Geopolitics and the ‘New’ State Capitalism

Religion and Geopolitics in the New World

Water, geopolitics and state building: the case of Israel.

The first process was geopolitical, and had to do with the need to provide security for the fledgling state from external threats. This included not only threats to the Israel’s existence, but also threats to the economic well being of its population and its capacity for future growth through the absorption of large segments of the Jewish Diaspora. Water issues were central to Israel’s geopolit...

Reinventing State Capitalism

‘State Capitalism’ in the Soviet Union

The aim of this paper is to explore the reactions to the Bolshevik Revolution of one group of critics from the left: those who saw it as ushering in a new form of capitalism. The controversy over state capitalism had both theoretical and practical significance. At the analytical level it presented an important test of Marx’s conception of historical materialism, which had been formulated in a l...

Gambling, capitalism and the state: towards a new dialectic of the risk society?

In this article I explore the relationships between commercial gambling and late capitalism. In particular, I am interested in the societal forces that produce gambling as a contemporary form of consumption,which I define as the state-sanctioned commodification of chance.As a theoretical entry point, I employ the typology of games devised by French sociologist Roger Caillois in his 1961 volume ...