Arms and Oil in the Middle East: A Biography of Research

Abstract

This essay interweaves two stories—one theoretical and empirical, the other autobiographical. The first story embeds the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the broader political economy of the Middle East and the global accumulation of “capital as power.” The second story narrates the authors’ personal journey to uncover, theorize, and research this enfoldment. The essay explores and contextualizes the misleading duality of politics and economics; the link between military spending, finance, and stagflation; the concepts of “dominant capital” and “differential accumulation” and their evolution through “breadth” and “depth”; the manner in which these concepts and processes inform the political economy of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and the ways in which they help identify the key role of the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition and predict the periodic eruption of Middle East “energy conflicts.” In their explorations, the authors have encountered numerous gatekeepers who tried to derail their research as well as a few open-minded editors who sought to promote it, and it is probably fair to say that, dialectically, they have benefited from both.

Key Words:

• Capital as Power
• Differential Accumulation
• Dominant Capital
• Middle East Energy Conflicts
• Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition

Acknowledgments

Research for this paper was partly supported by the SSHRC.

Notes

1 See Rowley, Bichler, and Nitzan (1988, 1989), Bichler, Nitzan, and Rowley (1989), Nitzan, Rowley, and Bichler (1989), and Bichler, Rowley, and Nitzan (1989).

2 Our original term was the “Armadollar-Petrodollar Coalition,” but a journal referee later opined that the term “armadollar” sounded too much like armadillo, so we reluctantly replaced it with the duller yet safer “weapondollar.”

3 Fig. 1 was first published in Nitzan and Bichler (1995, 499, fig. 10b) with data ending in 1991. It was later updated in Bichler and Nitzan (2015, 64, fig. 4) with data through 2013. An earlier, nondifferential chart is given in Rowley, Bichler, and Nitzan (1989, 26, fig. 8).

4 The disproportionately high values for 2002 (+426 percent), 2007 (+892 percent), and 2008 (+1,114 percent) are due to the Fortune 500’s very low rates of return in those years.

5 In the late 1970s and early 1980s, and again during the 2000s, differential decumulation was sometimes followed by a string of conflicts stretching over several years. In these instances, the result was a longer time lag between the initial spell of differential decumulation and some of the subsequent conflicts.

6 It is important to note here that the energy conflicts have led not to higher oil profits as such but to higher differential oil profits. For example, in 1969–70, 1975, 1980–2, 1985, 1991, 2001–2, 2006–7, 2009, and 2012, the rate of return on equity of the Petro-Core actually fell; but in all cases the fall was either slower than that of the Fortune 500 or too small to close the positive gap between them, so despite the absolute decline, the Petro-Core continued to beat the average.

7 Although there was no official conflict in 1996–7, there was plenty of violence, including an Iraqi invasion of Kurdish areas and U.S. cruise missile attacks (“Operation Desert Strike”).

8 For the details underlying the individual energy conflicts as well as a broader discussion of the entire process, see Bichler and Nitzan (1996b, 2004), Nitzan and Bichler (2002, ch. 5; 2006b).

9 The rigging of the stock market was reluctantly and only partially investigated by the Bejsky Commission (see Bejsky et al. 1986). See also Nitzan and Bichler (2002, 119).

10 On the academic literature of the period, see Nitzan and Bichler (1996, 1997).

11 Although it relied solely on public sources, their book was banned by the Israeli censors.

12 As a devout Zionist, she was also enraged by many of the unpleasant facts cited in the thesis. For example, she did not like Nitzan’s reference to the 700,000 Palestinian refugees produced by the 1948 war, a number she believed to be grossly exaggerated. She also disliked some of Nitzan’s sources: for example, Israel’s most important investigative weekly, Ha’olam Hazhe, which in her view was a yellow newspaper.

13 Since the 1980s, “neo-Marxism” has been broadened to include various cultural theories associated with writers such as Gramsci, Foucault, Leotard, and Jameson. In this essay, we use the term much more narrowly to denote scientific attempts to revise and adapt Marx’s value analysis to the new age of monopoly capitalism.

14 At the global level, the price and volume of oil show little or no correlation (Bichler and Nitzan 2004, 305–6, n42).

15 For more on the issues discussed in this section, see Bichler and Nitzan (2004, 2015), Nitzan and Bichler (2006b).

16 A similar chart, focusing only on the United States, is given in Nitzan and Bichler (2002, 272, fig. 5.9).