The United States is often hailed as the world's largest 'free market'. But this 'free market' is also the world's largest penal colony. It holds over seven million adults – roughly five per cent of the labour force – in jail, in prison, on parole and on probation. Is this an anomaly, or...

Most explanations of stock market booms and busts are based on contrasting the underlying 'fundamental' logic of the economy with the exogenous, non-economic factors that presumably distort it. Our paper offers a radically different model, examining the stock market not from the mechanical...

The 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,...

This working paper contains an intervention by Corentin Debailleul and an extended reply by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan. The exchange was first posted on the Capital as Power Forum in January 2016. Debailleul’s original questions are articulated at greater length here, while Bichler...

Most explanations of stock market booms and busts are based on contrasting the underlying ‘fundamental’ logic of the economy with the exogenous, non-economic factors that presumably distort it. Our paper offers a radically different model, examining the stock market not from the mechanical...

The United States is often hailed as the world's largest 'free market'. But this 'free market' is also the world's largest penal colony. It holds over seven million adults – roughly five per cent of the labour force – in jail, in prison, on parole and on probation. Is this an anomaly, or...

SPANISH ABSTRACT: La mayoría de las explicaciones de las alzas y bajas del mercado de valores se basan en la comparación de la lógica “fundamental” subyacente de la economía con los factores exógenos que supuestamente la distorsionan. Este artículo presenta un modelo radicalmente...

Las teorías convencionales del capitalismo están sumidas en una profunda crisis: tras siglos de debates todavía son incapaces de decirnos qué es el capital. Tanto liberales como marxistas se refieren al capital como una entidad 'económica' que puede ser contabilizada en unidades universales...

This paper clarifies a common misrepresentation of our theory of capital as power, or CasP. Many observers tend to box CasP as an "institutionalist" theory, tracing its central process of "differential accumulation" to Thorstein Veblen's notion of "differential advantage". This view, we argue,...

Until a few months ago, the stock market narrative in the United States could have been summarized by the popular acronym BTFD – or ‘buy the fucking dip’. Analysts and strategists, emboldened by the world’s synchronized recovery, Trump’s pro-business policies and ample liquidity,...