Brennan, ‘The Power Underpinnings, and Some Distributional Consequences, of Trade and Investment Liberalisation in Canada’

Abstract Criticism of trade and investment liberalisation (TAIL) in North America has drawn attention to weak economic performance, wage-profit redistribution, social dumping and fiscal pressure on government programmes as evidence that the TAIL regime has failed to deliver on some of its key promises. This criticism has been unable, however, to establish satisfactory conceptual and […]

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No Way Out: Crime, Punishment & the Capitalization of Power

Presentation at the Department of Political Science, York University. 12 November   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 […]

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Bichler & Nitzan, ‘Capital as Power: Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism’

Abstract 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 are totally fictitious: they can […]

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