No. 2014/03: Baines, ‘The Ethanol Boom and the Restructuring of the Food Regime’

Abstract The agrofuel boom has brought about some of the most significant transformations in the world food system in recent decades. A rich and diverse body of agrarian political economy research has emerged that elucidates the conflicts and redistributional shifts engendered by these transformations. However, hitherto this point, less attention has been given to differences […]

Continue Reading

Baines, ‘Wal-Mart’s Power Trajectory: A Contribution to the Political Economy of the Firm’

Abstract This article offers a power theory of value analysis of Wal-Mart’s contested expansion in the retail business. More specifically, it draws on, and develops, some aspects of the capital as power framework so as to provide the first clear quantitative explication of the company’s power trajectory to date. After rapid growth in the first […]

Continue Reading

Baines, ‘Food Price Inflation as Redistribution: Towards a New Analysis of Corporate Power in the World Food System’

Abstract This paper outlines the contours of a new research agenda for the analysis of food price crises. By weaving together a detailed quantitative examination of changes in corporate profit shares with a qualitative appraisal of the restructuring in business control over the organisation of society and nature, the paper points to the rapid ascendance […]

Continue Reading

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 […]

Continue Reading