New imperialism or new capitalism?

Over the past century, the institution of capital and the process of its accumulation have been fundamentally transformed. By contrast, the theories that explain this institution and process have remained largely unchanged. The purpose of this paper is to address this mismatch. Using a broad brush, we outline a new, power theory of capital and accumulation. We use this theory to assess the changing meaning of the corporation and the capitalist state, the new ways in which capital gets accumulated and the specific historical trajectory of twentieth-century capitalism up to the present.arms; accumulation; capital flow; capitalism; conflict; corporation; crisis; distribution; elite; energy; finance; globalization; growth; imperialism; GPE; liberalism; Marxism; Middle East; military; national interest; neoclassical economics; neoliberalism; nomos; oil; OPEC; ownership; peace; power; profit; ruling class; security; stagflation; state; stock market; TNC; United States; US; utility; value; violence; war

"Studying Economics As an Equation Without Value Variables": A Critical Addendum (תוסף ביקורתי למאמר: לימודי הכלכלה כמשוואה בלא משתנים ערכיים)

ב-4 ביולי 2005, פרסם עתון 'הארץ/דה-מרקר' מאמר תחת הכותרת "לימודי הכלכלה כמשוואה בלא משתנים ערכיים". המאמר הוא דוגמא מצוינת לאלו שאוהבים 'ביקורתיות', 'דה-קונסטרוקציה' ותיאוריות של השתקה וצנזורה של היום. המאמר הוא גם דוגמא מצוינת לאופיו של 'הארץ', ובעיקר ליכולתם של עורכיו, אשר רוחם של בעלי ומנהלי העיתון מפעמת בקצות עצביה

The scientist and the church

The April 21, 2005 issue of the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS carried a lead article titled ‘Blood for Oil?’ The paper is attributed to a group of writers and activists – Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts – who identify themselves by the collective name ‘Retort.’ In their article, the authors advance a supposedly new explanation for the wars in the Middle East. Much of their explanation – including both theory and fact – is plagiarized. It is cut and pasted, almost ‘as is,’ from our own work. The primary source is ‘The Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition,’ a 71 page chapter in our book THE GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ISRAEL (Pluto 2002). The authors also seem inspired, incognito, by our more recent papers, including ‘It’s All About Oil’ (2003), ‘Clash of Civilization or Capital Accumulation?’ (2004), ‘Beyond Neoliberalism’ (2004) and ‘Dominant Capital and the New Wars’ (2004). In their paper, the Retort group credits us for having coined the term ‘Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition’ – but dismiss our ‘precise calibration of the oil/war nexus’ as ‘perfunctory.’ This dismissal does not prevent them from freely appropriating, wholesale fashion, our concepts, ideas and theories – including, among others, the ‘era of free flow,’ the ‘era of limited flow,’ ‘energy conflicts,’ the ‘commercialization of arms exports,’ the ‘politicization of oil’ and the critique of the ‘scarcity thesis.’ Nowhere in their article do the authors mention the source of these concepts, ideas and theories; occasionally, they even introduce them with the prefix ‘Our view is. . . .’ Their treatment of facts is not very different. They freely use (sometimes without understanding) research methods, statistics and data that took us years to conceive, estimate and measure – again, never mentioning the source. These concepts, theories and facts are far from trivial. Until recently, they were greeted with strategic silence, from both right and left. Their publication has been repeatedly denied and censored by mainstream as well as progressive journals (including, it must be said, by the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, that turned down our paper on the subject). They cannot be found anywhere else in the literature, conservative or radical. To treat them as ‘common knowledge’ is deceitful. To cut and paste them without due attribution is blatant plagiarism. The first part of our paper illustrates this process of ‘intellectual accumulation-by-dispossession’ with selected examples. The issue, though, goes well beyond personal vanity and self-aggrandizement. At the core, we are dealing here with the clash of science and church, with the constant attempt of organized faith – whether religious or academic – to disable, block and, if necessary, appropriate creativity and novelty. Creativity and novelty are dangerous. They defy dogma and undermine the conventional creed; they challenge the dominant ideology and threaten those in power; occasionally, they cause the entire edifice of power to crumble. For these reasons, the latent purpose of intellectual accumulation-by-dispossession – like the accumulation of private property – is primarily negative. The word ‘private’ comes from the Latin ‘privatus,’ meaning ‘restricted,’ and from ‘privare,’ which means ‘to deprive.’ And, indeed, the most important feature of private ownership is not to enable those who own, but to disable those who do not. It is only through the threat of prevention – or ‘strategic sabotage’ as Thorsein Veblen called it – that accumulation can take place. It is only by restricting the free creativity of society that society itself can be controlled. The second section of the paper explains how the appropriators of ‘Blood for Oil?’ fit this pattern. The final section of the paper is an epilogue. It describes our failed attempts to get this paper published with The LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS; Retort’s efforts to mislead us; and some additional insight from their AFFLICTED POWERS, a 2005 Verso book that contains the same plagiarism and more. The epilogue concludes with a few observations on the nature of academic dialectics.academia; arms; accumulation; capital; capitalism; church; conflict; corporation; crisis; data; development; distribution; dual; economy; elite; energy; finance; globalization; growth; imperialism; distribution; institutionalism; IPE; liberalization; methodology; Middle East; military; national interest; science; security; oil; OPEC; ownership; peace; plagiarism; politics; power; profit; religion; ruling class; sabotage; stagflation; state; TNC; United States; violence; war

