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...

The recent shift from ‘global villageism’ to the ‘new wars’ revealed a deep crisis in heterodox political economy. The popular belief in neoliberal globalization, peace dividends, fiscal conservatism and sound finance that dominated the 1980s and 1990s suddenly collapsed. The early 2000s...

The paper offers a new theoretical framework for linking inflation and accumulation, with the Israeli experience as a case study. The focal point is the process of differential accumulation by the largest core firms. The theory of differential accumulation suggests that the relative power of...

An exchange between Andrew Kliman and Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan. 1. Andrew Kliman: 'Value and Crisis: Bichler and Nitzan versus Marx' EDITORS' NOTE: In the first article, Andrew Kliman responds to Bichler and Nitzan's recent paper on 'Systemic Fear, Modern Finance and the Future of...

This 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...

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...

Do capitalists really want a recovery? Can they afford it? On the face of it, the question sounds silly: of course capitalists want a recovery; how else can they prosper? According to the textbooks, both mainstream and heterodox, capital accumulation and economic growth are two sides of the same...

The unravelling of the Middle-East peace process continues to baffle the pundits. The early optimism of the Oslo peace accord has now turned into despair. Prime minister Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist. The Palestinians have embarked on a new Intifada. And Israel has re-occupied...

These notes are transcribed from a commentary on a paper by Sean Starrs, titled 'State and Capital: False Dichotomy But Still Inter-Related'. Both the paper and the commentary were presented as part of an integrated panel series on 'Capital as Power', held at the 36th Annual Conference of the...

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...