise goods' -- throws up barriers to collective action around macroeconomic stabilization by incentivizing a search for tailored state regulation of individual IPRs. By contrast, the profitability of Fordist-era firms rested on a combination of public goods (state macro-economic stabilization) and private goods (efficient management of the assembly line). The salience of franchise goods suggests that current political conflicts will not produce a stable form of regulation; a second 'Bretton Woods' moment is unlikely. Finally, an evolutionary perspective is useful because it focuses our attention on the balance between and composition of public, private and franchise goods in the creation of actual production structures and the accumulation of profit.

Conference page: http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/341/