Petrodollars and Profit: Rethinking Political Economy through the Middle East (Review of Bichler & Nitzan's "The Scientist and the Church")

Petrodollars and Profit: Rethinking Political Economy through the Middle East (Review of Bichler & Nitzan's "The Scientist and the Church")
Ajl, Max. (2015). Jadaliyya. 22 December. (Review; English).

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Abstract or Brief Description

FROM THE REVIEW: What if oil prices are not received, but made? What if cartels raise prices by constricting supply, and use war, legal chicanery, and international property deeds to do so? Such questions led Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, two political economists, to examine the production, distribution, and political structure of the oil business. They derived from these patterns a theory of prices and power distinct from orthodox and heterodox worldviews alike. They see prices as the result of social processes, “a symbolic quantification of power.” One of them is sabotage, or the strategic disruption of production. Power, then, is the ability to create and order the world to ensure just the right mix of sabotage and supply in order to ensure profit rates beat out those of your competitors. It is this novel, fascinating, brash, and contested theory of capitalism which they lay out in a new book, The Scientist and the Church.