Park, ‘Dominant Capital and the Transformation of Korean Capitalism: From Cold War to Globalization’

Abstract After the 1997 financial crisis, the neo-liberal restructuring of the Korean political economy accelerated dramatically. While there is a general consensus that the reform has had negative consequences for Korean society, heated debates continue over the culprits of the 1997 crisis and the changes that followed in its wake. Major opinions have largely coalesced […]

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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 […]

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Hager, ‘What Happened to the Bondholding Class? Public Debt, Power and the Top One Per Cent’

Abstract In 1887 Henry Carter Adams produced a study demonstrating that the ownership of government bonds was heavily concentrated in the hands of a ‘bondholding class’ that lent to and, in Adams’s view, controlled the government like dominant shareholders control a corporation. The interests of this bondholding class clashed with the interests of the masses, […]

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McMahon, ‘The Rise of a Confident Hollywood: Risk and the Capitalization of Cinema’

Abstract This paper investigates the historical development of risk in the Hollywood film business. Using opening theatres as a proxy for future expectations, the paper demonstrates how, from 1981 to 2011, Hollywood has improved its ability to predict the financial rankings of its films. More specifically, the Hollywood film business has become better at predicting […]

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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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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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Nitzan & Bichler, ‘Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder’

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 both think of capital as an ‘economic’ entity that they count in universal units of ‘utils’ or ‘abstract labour’, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious. Nobody […]

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