Bichler, Shimshon, Jonathan Nitzan, and Piotr Dutkiewicz. 2013. Capitalism as a Mode of Power: Piotr Dutkiewicz in Conversation with Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan. In 22 Ideas to Fix the World: Conversations with the World's Foremost Thinkers, edited by P. Dutkiewicz and R. Sakwa. New York: New York University Press and the Social Science Research Council, pp. 326-354.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the market was seen as a liberal, equal and tolerate instituition. The disintegrate process of feudalism based on rural self-sufficiency, peasant-serfs and aristocracy signaled the beginning of marketized order with urbanization, science, bourgeoisieand liberty. The duality was taken as self-evident: the conflict between the state (politics) and the market (economics), hence a bifurcation serving the ideology of capitalism. This dominat ideology rules the world. Everyone in the capitalist megamachine is trapped in this matrix. Some economists would say: There is no alternative (TINA).
The capitalist regime denoted a new totalizing logic, the obedience to the rule of capital. This doesn’t equal to a constant nature. By the late nieteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were several new features in capitalism: 1) the rise and expansion of large organizational organs; 2) the classical theoretical schems could not accmmodate the military and monetary capitalism; 3) the primacy of class and production was challenged by a new emphasis on masses-elites, bureaucracy-state and power-system; 4) the mechanical cosmology was undermined by uncertainty, relativity and the entanglement of subject and object. Although the center is still capital, we have to think about alternatives to economic theory.
