Nationality Israeli | Name Shimshon Bichler Fields Political Economy | |
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School or tradition Institutional economics Influences Thorstein Veblen, Cornelius Castoriadis Books Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder Influenced by Thorstein Veblen, Cornelius Castoriadis | ||
Contributions Power theory of value | ||
Shimshon Bichler is an educator who teaches political economy at colleges and universities in Israel. Along with Jonathan Nitzan, Bichler has created an engaging power theory of capitalism and theory of differential accumulation in their analysis of the political economy of wars, Israel, and globalization.
Contents
Capital as a Mode of Power
Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan discuss the nature of contemporary capitalism. Their central argument is that the dominant approaches to studying the market – liberalism and Marxism – are as flawed as the market itself. Offering a historically rich and analytically incisive critique of the recent history of capitalism and crisis, they suggest that instead of studying the relations of capital to power we must conceptualize capital as power if we are to understand the dynamics of the market system. This approach allows us to examine the seemingly paradoxical workings of the capitalist mechanism, whereby profit and capitalization are divorced from productivity and machines in the so-called real economy.