I am in this post-Christmas period working on some of the definitions that will underpin my work on a project if care. Right now, this is going to involve the publication of glossary entries for some of the key ideas that will be foundational to that work.
In that context, I have just published this on capital, which has never had a glossary entry until now. Each component of capital will get its own glossary entry in due course.
Capital is a stock of legally and socially recognised assets whose ownership or control confers enforceable claims on future income. It includes physical assets (land, buildings, machinery), financial assets (shares, bonds, bank deposits), and intangible assets (intellectual property, licences, monopoly rights). Crucially, it also includes environmental capital: the natural systems that make economic activity possible.
Capital also includes human capital, which is the embodied capacities of people, including health, knowledge, skills, creativity and the ability to participate meaningfully in economic and social life, and social capital, comprising the institutions, relationships, norms and systems of trust that make collective economic activity possible, including public institutions, democratic representation, legal systems and shared social purpose.
Capital is not simply “stuff used in production”. It is a social, legal and ecological relationship grounded in ownership, enforceability and entitlement, operating within biophysical, human and institutional limits. What matters is not merely what assets exist, but which claims may be exercised over them, by whom, through which institutions, and at what cost to future economic, social and ecological capacity.
Financial capital is therefore derivative rather than foundational: its claims are only sustainable insofar as physical, environmental, human and social capital are maintained.
Understanding capital, therefore, requires understanding of capital maintenance concepts, including the maintenance of environmental systems, human capability and social institutions on which all other forms of capital depend. Where these maintenance requirements are ignored, apparent income may in fact represent the consumption or liquidation of capital, even though it appears as profit or growth within conventional accounting frameworks.
NB: It is expected that this definition will be expanded in due course.
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Clear, concise and comprehensive definition. An interesting variation, expansion and clarification of Bourdieu’s 4 forms of capital – economic, cultural social and symbolic – and how those capitals can be exchanged eg cultural capital in the form of educational credentials for a job and hence economic capital.
I’m becoming increasingly interested in the idea of moral capital which links to your notion of a politics of care. The moral bankruptcy of current politicians, be it Starmer or more extremely Trump, appears to me to be a causal factor in our current malaise, not derived from a lack of or inappropriate development of other forms of capital. We need a secular re-moralisation of politics. Core values such as kindness, compassion, generosity, respect for all sentient beings and the planet, etc., must become the foundation upon which economic and political practices are built. The economic domain must become reembedded in the social domain and the political domain must be the means for the realization of the moral ends of society as a whole (decided democratically) not and end in itself. Idealistic, certainly but also pragmatic.
Thank you for your attempts to remoralize politics instituting care as the foundational principle.
Thanks
Good that you are doing this. I myself have struggled with the definitions and believe the most useful is that of real capital – that which is used in the societal processes (including preservation of nature) – but not used up. Maintenance is then needed to keep its status. Your points about ownership and concern are key: if you don’t own the air, what makes you think you can use it as a waste repository? Etc.
Real capital status can be modelled – right down to modelling the cost of regenerating it. Steve Keen has been on the edge of this with COVID modelling in Ravel.
This means that a politics of care can theoretically be framed to be actionable – from who owns what and what state is it in to what resources should be employed to what it will cost to where the money would come from. Helpful is the idea of capital maturity, familiar to biologists from the work of Odum. https://www.patreon.com/posts/why-aim-for-when-132407246?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link