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Access status: Open Access ,
El capital como poder en el siglo XXI: Una conversación
(2025) Hudson, Michael; Nitzan, Jonathan; Fix, Blair; Di Muzio, Tim
El 3 de diciembre de 2024, Michael Hudson se reunió con los investigadores del capital como poder Jonathan Nitzan, Tim Di Muzio y Blair Fix para discutir las intersecciones entre sus dos líneas de investigación. Lo que sigue es una transcripción de la conversación. Vídeo de YouTube (inglés): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBOU4xBg2pA
Access status: Open Access ,
The Deep Roots of Fascist Thought
(2025) Fix, Blair
For decades, the word ‘fascist’ existed solely as a hyperbole — a term meant to insult rather than describe. But lately, politics have grown so hyperbolic that the label looks increasingly sincere. For example, when a powerful man advocates far-right politics and brazenly performs Nazi salutes in front of a cheering crowd, it seems like we have a word for that. What was it again? Ah yes … fascist. Of course, fascism is easy to see when it happens elsewhere. But when it grows under your nose within your own culture, even the most blatant signs can seem obscure. So what we need, then, is a hard-nosed way to measure the spread of fascist ideology — a method that is calmly quantitative, immune to both apologetics and hyperbole. In my mind, the best option is to study patterns in written language. Backing up a bit, all ideologies have words that they emphasize, corresponding to concepts that they deem important. Now, we can get a qualitative sense for these words by reading a corpus of ideological text. But if we want to quantify an ideology, a better approach is to count words. When we do so, we can objectively identify the ‘jargon’ of an ideology — the words that it uses frequently and (crucially) overuses relative to mainstream writing. And once we’ve got this jargon, we can return to written language at large and track the changing frequency of our ideological jargon. The goal is to use word frequency to measure the spread (or collapse) of the ideology in question. In this essay, I’ll use word frequency to track the spread of fascist ideology. The journey starts with a trip to 1930s Europe, where we’ll encounter the works of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler (translated into English). The rantings of these two villains will serve as our corpus of fascist text. From this text, we’ll extract the ‘jargon’ of fascism — the words that Mussolini and Hitler use frequently and overuse relative to mainstream English. With this jargon, we’ll then track the popularity of fascist thinking in written language. Because I’m an anglophone, I’ll start with English writing. Running the numbers, I find that in English books, fascist jargon has been on the rise since the 1980s. Now this trend is admittedly alarming. But I’m going to resist the urge to focus myopically on the present. And that’s because the best way to understand today’s neo-fascism is by studying the deep past. Here, then, is my key finding. Although ‘fascism’ was ostensibly born in the early 20th century, the linguistic data tells a different story about fascism’s origin. Looking at five European languages (English, German, Italian, Spanish, and French), I find that the high point of fascist jargon came several centuries before Hitler and Mussolini were born. In short, what we call ‘fascism’ may be best treated as a repackaging and rebranding of a set of dark ideas that have longed plagued humanity. So when fascists look into the future, they’re really peering into the long-dead past.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Half Life of Empire
(2025) Fix, Blair
A good way to think about human history is that it has two distinct scales. On the small scale we have the churn of daily events — the stuff of endless individual exploits. And on the large scale, we have the long-term evolution of human societies — a scale so sweeping that the actions of individuals are as insignificant as the shifting grains of desert sand. The task of social science is to somehow connect these two scales — to show how the characters of history act on a stage that they do not fully control. Looking at the present political spectacle, it’s clear that the world order is changing. In a matter of months, Donald Trump has taken a wrecking ball to the US-led regime that reigned since the end World War II. But here is an interesting question: if Trump had not been re-elected, to what extent would things be different? The answer depends on our choice of scale. In a world without Trump, the eddies of small-scale history would surely be altered. There would be no ‘department of government efficiency’, for example. Nor would their likely be an unfolding US-led trade war. But on the scale of long-term history, many tides would remain the same. Chief among them would be the inexorable decline of US empire. To put things bluntly, the ‘American century’ is over and will never return.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Soviet Experiment with Empire
(2025) Fix, Blair
In my last post, ‘The Half Life of Empire’, I charted the rise and fall of the British and US empires, as measured by their share of world energy use. Afterwards, several readers requested that I apply the same methods to the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. Here’s my attempt to do so.
