In Search of Sabotage

A key aspect of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s theory of ‘capital as power’ is that it treats property not as a productive asset, but as a negative social relation. Property, Nitzan and Bichler argue, is an institutional act of exclusion. It is the legal right to sabotage […] In this series, which we are calling ‘In Search of Sabotage’, we will investigate how capitalists’ success relates to various social outcomes. If Nitzan and Bichler’s sabotage thesis is correct, a win for capitalists ought to come at the detriment of society at large. With this idea in mind, here is the road ahead. In each installment of this series, we will pick something that we think is a social ‘bad’. (In this post we look at income inequality.) Then we’ll see how this social bad relates to capitalists’ success, as measured by Bichler and Nitzan’s power index. As we work through the data, we have no idea what we’ll find. So join us in this journey of science in action.