What’s New


February 7, 2024

Abstract Political economists, both mainstream and Marxist, find it difficult to reconcile the «real» and «financial» appearances of capital. The conventional view is that «real» capital is an objective productive entity; that «finance» merely reflects …

January 12, 2024

Regan Boychuk Author’s Note: John D. Rockefeller Sr. had the last laugh about American anti-trust law and the muck-raking media before descending to Dante’s 9th Circle in May 1937. The oil industry’s center of gravity had …

November 30, 2023

Abstract This chapter examines the political economy of biopharmaceutical innovation, focusing primarily on vaccines in the Covid-19 pandemic. This analysis aims to make visible the deep entanglements that entrench an extractive and dysfunctional innovation ecosystem, …

November 24, 2023

Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix A few months ago I received an intriguing email from researcher and activist Regan Boychuk. For the past 15 years, Boychuk has been studying the …

November 18, 2023

Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon Around the time of this post, SAG-AFTRA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) produced a tentative agreement in their 2023 negotiations. The SAG-AFTRA …

November 9, 2023

Abstract The 2023 war between Hamas and Israel elicits many different explanations. As with previous regional hostilities, here too, the pundits and commentators have numerous overlapping processes to draw on – from the struggle between …

October 31, 2023

Originally published at pluralistic.net Reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license Cory Doctorow If you’ve never had a fight over the phrase “intellectual property,” count yourself lucky, you normie, you. In the land of …

October 5, 2023

Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon Missed Part 1? You should start here. Author’s note: Around the time of this post, the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) …

September 26, 2023

Jerry Cayford Originally published here A conversation, eighty-some years ago, shaped our world today. The conversation was among three papers in economics. In 1939, Nicholas Kaldor and John Hicks published papers that steered economics through …

September 20, 2023

Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix One of the challenges of studying the past is that time has a maddening way of erasing evidence. Take the origin of life — the …

September 12, 2023

Manuscripts Don’t Burn SHIMSHON BICHLER and JONATHAN NITZAN September 2023 Keywords censorship, ideology, marxism, neoliberalilsm, peer review, plagiarism Citation Bichler, Shimshon, and Nitzan, Jonathan. 2023. ‘Manuscripts Don’t Burn’. Review of Capital as Power, Vol. 2, …

September 12, 2023

The Capital as Power Approach An Invited-then-Rejected Interview with Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan SHIMSHON BICHLER and JONATHAN NITZAN September 2023 Keywords capital accumulation, capitalization, interview, Marxism, modes of power, stagflation, systemic fear, value theory …

September 8, 2023

Originally published at pluralistic.net Reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license Cory Doctorow “Political economy” may sound like an obscure technical matter, but it’s a really very simple (and incredibly important) idea: That the …

August 20, 2023

Abstract Israel’s ongoing crisis – or ‘judicial coup’ in popular parlance – has elicited two opposite responses. The first comes from global rating agencies, economists and investment strategists who see Israel’s country risk rising. The …

July 22, 2023

Regan Boychuk Green Party of Alberta energy critic Author’s note Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The suggestion that a semi-secret conspiracy of racists transferred imperial control of Canada from the British to the Americans on …

July 17, 2023

Daniel Baryon Originally published at libcom.org Author’s Note The following is the script of the video I published on my channel Anark. If you would like to watch that video, it is here Minor edits …

July 15, 2023

Abstract This essay opposes the idea that contemporary critical events like pandemics, global warming, environmental deterioration, et cetera, are to be considered as affecting humanity in a uniform way. Instead of seeing these phenomena like …

July 14, 2023

Abstract Este artículo intenta sentar las bases para una comprensión de los precios radicalmente diferente a como los entiende el pensamiento económico tradicional. Tras revisar algunos aspectos relevantes de la crítica a la teoría del …

June 14, 2023

Originally published at Wealth Economics Steve Roth Following the community of Socks (?s) or “social democrats” out there on the interwebs (this is definitely my economic tribe), in articles, and in books, there’s a particular …

June 3, 2023

Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon On May 2, 2023, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike after failing to reach an acceptable agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and …

May 31, 2023

Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Download: PDF | EPUB … the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it … — Karl Marx In …

May 30, 2023

Abstract This paper builds an empirical and theoretical model to analyze how the financial goal of risk reduction changed the insides of Hollywood’s star system. For the moviegoer looking at Hollywood cinema from the outside, …

May 29, 2023

Originally published at pluralistic.net Reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license Cory Doctorow When you hear that a billionaire has bought a horse or a newspaper or a sports team, you might think it’s …

May 26, 2023

Originally published at Manchester Metropolitan University Adam Marshall In recent years, as governments and corporations have intensified their efforts to locate, extract and monetise oil, gas, and various other biophysical resources, the world has simultaneously …

May 25, 2023

Originally published at Asimmetria Yuri Di Liberto What if I told you that they knew everything? And that they have known it for a very long time? On January 13 of this year, 2023, in …