Access status: Open Access ,
Capital as Coordination: A Synthesis Encompassing Marx and CasP
(2025) De Beer, Pieter
The global system we inhabit is often described in terms of markets, capital, and labor, but beneath these abstractions lies the deeper question of how coordination produces power and how power organizes coordination. Among the most influential traditions attempting to answer this question are Marxism and Capital as Power (CasP), two frameworks that, while sharing certain roots, diverge sharply in their interpretation of what capital is and how it operates. This divergence has led to ongoing tension. Marxists often argue that CasP misrepresents or abandons the core of Marx’s critique, while CasP theorists argue that Marxism remains tethered to outdated economic metaphysics. Both claim to reveal capitalism’s inner workings. But must we choose between them? This essay argues that we do not. Through the lens of Coordination: the Fabric of Power (CfP), a broader theoretical framework that views coordination itself as the primary material of power, we can move beyond this impasse. Rather than asking whether capital is labor-time or capitalization, CfP reframes the question: How is coordination patterned, withheld, or manipulated in ways that produce asymmetries of power? In doing so, it offers a synthesis that integrates the structural insights of Marxism with the empirical clarity of CasP, not by erasing their differences, but by metabolizing their strongest claims.
Access status: Open Access ,
ריאיון עם שמשון ביכלר (Interview with Shimshon Bichler)
(2003) Bichler, Shimshon; Honig-Parnass, Tikva
מהריאיון: "בתוכנית אוסלו היו הרבה פנטזיות מגלומניות, מהסוג ששמעון פרס אוהב להפיץ. מאחר שאי אפשר היה סתם ככה, פשוט ולעניין, לסגת מכל השטחים, ובעיקר לפנות בבת-אחת את כל ההתנחלויות והתשתית הענקית שבוזבזה שם במשך עשרות שנים – היו מוכרחים להפוך את הדבר הפשוט הזה, כמו למשל (רעיון מטורף לחלוטין) לאפשר מעט עצמאות לפלסטינים במעט שטח שנותר להם, לעניין שולי. לא. הרי לא יתכן שעסקי 'הביטחון הלאומי' שכה שקדו לטפח, יתגלו כסתם בועה: היה צריך שמאחורי העניין הפשוט הזה תהיה תוכנית גדולה, 'חזון', שמאחוריו מסתתרת תוכנית עיקרית, מהממת ומתוחכמת, גלובלית ומה לא. מעט מאד בני-אדם טרחו לקרוא את מסמכי אוסלו ופאריס, והאמת היא שההסכמים הללו, אם אפשר לכנות בשם כזה תכתיבים בין כובש לנכבש, הוכנו באופן גרוע, בחשאי, על ידי בני אדם שכל חייהם הסתכמו באינטריגות עלובות. אבל אין לכך שום קשר לעניין העיקרי: הסכם בין ישראל והפלסטינים אינו זקוק ליותר מעמוד אחד מודפס, שבו הישראלים מכירים במדינה עצמאית פלסטינית לפחות בגבולות 4 ביוני 1967, ומתחייבים להסתלק מכל השטחים תוך 24 שעות. השאר, כמו כדאיות של שני צדדים ריבוניים ועצמאיים, להגיע לשיתוף פעולה מסחרי, או הסדרי סחר ותנועה, זה כבר עניין למשא-ומתן מאוחר, ובתנאי ששני הצדדים מעוניינים בכך."
Access status: Open Access ,
Monetary Expansionism, Global Commodity Prices, and Global Inequality
(2025) Kim, Jongchul
An early analysis of the imperialist implications of the surge of global commodity prices was conducted in 2014 by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler. However, their analysis did not consider how the US monetary and fiscal expansionist policies have contributed to the rise of global commodity prices. This article fills this gap. Arguably, under the current international fiat money system established in the early 1970s, the US has had the opportunity to use artificial money-creation mechanisms to enjoy the wealth produced by people outside the US without cost. This article argues that the US monetary and fiscal expansionist policies, including quantitative easing, are cases where the US takes advantage of such an opportunity and that the free transfer of wealth is a cause of the surge in global commodity prices.
