1. Baines, Joseph. 2015. Fuel, Feed and the Corporate Restructuring of
the Food Regime. The Journal of Peasant Studies. Online January 21: 1-27.
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, less attention has been given to differences within
agri-food capital. This paper contributes to the existing literature
on agrofuels, by showing how one cluster of agri-food corporations
and farmers within the US has benefited from soaring ethanol
production at the expense of another cluster. More specifically, I
delineate and chart the pecuniary trajectories of two corporate-led
distributional coalitions that have vied over the course taken by
the US ethanol sector: the 'Agro-Trader nexus' and the 'Animal
Processor nexus'. My main finding is that the US ethanol boom has
been a vector of redistribution: increasing the earnings of the
Agro-Trader nexus and corn growers while reducing the earnings of
the Animal Processor nexus and livestock farmers. This finding
points to the limits and contradictions of agrofuels capitalism and
the acute tensions that exist at the heart of the corporate food regime.
FULL TEXT: http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/434/
2. Bichler, Shimshon, and Jonathan Nitzan. 2004. Capital As Power.
Korean. Translated with an introduction by Gibin Hong. Seoul: Samin Books.
ABSTRACT: It is hard these days to open a newspaper or watch
television without coming across a debate about capitalism.
“Globalization,” “imperialism,” and “neoliberalism” have become
household words. Experts preach the gospel of productivity, while
anti-globalization protestors blame the IMF and transnational
companies for much of our social ills. Some view economic growth as
a magic bullet, for others it spells ecological disaster. Many
interpret the new wars of the twenty first century as serving
“economic” interests and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as a
backlash against western “liberalism.” For some capitalism means the
“end of history,” for others a source of conflict and an engine of
change. No aspect of capitalism seems to escape controversy. In this
context, it is surprising to find little or no debate on the concept
which matters the most: capital itself. Capital is the central
institution of capitalism and yet we do not have a satisfactory
theory to explain it. As it turns out, we do not know precisely what
capital is. This omission is crucial. Without a clear definition of
capital we cannot fully understand how it works and why. Until we
understand capital we are destined to misunderstand our society,
misjudge its alternatives and fail to imagine a better future. In
order to debate capitalism we first need to debate capital. This
book offers a new way to do so. The secret to understanding capital,
we argue, lies not in the narrow confines of production but in the
broader processes and institutions of power. Capital, we claim, is
neither a material object, nor a social relationship embedded in
material entities, but rather a symbolic representation of power.
FULL TEXT: http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/7/
3. Bichler, Shimshon, and Jonathan Nitzan. 2015. Still About Oil?
Real-World Economics Review (70, February): 49-79.
ABSTRACT: 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 years and brings
our empirical research up to date. It shows that the key stylized
patterns we discovered more than twenty years ago – along with other
regularities we have uncovered since then – remain pretty much
unchanged: (1) conflict in the region continues to correlate tightly
with the differential profits of the Weapondollar-Petrodollar
Coalition, particularly the oil companies; (2) dominant capital
continues to depend on stagflation to substitute for declining
corporate amalgamation; and (3) capitalists the world over now need
inflation to offset the spectre of debt deflation. The convergence
of these interests bodes ill for the Middle East and beyond: all of
these groups stand to benefit from higher oil prices, and oil prices
rarely if ever rise without there being an energy conflict in the
Middle East.
FULL TEXT: http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/432/
4. Di Muzio, Tim. 2015. The Plutonomy of the 1%: Dominant Ownership and
Conspicuous Consumption in the New Gilded Age. Millennium 43 (2): 492-510.
ABSTRACT: This article offers a study on the plutonomy of dominant
owners and what their consumptive practices might tell us from the
lens of the capital as power framework in IPE. I argue that the
differential consumption of dominant owners is an important
dimension of an internationalised capitalist mode of power for two
reasons. First, Nitzan and Bichler argue that the primary driver of
accumulation is the desire for differential power symbolically
expressed in a magnitude of money. In this article, I argue that
there is a secondary dimension noted but underdeveloped in their
framework and influenced by Veblen: the drive for social status and
the display of positionality through differential intraclass
consumption. Second, as identified by Kempf, I argue that the
consumptive practices of dominant owners are helping to lock global
society into an unsustainable and ethically indefensible quest for
perpetual economic growth. This growth project not only undermines
calls for needed social and economic change but also threatens
populations with environmental collapse.
FULL TEXT: http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/433/
5. Ostojić, Mladen. 2015. Differential Taxation: A Convergence of
Interests between American Banking and Government. Transnational
Institute, January 14, pp. 1-17.
ABSTRACT: This paper demonstrates that the interests of American
banking and government have converged after the early 1980s and
relates this trend to modern financial deregulation, revealing a
symbiosis that would later influence the global financial crisis of
2007-2008. An examination of corporate profit and taxation in the
United States reveals an anomaly: from the early 1980s until the
financial crisis, banking profits after tax sharply outpaced those
of the corporate average despite their effective tax rates having
simultaneously increased relative to those of the corporate average.
These conditions thereby created a mutually beneficial relationship
between American banking and government in which banks earned higher
profits and the government earned higher tax revenues. However, this
tax arrangement ultimately depended on unsustainably deregulated
banking profits, and fell apart during the financial crisis of
2007-2008.
FULL TEXT: http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/435/
***
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Jonathan Nitzan
Political Science || Social and Political Thought
York University
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Toronto, Ontario, M3J-1P3
Canada
Voice: (416) 736-2100, ext. 88822
Fax: (416) 736-5686
Email: nitzan at yorku.ca
The Bichler & Nitzan Archives:http://bnarchives.net
Alternative site:http://yorku.academia.edu/JonathanNitzan
Capital as Power:http://capitalaspower.com
RECASP (journal):http://lha.uow.edu.au/hsi/research/recasp/articles/index.html
RECASP Essay
Prize:http://lha.uow.edu.au/hsi/research/recasp/essayprize/index.html
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