Political economists, both mainstream and Marxist, find it difficult to reconcile the «real» and «financial» appearances of capital. The conventional view is that «real» capital is an objective productive entity; that «finance» merely reflects this reality; and that, unfortunately, the...

Rethinking resistance, power and production.

Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists both think of capital as an 'economic' entity that they count in universal units of ‘utils’ or 'abstract labour', respectively....

Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists think of capital as an economic entity that they count in universal units of utils and abstract labour, respectively. But these units...

Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists think of capital as an economic entity that they count in universal units of utils and abstract labor, respectively. But these units...

The Scientist and the Church is a wide-ranging biography of research, showcasing Bichler and Nitzan’s attempts to break through the stifling dogmas of the academic church and chart a new scientific cosmology of capitalism. Central to the authors’ work is the notion that capital is not a...

This chapter outlines the main problems of capital theory, key issues which need to be resolved, and the way in which an alternative concept of capital may affect the future evolution of IPE. Briefly, existing theories of capital can be classified into three groups, based on their relationship...

This essay deals with the relationship between stagflation and the process of restructuring. The literature dealing with the interaction of stagnation and inflation is invariably based on some explicit or implicit assumptions about economic structure, but there are very few writings which...

Theories 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...