Access status: Open Access ,
Capital as Power in the 21st Century. A Conversation
(2025) Hudson, Michael; Nitzan, Jonathan; Di Muzio, Tim; Fix, Blair
On December 3, 2024, Michael Hudson met with capital-as-power researchers Jonathan Nitzan, Tim Di Muzio and Blair Fix to discuss the intersections between their two lines of research. YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBOU4xBg2pA
Access status: Open Access ,
Tracking the Fortunes of Corporate Psychedelia
(2024) Hager, Sandy Brian
In recent years, new biotech companies have emerged hoping to cash in on a medical psychedelics market expected to be worth billions. This article examines the business models of two of the largest such companies. According to conventional wisdom, for-profit players are best positioned to deliver new cures for mental illness at scale because of their ability to tap capital markets. The analysis presented here challenges this story on two counts. First, it argues that profitability in the pharmaceutical business depends not on rapid scaling per se, but on controlling and restricting access to maintain pricing power. Second, it claims that the unruliness of sychedelics – manifested in the presence of cheap generics, murky intellectual property claims, and high costs of administration – raises serious questions about their commercial viability. The article then assesses the sector’s embrace of Johnson and Johnson’s patented form of esketamine, Spravato, as its prototype for commercialization. Spravato may provide a pathway for profitability, but patients must contend with high prices and a drug that provides only short-term relief and requires indefinite dosing. Rather than disrupt Big Pharma, corporate psychedelia replicates its main features, raising questions about its claims to tackle the mental health crisis.
Access status: Open Access ,
Earning Through Obsolescence. An Examination of Falling Household Durables Usage Lifespans in the United States 1970–2018
(2025) Dillon, Sean
This study examines the declining usage lifespan of household consumer durables in the United States between 1970 and 2018, situating the phenomenon within a heterodox political economy framework. While mainstream economic narratives attribute the rising rate of consumer durable waste over this time to “overconsumption” driven by consumer materialism, this study challenges that perspective through an empirical analysis of waste generation, consumer spending, depreciation rates, and corporate profitability within the consumer durables sector. The findings reveal a significant divergence between rising levels of durable goods waste and relatively stable per capita ‘real’ consumer spending, suggesting that falling product longevity is largely not demand-driven. Instead, the data indicates that manufacturers have profitably reduced product durability, as evidenced by increasing rates of geometric depreciation and a rise in total sectoral earnings without proportional increases in earnings margins. These findings align with the theory of “planned obsolescence,” whereby firms deliberately shorten product lifespans to drive replacement purchases and sustain profit growth. Given that this strategy cannot be adequately explained within conventional neoclassical economic models, the article draws the Veblenian theory of “strategic sabotage” to conceptualize the deliberate underutilization of technological capacity in pursuit of pecuniary gains. The study provides both empirical and theoretical evidence that the decline in consumer durables product longevity observed between 1970 and 2018 is structurally embedded in capitalist production of consumer durables goods.
Access status: Open Access ,
Military Spending and Economic Growth: A 2025 Update
(2025) Bichler, Shimshon; Nitzan, Jonathan
The start of the second millennium brought a growing sense that capitalism was becoming more ‘authoritarian’ and ‘illiberal’, with various indicators suggesting that ‘democracy’ is waning around the globe, that the protection of human and civil rights is in retreat and that the number and intensity of military conflicts is on the rise. This angst is now greatly amplified by the domestic and foreign policies of the new Trump administration. Having returned to office in early 2025, Trump promptly launched a highly publicized crusade against his country’s ‘deep state’, with blasé disregard for its laws and con-stitution; announced his intentions to retreat from his country’s traditional postwar role as leader and protector of the Western world; and embarked on seemingly unhinged acts against friends (Canada, Mexico, Denmark, Panama and, primarily, Ukraine) while cozying up to long-term foes (Russia). One possible consequence of this growing angst is a global ‘arms race’.
