The Bichler and Nitzan Archives
Not a member yet
759 research outputs found
Sort by
A Portrait of Esther Alexander and Her Time (דיוקן לאסתר אלכסנדר ולתקופתה)
Get PDFאסתר אלכסנדר הייתה אחת הבודדות בישראל שניסתה להתמודד, ברצינות ובאופן מקורי, עם תופעת הסטגפלציה. היא עשתה זאת תוך שימוש מרבי בכלים המסורתיים של המתודה הקיינסיאנית, כשהיא משלבת זאת בגירסת ינקותה המרקסיסטית
The Scientist and the Church
Get PDFThe April 21, 2005 issue of the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS carried a lead article titled ‘Blood for Oil?’ The paper is attributed to a group of writers and activists – Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts – who identify themselves by the collective name ‘Retort.’ In their article, the authors advance a supposedly new explanation for the wars in the Middle East.
Much of their explanation – including both theory and fact – is plagiarized. It is cut and pasted, almost ‘as is,’ from our own work. The primary source is ‘The Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition,’ a 71 page chapter in our book THE GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ISRAEL (Pluto 2002). The authors also seem inspired, incognito, by our more recent papers, including ‘It’s All About Oil’ (2003), ‘Clash of Civilization or Capital Accumulation?’ (2004), ‘Beyond Neoliberalism’ (2004) and ‘Dominant Capital and the New Wars’ (2004).
In their paper, the Retort group credits us for having coined the term ‘Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition’ – but dismiss our ‘precise calibration of the oil/war nexus’ as ‘perfunctory.’ This dismissal does not prevent them from freely appropriating, wholesale fashion, our concepts, ideas and theories – including, among others, the ‘era of free flow,’ the ‘era of limited flow,’ ‘energy conflicts,’ the ‘commercialization of arms exports,’ the ‘politicization of oil’ and the critique of the ‘scarcity thesis.’ Nowhere in their article do the authors mention the source of these concepts, ideas and theories; occasionally, they even introduce them with the prefix ‘Our view is. . . .’ Their treatment of facts is not very different. They freely use (sometimes without understanding) research methods, statistics and data that took us years to conceive, estimate and measure – again, never mentioning the source.
These concepts, theories and facts are far from trivial. Until recently, they were greeted with strategic silence, from both right and left. Their publication has been repeatedly denied and censored by mainstream as well as progressive journals (including, it must be said, by the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, that turned down our paper on the subject). They cannot be found anywhere else in the literature, conservative or radical. To treat them as ‘common knowledge’ is deceitful. To cut and paste them without due attribution is blatant plagiarism. The first part of our paper illustrates this process of ‘intellectual accumulation-by-dispossession’ with selected examples.
The issue, though, goes well beyond personal vanity and self-aggrandizement. At the core, we are dealing here with the clash of science and church, with the constant attempt of organized faith – whether religious or academic – to disable, block and, if necessary, appropriate creativity and novelty. Creativity and novelty are dangerous. They defy dogma and undermine the conventional creed; they challenge the dominant ideology and threaten those in power; occasionally, they cause the entire edifice of power to crumble.
For these reasons, the latent purpose of intellectual accumulation-by-dispossession – like the accumulation of private property – is primarily negative. The word ‘private’ comes from the Latin ‘privatus,’ meaning ‘restricted,’ and from ‘privare,’ which means ‘to deprive.’ And, indeed, the most important feature of private ownership is not to enable those who own, but to disable those who do not. It is only through the threat of prevention – or ‘strategic sabotage’ as Thorsein Veblen called it – that accumulation can take place. It is only by restricting the free creativity of society that society itself can be controlled. The second section of the paper explains how the appropriators of ‘Blood for Oil?’ fit this pattern.
The final section of the paper is an epilogue. It describes our failed attempts to get this paper published with The LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS; Retort’s efforts to mislead us; and some additional insight from their AFFLICTED POWERS, a 2005 Verso book that contains the same plagiarism and more. The epilogue concludes with a few observations on the nature of academic dialectics
Letter to Bichler and Nitzan: points of agreement and disagreement on the labour theory of value and on power
Get PDFCommentary on and critique of Bichler and Nitzan’s power theory of value and capital accumulation
Iraqi Oil Speculators' Ball: Palast the Prospector Hits the Mother Lobe
Get PDFFROM THE ARTICLE:
“Last year two very gifted researchers, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, argued that the Iraq War would not make oil plentiful and cheap at all, but scarce and expensive with the leading oil companies profiting greatly from the new environment of heightened instability and soaring oil prices.... Nitzan and Bichler had been making predictions of this kind for quite some time, from before the invasion in fact, but to no avail. I’m happy to say that we finally have confirmation of their claims, thanks to BBC Newsnight Greg Palast.
