In his 2014 article, 'Food Price Inflation as Redistribution', Joseph Baines shows the intimate correspondence between differential profit and world hunger. But the capitalization of food is a dialectical process. As Michael Harrington noted more than half a century ago in his seminal book 'The...

The presidential election of Donald Trump has rekindled hopes for a U.S. recovery. The new president promises to ‘make America great again’, partly by creating many millions of new jobs for U.S. workers, and judging by the rising stock market, capitalists seem to love his narrative. But if...

Economic, financial and social commentators from all directions and persuasion are obsessed with the prospect of recovery. The world remains mired in a deep, prolonged crisis, and the key question seems to be how to get out of it. The purpose of our paper is to ask a very different question that...

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, we identified a new Middle East phenomenon that we called 'energy conflicts' and argued that these conflicts were intimately linked with the global processes of capital accumulation. This paper outlines the theoretical framework we have developed over the...

What do economists mean when they talk about ‘capital accumulation’? Surprisingly, the answer to this question is anything but clear, and it seems the most unclear in times of turmoil. Consider the recent ‘financial crisis’. The very term already attests to the presumed nature and causes...

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...

Rethinking resistance, power and production.

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.