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...

This paper offers a new approach to the political economy of armament, focusing on the relationship between military spending and differential accumulation in mature capitalist economies. Applied to the “model” case of Israel, our analysis suggests that the militarization of Israel’s...

Political economy, radical as well as conservative, remains anchored in Newtonian cosmology. This cosmology, liberating as it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, has become a fetter on understanding present-day society.

The first part of the exchange is a short article by Joe Francis. The article provides new long-term estimates and an assessment of the buy-to-build indicator for the United States and Britain, going back to the beginning of the 20th century. The second part offers commentary by Shimshon Bichler...

Comments on Francis’ new estimates of the buy-to-build indicator for the United States and Britain. These estimates offer a welcome correction, modifications and additions to the U.S. numbers that we first presented in 1999 and later updated.

Over the past century, Israel has been transformed from an agricultural colony, to a welfare-warfare state, to a globally integrated “market economy” characterised by great income disparities. What lies behind this transformation? Why the shift in emphasis from “war profits” to “peace...

The purpose of this article is to offer an alternative analytical framework for understanding the long term transformation in Israel. First, we argue against the conventional separation between the “political system” and the “economic system.” This separationist approach has been popular...

PREAMBLE BY PIOTR DUTKIEWICZ: In a unique two-pronged dovetailing discussion, frequent collaborators and coauthors Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler discuss the nature of contemporary capitalism. Their central argument is that the dominant approaches to studying the market – liberalism and...