May 23, 2023

Regan Boychuk Green Party of Alberta energy critic & May 2023 candidate for Banff-Kananaskis Author’s note This article will prove the United States imposed its foreign policy doctrine of “Minimum Duty” on Alberta in November …

May 19, 2023

Christopher Mouré and Shai Gorsky When it comes to social institutions, not-for-profit organizations (NFPs) allegedly strike a balance between the private and public realm. While privately owned and operated, not-for-profits are distinguished by their ostensibly …

April 28, 2023

Abstract This paper is part of a dialogue with Blair Fix on how inflation redistributes income between creditors and workers and the way in which monetary policy affects this process. In his 2023 paper, ‘Inflation! …

April 26, 2023

Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler In 1989, we applied for a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation grant to investigate the funding of fascist and Neo-Nazi movements in Israel. The Foundation did not find the topic important …

April 24, 2023

Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Over the last year, I’ve watched with horror and amusement as health agencies around the world flip-flopped their advice on how to deal with COVID. …

April 23, 2023

Originally published at pluralistic.net Reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license Cory Doctorow People who fret about the debt we’re taking on to deal with climate change are (half) right. Because there’s two ways …

April 3, 2023

Abstract Rapid technological change is often touted as a fundamental reality of capitalist societies. It is also presented as concrete evidence for the supposed progressive improvement of material well-being that characterises the capitalist system of …

March 26, 2023

Jonathan Nitzan What is capital? Despite centuries of debate, there is no clear answer to this question – and for a good reason. Capital is a polemic term. The way we define it attests our …

March 24, 2023

Abstract Od głodu i biedy po zwykłe marnotrawstwo i nawracające fale przeróżnych kryzysów – to nie niepożądane skutki uboczne kapitalizmu, ale przejawy sabotażu. Bo nic nie utrwala władzy kapitału skuteczniej niż istnienie szerokiej rzeszy ludzi, …

March 23, 2023

Abstract RESUMEN. Esta tesis es un esfuerzo por desentrañar el papel que juega el campo financiero dentro del proceso de acumulación de capital y la manera en que condiciona el desarrollo de la lucha entre …

March 16, 2023

Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Last week I ran a Twitter survey to see what software my fellow researchers use. It turns out they like R: As an avid R …

March 9, 2023

Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow Capital-as-power, a framework from Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, holds that companies don’t seek to be as profitable as possible – but rather to accumulate as much power as …

February 22, 2023

Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix According to behavioral economics, most human decisions are mired in ‘bias’. It muddles our actions from the mundane to the monumental. Human behavior, it seems, …

February 6, 2023

Abstract Capitalizing a Cure takes readers into the struggle over a medical breakthrough to investigate the power of finance over business, biomedicine, and public health. When curative treatments for hepatitis C launched in 2013, sticker …

February 6, 2023

Abstract There is little doubt that, in the last hundred years or so, progress has been made in lifting more people out of extreme poverty. Yet, considerable economic inequalities both within and between nations persists …

February 3, 2023

Abstract הקפיטליזם שולט בעולם. דיונים סוערים מתנהלים בין המלומדים הממסדיים לבין “הביקורתיים” על טיבו של הקפיטליזם הגלובלי. הבעיה היא שטיבו של המוסד המרכזי בקפיטליזם — ההון — אינו ידוע. לאחר יותר ממאתיים שנה של התפתחות …

January 17, 2023

The Business of Strategic Sabotage SHIMSHON BICHLER and JONATHAN NITZAN January 2023 Abstract In a recent article, Nicolas D. Villarreal claims that our empirical analysis of the relation between business power and industrial sabotage in …

January 10, 2023

Regan Boychuk The bias of Alberta’s media in favour of our dominant industry is both pervasive and obvious to any careful observer. But how to prove it? Studies of media bias are notoriously difficult and …

December 21, 2022

Abstract This paper uses word frequency to track the rise and potential peak of capitalist ideology. Using a sample of mainstream economics textbooks as my corpus of capitalist thinking, I isolate the jargon of these …

December 21, 2022

Abstract Steve Keen’s book, The New Economics: A Manifesto (2021), offers a new path for economics, and for good reason. In his view, neoclassicism, the paradigm that rules modern-day economics, has become a serious menace: …

December 13, 2022

Regan Boychuk Author’s note: At the end of the First Cold War, Canada tried to make the polluter pay. This resulted in the United States launching an unknown, but successful coup in Alberta over the …

December 4, 2022

Regan Boychuk Author’s note: At the end of the First Cold War, Canada tried to make the polluter pay. This resulted in the United States launching an unknown, but successful coup in Alberta over the …

December 2, 2022

Regan Boychuk Author’s note: At the end of the First Cold War, Canada tried to make the polluter pay. This resulted in the United States launching an unknown, but successful coup in Alberta over the …