Capitalist Power & a Hybrid between Property and Debt -- Jongchul Kim
Channel: Creorder
Date: 2013-01-08

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

September 28-30, 2012, York University, Toronto

21. Capitalist Power and a Hybrid between Property and Debt

Jongchul Kim, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne (jongchul323@gmail.com)

This presentation aims to ask the theory of Capital as Power (CasP) to incorporate the idea of the hybrid ownership of property and debt seriously, for three reasons.

First, finance, as the form in which capitalist power exists, is a hybrid. Modern banks can create money because they utilize the hybrid ownership known as the trust. This trust in its origin conveyed the ontological, cultural, and political specificities of Anglo-Saxon society, the specificities from which goldsmith-banking and, later, joint-stock banking grew. This hybridity is still exploited by the shadow banking of the twenty-first century and caused the financial crisis of 2008. And the shareholders' ownership of business corporations is a hybrid between owners' rights and creditors' rights.

Second, the capitalist form of organization is a means through which property owners utilize this hybridity and, as a result, enjoy the rights of both debtors and owners while minimizing their responsibility as owners. Public debt, the first systematic capitalization of power, also represents a hybrid ownership in the relation of rulers and the ruled: rulers in capitalism are both the owners of the absolute power to rule the ruled and debtors who borrow the power from the ruled.

Third, incorporating the idea of hybridity allows the theory of CasP to imagine a way of abolishing capitalist power. Capitalist power can be abolished by abolishing this hybridity, i.e. by clearly separating capitalist ownership into rights in rem (property owners' rights) and rights in personam (creditors' rights).

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