Capital

“Weber’s thesis is very amenable to the perspective of generative anthropology (GA), of the human scene with center and periphery. Weber saw work (and accumulating and investing capital) as deeply entwined with a religious framework. For GA, exchange in general, and the market system specifically, are key concerns, as is of course religion, the sacred. [2]…”

“Power, meanwhile, interferes with the way money would “like” to “present itself”: rather than a representation of the intrinsic properties of its possessor, through the medium of power we can see money as commanding a certain “portion” of the center (and hence as reducing the center to “portions”). Capital, at the very least is something that makes it…”

“The introduction of money into the system provides those engaged in market exchanges with more flexible means of establishing long-term interactions, while also ensuring the control of the central authority over this expanded process. Money is introduced as debt, debt which is ultimately owned by the central authority, whether or not finance is nominally…”

“Nitzan and Bichler seem to me unconvincing in one area—their discussion of the state. Their insistence that capital is power—not dependent on power, not an influence on power, not even just powerful, but a specific mode of power—means that the state cannot be conceptually separated from capital. Nitzan and Bichler make this case by contending that the state…”

“Everything we do or that happens to us (every event) can be part of a practice of capitalization (scenic design aimed at capturing value)—getting better at something, improving appearance, making friends, learning things, etc., can all increase our value by indicating the possibility of greater future earnings. I give some “credit” to capitalism because I…”

“Assets can be leveraged so as to acquire more assets, and so as to secure the conditions under which assets in those particular forms will be more highly valued and protected. A specific kind of state-capitalist synthesis emerges in which the state mobilizes its assets to ensure a world of assetization or to survive and flourish within limits in the world…”

“The value of anything owned, which is to say, how much money someone will pay for it, is discounted against expected future earnings. This is simple and generative formulation of Bichler and Nitzan’s _Capital as Power_. The formulation assumes that things can be owned, which means a relatively stable property regime; it assumes the quantification of value…”

“The core of generative anthropology is its insistence on providing an anthropological basis, demonstrated or hypothetical, for the Ideas that philosophy and social thought have long sought to derive from the authority of classical sources or more simply from the thinker’s own intuitions of the words. GA’s “new way of thinking” takes a less exalted idea of…”

“The human exchange system does not merely reshuffle the same elements; from the first and ever thereafter, it creates meaning by incarnating, capturing, and consuming– sacrificing , in a word–its sacred Other. All earlier models of human behavior have either been centered on this Other as though we could understand “its” intentions on the analogy of our…”

“Sometimes you may want mastery, for certain purposes—but taking intentional subjective mastery over objects as your primary descriptive discourse assumes a liberal, and we can even say capitalist, ontology—one, to refer to Bichler and Nitzan’s Capital as Power, of “capitalization.” The subject is discounted against anticipated future earnings—that’s what…”