Access status: Open Access ,
Partisan Politics and the Road to Plutocracy
(2025) Fix, Blair
As billionaires dance in the halls of the second Trump administration, it’s haunting how well Plutarch’s two-thousand-year-old words describe the state of American politics. It’s a barren landscape of plutocratic insatiability. How did it get this way? One way to tell the story is to look at the battle between the ruling class and everyone else — a battle which elites are obviously winning. But another way to understand the struggle is to look at the war between factions of the ruling class — a battle that plays out largely within partisan politics. On this partisan front, the historical backdrop is that for forty years, Republicans have been playing a political shell game. As Jay Michaelson puts it, Republicans “appear populist … but act plutocrat”. What’s disorienting is that this shell game has worked. Although Republicans have historically governed for the benefit of the rich, they have recently rebranded themselves (successfully, it seems) as the party of the working class. Is this new Republican messaging sincere? Or is it gaslighting? Well, Trump’s billionaire-stacked administration is quickly answering the question for us. However, this essay is not primarily about Trump, nor is it focused on the future. Instead, it’s a journey into how the partisan politics of the past have shaped the American plutocracy of today. The essay consists of a deep dive into the realm of US state politics. The story will be simple and repetitive. Across states, I will measure the degree to which Republicans control each state’s legislature. Then I will observe, in a statistical sense, the policies and social outcomes that follow. That’s it. Of course, I’ll add commentary along the way. But the goal is to let the evidence speak for itself. And what leaps from the data is this: Republican control of state legislatures is systematically associated with the rich being (and becoming) richer. In short, American plutocracy seems to be a quintessentially Republican affair. And that’s not all. As we journey into the depths of US state politics, the plot will thicken. We’ll find striking partisan differences in the language used in state bills. We’ll see the many ways that Republicans help the rich and hurt workers. We’ll see the impact partisan politics have on the population as they work longer hours with less security. We’ll see the toll that Republican control takes on human welfare. And we’ll study the ways that Republicans gain power, despite enacting policies that are self-evidently bad for the majority. And we’ll reflect on the reasons that plutocracy can become self-reinforcing. Think of the evidence that follows as a case study in how the machinery of democracy can be used to benefit the few and harm the many. It’s a warning from the past about tactics that will no doubt be intensified by Trump and his posse of plutocrats.
Access status: Open Access ,
The American Housing Crisis: A Theft, Not a Shortage
(2024) Fix, Blair
If mainstream economics teaches us one lesson, it’s that when something becomes unaffordable, it’s because of a shortage. And that brings me to the US housing crisis. In America, housing is getting less affordable. So there must be a short supply, right? Not necessarily. You see, shortage is not the only route to unaffordability. There’s also … theft. Here’s how it works.
Access status: Open Access ,
From Commodity to Asset: The Truth Behind Rising House Prices
(2024) Fix, Blair
When it comes to rising house prices, nearly everyone has a theory about the cause. There’s ‘too much foreign money’. There are ‘too many immigrants’. There’s ‘too little construction’. And so on. What unites these explanations is that they appeal, in some way, to the idea that rising prices are caused by a mismatch between supply and demand. And surely that’s true, right? Yes, it is true … in the same way that death is caused by dying. But of course, that’s circular logic. And so it goes with ‘supply and demand’. Since prices are always caused by the interplay between what we want and what we can get, evoking ‘supply and demand’ leads us pretty much nowhere. Worse, it often puts the focus on short-term patterns, when the real scientific payoff lies in studying price trends over the long term. Speaking of the long term, many people assume that rising house prices are a recent problem. But in the United States, the pattern dates to the early 1970s. For almost a century before that, US house prices had been dropping against income. And so Americans treated their house like a ‘commodity’ — a thing they bought to live in. But from 1972 onward, house prices began to slowly appreciate against income. And so Americans started to treat their house like an ‘asset’. It’s this transformation — from commodity-like depreciation to asset-like appreciation — that is the real story of house prices. And the truth is that this story can’t be understood using popular scapegoats. To see why US house prices headed south and then north, we need to forget about supply and demand and instead, peer into the belly of industrialism. We need to ground house prices in the use of energy. Now, if going from prices to energy sounds like a non sequitur, I’ll show you why it makes sense. And I’ll show you how, when we bring debt into the energy fold, we can explain almost all of the historical variation in US house prices. The lesson here is simple yet disturbing. When it comes to rising house prices, the trend has less to do with a ‘supply crisis’, and more to do with basic physical limits to industrial supply chains.
Access status: Open Access ,
A Tour of the Jevons Paradox: How Energy Efficiency Backfires
(2024) Fix, Blair
According to mainstream thinking, efficiency is a potent tool for conservation — a way to live better while using fewer resources. Unfortunately, this simple narrative is contradicted by overwhelming evidence. Instead of spurring conservation, efficiency seems to stimulate the consumption of more resources. This paper surveys the evidence for efficiency backfire and concludes that efficiency is a general tool for catalyzing technological sprawl.
