Shimshon Bichler

By 2002, Bichler held a doctorate in political science, had worked as an economic correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Hadashot, and was teaching at the University of Haifa and Emek Yezreel College.[1] In 1984, he co-authored The Privileged (HaMeYuhasim) with Shlomo Frenkel; the book was published by Kadim.[1]

Bichler collaborated with Jonathan Nitzan, who in 2002 was teaching economics at York University in Canada.[1] Their publications challenged the conventional separation of economics from politics and analyzed capital in terms of power relations.[4][3]

Their Hebrew book From War Profits to Peace Dividends was published by Carmel and described in a 2002 profile as a 500-page work using graphs, diagrams, and analysis to trace Israeli capital's shift from war profits to peace dividends.[1] The authors connected the end of the Cold War with a transition away from a wartime economy and toward a liberal economy.[1]

In related analysis, Bichler and Nitzan linked arms races and wars to oil crises, rising prices, higher oil-company profits and government revenues, and renewed arms purchases.[3] They also argued that a U.S. oil-and-arms coalition influenced American foreign policy after the Vietnam War and lost influence with the end of the Cold War.[3]

In a 2002 interview, Bichler offered a broader interpretation of Israeli economic and political history. He argued that Israeli capital's interests had become tied to those of the U.S. oil-and-arms coalition and that the changing costs of occupation and war helped shift elite interests toward liberalization and the rhetoric of peace markets.[1] These claims were presented as Bichler's interpretation.[1]

The pair's 2002 book The Global Political Economy of Israel was published by Pluto Press in Sterling, Virginia, and London.[2] Their method analyzed "power units" that could be ordered quantitatively and hierarchically, while treating family holdings and cross-firm ownership networks as part of the structure of corporate power.[3]

The Internet Archive lists Capital as Power by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan with a publication date of May 29, 2012, and states that it had previously appeared as two papers: "Capital as Power: Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism" (2010) and "Differential Accumulation" (2011).[4]

The work rejects liberal and Marxist theories that quantify capital through utility or abstract labor. It calls capital "a symbolic quantification of power" representing the organized capacity of dominant capital groups to reshape—or "creorder"—society.[4] Bichler and Nitzan tie this claim to a historical account in which political economy split into economics and politics by the late nineteenth century and fragmented further into separate social sciences during the twentieth century, leaving no coherent framework for explaining capital.[4]

Their alternative rests on "dominant capital" and "differential accumulation." It also proposes a new conception of the state and capitalist mode of power, together with empirical methods based on new categories, forms of data presentation, estimates, measurements, and disaggregate accounting.[4] In a 2002 interview, Bichler linked corporate power to the ability to control production or threaten to stop it, a capacity he and Nitzan termed "sabotage."[3] The framework also directs attention to families and holding companies whose cross-firm stakes may not be visible from lists of the largest publicly traded corporations.[3]

The framework's allocation of power between corporations and states drew contemporary criticism from economist Amir Licht. He rejected the claim that multinational corporations could be treated as the dominant force governing the world, emphasizing that corporations lack the state's monopoly on force and depend on state-created order.[3]

This counterpoint identifies a central dispute in the capital-as-power approach: whether corporate ownership and profit-making power can be treated as the dominant organizing force when states retain coercive authority.[3]