Cheap wars

The new conflicts of the twenty-first century – the 'infinite wars,' the 'clashes of civilization,' the 'new crusades' – are fundamentally different from the mass wars and statist military conflicts that characterized capitalism from the nineteenth century until the end of the Cold War. The novelty lies not so much in the military nature of the conflicts, as in the broader role that war now plays in capitalism.accumulation capital capitalism crisis differential accumulation distribution elite energy conflict globalization inflation Iraq Israel Keynesianism Lebanon Middle East military spending neo-liberalism oil ownership power prices profit ruling class TNC United States violence war warfare welfare Weapondollar-Petrodollar

Kliman on Systemic Fear: A Rejoinder

In this rejoinder, Bichler and Nitzan address the points raised in Kliman's article: (Kliman, A., 2011. Value and Crisis: Bichler and Nitzan versus Marx. Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies,(1)4, pp. 61-92)

Some Aspects of Aggregate Concentration in the Israeli Economy, 1964-1986

This essay examines the Israeli market structure from the perspective of ownership. We distinguish between the several corporate holding-groups that dominate the ‘Big Economy’ and the multitude of smaller, largely independent, business entities of the ‘Small Economy’. Although the two “sectors” operate under the same macroeconomic conditions, the analysis reveals marked differences in their business performance. These differences were reflected in an upward trend of aggregate concentration through the 1964-1968 period. Until the early 1970s the upward trend was moderate and was largely due to the different expansion paces of the two “sectors”. Since then, however, the trend intensified as the ‘Small Economy’ stagnated while profits in the ‘Big Economy’ continued to grow.concentration dual economy holding groups Israel market structure national accounting ownership profit surplus

The CasP Project: Past, Present, Future

capital as power capitalist mode of powerThe study of capital as power (CasP) began when we were students in the 1980s and has since expanded into a broader project involving a growing number of researchers and new areas of inquiry. This paper provides a bird’s-eye view of the CasP journey. It explores what we have learned so far, reviews ongoing research, and suggests future trajectories – including the coevolution of Concepts of Power–Modes of Power (COP-MOPs); the origins of capitalized power; the state of capital; finance as the symbolic creordering of capitalism; the role of labour, production and waste; the capitalized environment; and the need for post-capitalist accounting

It's All About Oil

accumulation capital capitalism civilization conflict crisis debt differential accumulation distribution elite energy finance globalization growth imperialism Israel GPE inflation liberalism Marxism Middle East military neoliberalism oil OPEC peace postmodernism power profit ruling class security stagflation state technology TNC United States US violence warThe new wars in the Middle East are certainly about oil, but not in the way most people think

The Asymptotes of Power

capitalization distribution power systemic crisis United StatesThis is the latest in a series of articles we have been writing on the current crisis. The purpose of our previous papers was to characterize the crisis. We claimed that it was a 'systemic crisis', and that capitalists were gripped by 'systemic fear'. In this article, we seek to explain why. The problem that capitalists face today, we argue, is not that their power has withered, but, on the contrary, that their power has increased. Indeed, not only has their power increased, it has increased by so much that it might be approaching its asymptote. And since capitalists look not backward to the past but forward to the future, they have good reason to fear that, from now on, the most likely trajectory of this power will be not up, but down. The paper begins by setting up our general framework and key concepts. It continues with a step-by-step deconstruction of key power processes in the United States, attempting to assess how close these processes are to their asymptotes. And it concludes with brief observations about what may lie ahead

Elementary Particles of the Capitalist Mode of Power

capital capitalization hype labour Marxism neoclassical economics normal rate of return risk power profit utility valueTheories of society, as of nature, are characterized by their elementary particles. The elementary particle of neoclassical economics is the util. The elementary particle of classical Marxism is abstract labour. These elementary particles represent material quanta. They are deemed useful because both neoclassical economics and classical Marxism analyze capitalism as a mode of production and consumption. In this paper we offer a different approach. We argue that, most broadly, capitalism should be seen not as a mode of production, but a mode of power. From a viewpoint of power, utils and abstract labour are useless. They represent absolute magnitudes, whereas power is inherently relative. To understand the capitalist mode of power we need new elementary particles. The basic unit of analysis we begin with is differential capitalization. Capitalization represents the present value of expected future earnings (ex-post future earnings modified by investors’ hype), which in turn are corrected for risk perceptions and discounted by the normal rate of return. Differential capitalization benchmarks the capitalization of any owner or group of owners against the average owner. The paper begins by exploring the four elementary particles that comprise differential accumulation – future earnings, hype, risk and the normal rate of return. It concludes by assessing the implications of this new framework of differential capitalization for understanding the capitalist mode of power