IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/capwps/202106.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Capitalist Degree of Immortality

Author

Listed:
  • Bichler, Shimshon
  • Nitzan, Jonathan

Abstract

This note offers some speculative ideas worth considering. One of the key features of all hierarchical civilizations is their rulers' fear of death. This fear was famously narrated in the ancient myth of Gilgamesh – the Sumerian king who realized that, like all other humans, he too was destined to die and embarked on a desperate quest to annul his mortality . According to Lewis Mumford, this quest for immortality is the main reason why society's rulers are forever obsessed with building and fortifying power hierarchies – or 'megamachines', as he called them. Controlling these megamachines, Mumford argued, is the rulers' way of playing God, a futile yet all-possessive effort to conquer the future and live forever. In capitalism, the rulers finally figured out how to do it – sort of.

Suggested Citation

  • Bichler, Shimshon & Nitzan, Jonathan, 2021. "The Capitalist Degree of Immortality," Working Papers on Capital as Power 2021/06, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:capwps:202106
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/248555/1/20211200_the_capitalist_degree_of_immortality_wpcasp.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Fix, Blair, 2021. "The Ritual of Capitalization," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, issue 97, pages 78-95.
    2. Nitzan, Jonathan & Bichler, Shimshon, 2009. "Capital as Power. A Study of Order and Creorder," EconStor Books, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, number 157973.
    3. Fix, Blair, 2021. "The Ritual of Capitalization," SocArXiv cf5xv, Center for Open Science.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Fix, Blair, 2023. "How to Make the Oil Industry Go Bust," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, issue 103, pages 2-25.
    2. Jordan Brennan, 2013. "The Power Underpinnings, and Some Distributional Consequences, of Trade and Investment Liberalisation in Canada," New Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(5), pages 715-747, October.
    3. Joel Rabinovich & Niall Reddy, 2024. "Corporate Financialization: A Conceptual Clarification and Critical Review of the Literature," Working Papers PKWP2402, Post Keynesian Economics Society (PKES).
    4. Fix, Blair, 2018. "The aggregation problem: Implications for ecological economics," Working Papers on Capital as Power 2018/03, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism.
    5. Baines, Joseph & Hager, Sandy Brian, 2021. "Commodity Traders in a Storm: Financialization, Corporate Power and Ecological Crisis," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, issue Latest Ar.
    6. Hager, Sandy Brian, 2015. "Public Debt as Corporate Power: Mapping the New Aristocracy of Finance," Working Papers on Capital as Power 2015/01, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism.
    7. Sheila C. Dow, 2014. "The role of belief in the debate over austerity policies," Working Papers PKWP1409, Post Keynesian Economics Society (PKES).
    8. McMahon, James, 2018. "Is Hollywood a Risky Business? A Political Economic Analysis of Risk and Creativity," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, issue Online Fi, pages 1-24.
    9. Martin, Ulf, 2018. "The autocatalytic sprawl of pseudorational mastery (version 0.12)," Working Papers on Capital as Power 2018/04, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism.
    10. Blair Fix, 2021. "How the rich are different: hierarchical power as the basis of income size and class," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 4(2), pages 403-454, November.
    11. van Griethuysen, Pascal, 2012. "Bona diagnosis, bona curatio: How property economics clarifies the degrowth debate," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 84(C), pages 262-269.
    12. Fix, Blair, 2018. "A Hierarchy Model of Income Distribution," Working Papers on Capital as Power 2018/02, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism.
    13. Hager, Sandy Brian, 2013. "Public Debt, Ownership and Power: The Political Economy of Distribution and Redistribution," EconStor Theses, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, number 157991, September.
    14. Bichler, Shimshon & Nitzan, Jonathan, 2020. "Growing through Sabotage: Energizing Hierarchical Power," Review of Capital as Power, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism, vol. 1(5), pages 1-78.
    15. Fix, Blair, 2021. "The Rise of Human Capital Theory," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, issue 95, pages 29-41.
    16. Fix, Blair, 2015. "Putting Power Back Into Growth Theory," Review of Capital as Power, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism, vol. 1(2), pages 1-37.
    17. Di Muzio, Tim & Dow, Matthew, 2017. "Uneven and Combined Confusion: On the Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism and the Rise of the West," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 30(1), pages 3-22.
    18. Hager, Sandy Brian, 2015. "Corporate Ownership of the Public Debt: Mapping the New Aristocracy of Finance," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 13(3), pages 505-523.
    19. Bichler, Shimshon & Nitzan, Jonathan, 2021. "Unbridgeable: Why Political Economists Cannot Accept Capital as Power," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, issue 95, pages 109-117.
    20. Bear, Laura, 2020. "Speculation: a political economy of technologies of imagination," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 103433, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    capital; capitalization; future; immortality; power;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • P16 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Capitalist Institutions; Welfare State
    • G01 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Financial Crises
    • G00 - Financial Economics - - General - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:capwps:202106. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.capitalaspower.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.