The Political Economy of Talking About Israel and the US
Get PDFFROM THE REVIEW:
“Nitzan has run into snags on many an occasion trying to get innovative research on Israel and on the Iraq War published in the Western press and academic journals. In one of his more eye-opening pieces, a book review entitled “The Rockefeller Boys”, he reviews the transformation the Israeli economy underwent in the 1980s and 1990s, from socialist command economy to a capitalist laissez-faire system, which ties in with his other work on Israel’s desire for ‘peace’. Long have I known that Chomsky has always seen Israeli politics as beholden to developments in the US, but I never thought this extended anywhere near as far as Nitzan reveals.
Post-Zionist Perspectives on Contemporary Israel
Get PDFReview essay of Baruch Kimmerling’s “The Invention and Decline of Israeliness”, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s “The Global Political Economy of Israel” and Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled’s “Being Israeli”
Flat Reality (מציאות שטוחה)
Get PDFסיפרו לנו שמאז המהפכה הצרפתית, העולם השתנה. אין עוד צורך באדון פושה ולא במשטרת מחשבות. האדונים אינם נזקקים עוד לגיליוטינה כדי לקצוץ מוחות, ולא למספריים כדי לצנזר פמפלטים. בעולם החדש הסתיימו הקונפליקטים והרדיפות ובמקומם התפתחו דוקטרינות גמישות של 'לימודי ביקורת' ו'פלורליזם תרבותי'. במקום מכוני מחקר אסטרטגיים מממנים היום האדונים מכונים לתיאוריה וביקורת, מסבסדים מרכזים לדמוקרטיה ולהפרטה, ומעודדים חברה אזרחית. בעולם הגלובלי החדש הם כבר לא פוחדים ממלים. כך ספרו לנ
Israel's Aristocracy of Finance Twenty Years Later: Preface to the Electronic Edition (מקץ עשרים שנה: אצולת ההון של ישראל)
Get PDFבמבט לאחר כעשרים שנה, ניתן לומר שמאומה לא נותר על כנו. הכל השתנה. מהרשימה של שליטי המשק הישראלי, מעט שרדו. כך או אחרת, כמעט כולם נעלמו ממפת הבעלויות של המשק. חלקם נאספו אל עמיהם, או שמניותיהם נאספו על ידי אויביהם-עמיתיהם (אלו שקוראים לעצמם בעיתוני שטיפת-המוח שבבעלותם, 'קהילת העסקים'), או שהם אספו את נכסיהם והמריאו מעבר לגבולות הצרים של ישראל ('יצירתיות עסקית') [....] ובכל זאת, אף שהספר מיושן וחלק מגיבוריו נעלמו מהתודעה, קשה להבין את המציאות הנוכחית מבלי להתחקות אחר שורשיה. והשורשים שתולים היטב בספר הזה. מבחינה זאת, הוא לא רק הקדים את זמנו, אלא הוא היחיד בישראל שעסק בנושא – אשר רבים הקפידו להתרחק ממנו, אז והיום: יחסי הבעלות והשליטה. או בשפה יותר אידיאולוגית: המבנה המעמדי של ישרא
Studying Economics as an Equation Without Value Variables (לימודי הכלכלה כמשוואה בלא משתנים ערכיים)
Get PDFבחוגי הכלכלה באוניברסיטאות מתחנכים אנשי דור העתיד שיעצבו את אופי הכלכלה והחברה. יש החושבים כי הלימודים לא מספקים להם את הכלים הדרושים להתמודד עם המשימ
Global Political Economy I: Theory and Approaches (YorkU, AS/POLS 3270 3.0, Undergraduate)
Get PDFWhat is ‘capitalism’ and how is it different from other social orders? How did capitalism develop? How does it function at different levels? What theories are used to explain capitalism, and how is it justified and critiqued by different ideologies? What are the roles of power, cooperation and incessant change in capitalism? This course examines such questions from the viewpoint of political economy. It begins by develop-ing the basic concepts of surplus and class, supply and demand, prices and profit, investment and capital accumulation. Using these basic concepts, the course proceeds to explore the nature of the corporation and business organization, the process of capitalist production, the role of inequality, the macro analysis of aggregate processes, government policies and the various ‘anomalies’ of political economy, such as stagflation and accumulation-through-crisis