Mik journal, Nr. 3: Art and Politics: Case-Studies from Eastern Europe (2007) [English/Lithuanian]

“The third volume of the Art History & Criticism journal includes articles based on the proceedings of the international conference Art and Politics: Case-Studies from Eastern Europe organised by the Art Institute, Vytautas Magnus University in 26-27 October 2006. Thirty scholars – from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Czech Republic, Croatia, Romania, France, Germany, the UK, and the USA – presented papers focused upon one aspect of the European history and culture, namely the former Eastern bloc and its Soviet past as well as quotidian post-Soviet reality. Participants of the Kaunas conference discussed one of the most challenging issues of the field – art and politics.” (from Preface)

Meno istorija ir kritika / Art History & Criticism journal
Issue: Menas ir politika: Rytų Europos atvejai / Art and Politics: Case-Studies from Eastern Europe, 2007
Editor-in-chief: Vytautas Levandauskas
Publisher: Vytauto Didžiojo universitetas / Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania
ISSN 1822-4555
232 pages

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Other issues

Jonathan Nitzan, Shimshon Bichler: The Global Political Economy of Israel (2002)

Over the past century, Israel has been transformed from an agricultural colony, to a welfare-warfare state, to a globally integrated “market economy” characterised by great income disparities. What lies behind this transformation? In order to understand capitalist development, argue Bichler and Nitzan, we need to break the artificial separation between “economics” and “politics”, and think of accumulation itself as “capitalisation of power”. Applying this concept to Israel, they reveal the big picture that never makes it to the news. Diverse processes – such as regional conflicts and energy crises, ruling class formation and dominant ideology, militarism and dependency, inflation and recession, the politics of high-technology and the transnationalisation of ownership – are all woven into a single story. The result is a fascinating account of one of the world’s most volatile regions.

Publisher Pluto Press, 2002
ISBN 0745316751, 9780745316758
407 pages

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Jonathan Nitzan, Shimshon Bichler: Capital as Power. A Study of Order and Creorder (2009)

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 has ever been able to observe or measure them, and for a good reason: they don’t exist. Since liberalism and Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters most – the accumulation of capital.

This book offers a radical alternative. According to the authors, capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. It has little to do with utility or abstract labour, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Capital, the authors claim, represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape – or creorder – their society.

Written in simple language, accessible to lay readers and experts alike, the book develops a novel political economy. It takes the reader through the history, assumptions and limitations of mainstream economics and its associated theories of politics. It examines the evolution of Marxist thinking on accumulation and the state. And it articulates an innovative theory of ‘capital as power’ and a new history of the ‘capitalist mode of power’.

Publisher Routledge, London and New York, 2009
RIPE Series in Global Political Economy
ISBN 0203876326, 9780203876329
463 pages
The electronic version of this work is protected by CreativeCommons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 2.5 Canada

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