Khaleeji-capital: Class-formation and regional integration in the Middle-East Gulf

The countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) are most typically understood from the perspective of their position as the world\u27s key oil- and gas-producing states. This essay explores the largely overlooked processes of class-formation in the GCC, and argues that very profound tendencies of capital- internationalisation are occurring alongside Gulf regional integration. The circuits of capital are increasingly cast at the pan-Gulf scale, and a capitalist class - described as khaleeji-capital - is emerging around the accumulation-opportunities presented within the new regional space. The formation of khaleeji-capital represents the development of a class increasingly aligned with the interests of imperialism and has important ramifications for understanding the region\u27s political economy. © 2010 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden

Secular trends, long waves, and the cost of the state: evidence from the long-term movement of the profit rate in the U.S. economy

Journal ArticleTheorists in the tradition of either Classical Marxism or Keynesianism understand that as capitalism provides an historical space for the development of material forces of production, its economic and social contradictions tend to develop, requiring progressively more complex institutional structures and increasingly higher degrees of state intervention

Variegated Finance Capital and the Political Economy of Islamic Banking in the Gulf

The significant expansion of Islamic Finance (IF) over recent years provides a useful vantage point for examining the variegated nature of global finance. Nonetheless, within the substantial political economy literature on IF, there has been surprisingly little reflection on the concrete forms of class and capital accumulation underlying IF in particular national contexts. Against a methodological tendency to divorce Islamic financial markets from the wider circuit of capital, this article employs a Marxian conception of ‘finance capital’ to examine the class composition of Islamic banking in the six Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The core argument is that the expansion of GCC Islamic financial markets reflects the growth of a distinct class-fraction of privately-controlled finance capital in the Gulf. The specificity of this process in the Gulf involves a set of privately-controlled conglomerates whose interests are uniquely interlocked with the ownership of Islamic banks but extend beyond these to a range of other moments of capital accumulation – most prominently those connected to the transformation of the built environment. These class relations differ from conventional banking in the Gulf, and highlight the importance of critical political economy in developing alternative interpretations to the dominant, industry-linked literature

New Geographies of Financial Power: Global Islamic Finance and the Gulf

A growing body of critical scholarship has examined the recent growth of Islamic finance (IF), unpacking its ethical assertions and highlighting its close affinities with conventional financial instruments. Receiving less attention, however, is the relationship between the global expansion of IF and the emergence of new financial actors and zones of accumulation. This article situates the evolution of global Islamic circuits alongside processes of capital accumulation in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), arguing that contemporary IF is deeply bound up with the internationalisation of capital groups headquartered in the GCC. This is evident in the internationalisation of GCC Islamic banks, which has given the Gulf a powerful foothold in new markets and a variety of sectors that are typically considered ‘non-financial’. Simultaneously, the expansion and geographical diversification of Islamic debt (sukuk) issuance is refashioning the Gulf’s relationships with other global spaces, a process that looks set to intensify given the widespread push to utilise IF in development financing. Seen from this perspective, the global growth of IF sits in a mutually constitutive relationship with patterns of capital accumulation in the Gulf, as well as the region’s burgeoning weight within (and new linkages to) the global economy

Capital, Labor, and State: Rethinking the Political Economy of Oil in the Gulf

The Middle East’s pivotal position in a hydrocarbon-based global capitalism carries enormous ramifications for the region and the Gulf Arab states in particular. This chapter aims to present key debates associated with this transformation. It begins with an overview of the Rentier State Theory (RST). RST theorists foreground the impact of oil rents on Gulf states, drawing causal relationships between these rents and the characteristics of the Gulf’s political economy. The chapter turns to a critique of some of its core assumptions, notably its theorization of state and class. It argues that a more satisfactory understanding of the political economy of oil in the Gulf can be found through a return to the categories of class and capitalism, and a deeper appreciation of the ways in which the Gulf is located in the wider dynamics of accumulation in the world market

(Post)Revolutionary Interlinkages: Labour, Environment and Accumulation

In this collective review, we explore Timothy Mitchells Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil with a view to reflecting critically on a contemporary historical juncture, which we call a (post)revolutionary moment. The review builds on discussions at a seminar we co-organised in Doha, Qatar under the auspices of Harvard Law Schools Institute for Global Law and Policy as part of its annual workshop in January 2013.1 Carbon Democracy is part of a significant body of scholarship stretching over several decades where Mitchell explores the relationship between economic expertise and the material conditions of socio-economic development. Mitchells analyses over the years have been wide-ranging in their interests and implications, but his particular focus has been the Arab region. In Carbon Democracy, Mitchell maintains this geographical focus, investigating the internal mechanics and political repercussions of that quintessential Middle Eastern commodity, oil. Yet this is not an ordinary resuscitation of the rentier states thesis: as Mitchell explains: [r]ather than a study of democracy and oil, [this] became a book about democracy as oilas a form of politics whose mechanisms on multiple levels involve the processes of producing and using carbon energy (5).