Access status: Open Access ,
Re-Considering the Origins of the Climate Emergency: War, Finance, and the State
(2023) Di Muzio, Tim; Dow, Matthew
One of the most important and recurring debates in the field of International Political Economy and international affairs are the links between capitalism, fossil fuel energy and climate change. In these debates, the origins of our current climate emergency are rooted in how Britain became the first country to become reliant on mass production and consumption coal (fossil fuels) for economic growth, industrialization, as well as social reproduction. Britain becoming a coal-fire capitalist-imperial global empire deeply influenced and structured the current world order and global political economy which is still locked-into a vicious cycle of path dependency whereby balance of power, production and social reproduction is dependent on energy, predominately fossil fuels.
Access status: Open Access ,
Measuring Hierarchy
(2024) Carbonell-Nicolau, Oriol
This paper presents a novel axiomatic approach to measuring and comparing hierarchical structures. Hierarchies are fundamental across a range of disciplines – from ecology to organizational science – yet existing measures of hierarchical degree often lack systematic criteria for comparison. We introduce a mathematically rigorous framework based on a simple partial pre-order over hierarchies, denoted as ≽H, and demonstrate its equivalence to intuitively appealing axioms for hierarchy comparisons. Our analysis yields three key results. First, we establish that for fixed-size hierarchies, one hierarchy is strictly more hierarchical than another according to ≽H if the latter can be derived from the former through a series of subordination removals. Second, we fully characterize the hierarchical pre-orders that align with ≽H using two fundamental axioms: Anonymity and Subordination Removal. Finally, we extend our framework to varying-size hierarchies through the introduction of a Replication Principle, which enables consistent comparisons across different scales.
Access status: Open Access ,
נסיכי הנפט מול קואליציית ההיי-טק (The Oil Princes versus the High-Tech Coalition)
(2024)
ספרם של שמשון ביכלר ויונתן ניצן "הדרך לעזה" נראה כמקרה בוחן פרטי וכהרחבה של טענתם הכללית בדבר מהות ההון "כמוסד השליטה במשטר הקפיטליסטי", מעבר לכאן ועכשיו. ניתן לומר שהשאלה הנידונה היא כיצד הגענו מהקהילה הקמאית השוויונית דרך "משטרי כוח" בהשראתו של אל עליון כל-יכול, עד שלטון ההון במשטר הקפיטליסטי של ימינו. הטענה (הפסימית) היא, שמבחינתם של "אנשי התחתית", אין חדש תחת השמש ושלטון ההון הקפיטליסטי כישות זרה וכל-יכולה, איננו אלא המשך שלטון האוליגרכיות של העת העתיקה. אף על פי כן, למרות הטקסט הביקורתי, קשה שלא לראות את הסב-טקסט הניאו-מרקסיסטי של הספר. כלומר, כדיאלוג ביקורתי עם המרקסיזם. [. . .] קשה לקבל את הטענה "הגלובלית" כהסבר לכאן ועכשיו. אך "הדרך לעזה" הוא ללא ספק ספר מאתגר ומעורר מחשבה הראוי לקריאה
Access status: Open Access ,
Rentiership and Intellectual Monopoly in Contemporary Capitalism: Conceptual Challenges and Empirical Possibilities
(2024) Baines, Joseph; Hager, Sandy Brian
The concepts of rentiership and intellectual monopoly have gained increased prominence in discussions about the transformation of global capitalism in recent years. However, there have been few if any attempts to construct measures for rentiership and intellectual monopoly using firm-level financial data. The absence of such work, we argue, is symptomatic of conceptual challenges in delineating what precisely qualifies as rent, intellectual or otherwise. In place of static conceptions of rent and intellectual monopoly, we develop a dynamic framework for analyzing the processes of rentierization and intellectual monopolization and apply this framework to the analysis of the transformation of non-financial firms in the United States since the 1950s. We find that the timing and intensity of rentierization and intellectual monopolization differs significantly across sector and firm size and is heavily mediated by the uneven ramifications of government policy across companies and industries. Overall, our framework illuminates the variegated landscape of corporate power in the US, and offers a useful guide for critically interrogating rentierization and intellectual monopolization in other contexts.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Road to Gaza, Part II: The Capitalization of Everything
(2024) Bichler, Shimshon; Nitzan, Jonathan
Our recent article on ‘The Road to Gaza’ examined the history of the three supreme-God churches and the growing role of their militias in armed conflicts and wars around the world. The present paper situates these militia wars in the broader vista of the capitalist mode of power. Focusing specifically on the Middle East, we show the impact these militia wars have on relative oil prices and differential oil profits and explain how the wars themselves, those who stir them and the subjects that fight them all get discounted into capitalized power.

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