Skip to content
LPE Originals

Why Antitrust Reform Matters

By

In the recent exchange between the Marxists and the antitrusters, much of the disagreement has turned on different understandings of the project of antitrust reform. What is its animating goal? Is antitrust a substitute or complement to other forms of regulation? And how does antitrust relate to broader political movements? Identifying rival stances that one might take on these questions can help clarify this debate, while also showing how antitrust law can serve as an instrument for democratizing economic life.
LPE Originals

Facing the Limits

By

In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value the natural world. Yet the lesson of this exploration is much broader: that capitalism imposes fundamental limits on our collective freedom.
LPE Originals

Is Climate Change an Externality?

By

Environmental harms are often cast as externalities, even by those seeking to emphasize their urgency. Yet the major modern environmental statutes, written before America’s neoliberal turn toward Coasean thinking, expressly rejected the use of economic analysis in designing pollution regulation. What does this history teach us, and how might our thinking shift if we rejected the idea that climate change is best thought of as an externality?
LPE Originals

What Can Politics Make of Nature?

By

Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts argues that capitalism limits our freedom to decide how to value the nonhuman world. Politics, as the domain in which we choose the terms of our collective life, has a special role to play in moving beyond these limitations. But what is Battistoni’s conception of politics, and how big is the effective space that the turn to politics opens up for such choice?
LPE Originals

LPE Without Borders: Lessons from the Global South

By

Law and political economy scholarship, immersed in a particular history of Northern law and capitalism, has tended to focus on US law and policy, with occasional excursions into Europe. But in a world where imperialist ideas and technologies tend to circle back to the metropole, and where the periphery appears to be the future of the center, the Global South has much to teach LPE about law, capitalism, and development.
LPE Originals

When Nature is Worthless

By

Under capitalism, the social domination of nature occurs through and is mediated by the commodity form. Certain portions of non-human nature can be valued, but only when they are transformed into commodities in the course of the capitalist production process. Other portions are not even commodifiable; the biological and physical processes subtending our existence are largely illegible to capitalist subjects qua capitalist subjects, and so are ignored or disdained even as they collapse.
LPE Originals

In the Shadow of Commodification

By

While capitalism is typically said to commodify everything, much of what makes up our world isn’t commodified at all. It instead appears as a free gift: a social form that describes the condition of usefulness lacking value. The idea of the free gift can give us a deeper understanding of the environmental problems that plague contemporary capitalism. It can also help us better understand capitalism itself.
LPE Originals

Marx, Antitrust, and the Logic of Capital

By

Antitrust may promise to tame corporate power, but it leaves untouched the deeper logic of capitalism that compels production for profit’s sake. In this sense, antitrust is not voluntarist enough, choosing to fight capital with one hand tied behind its back. At the same time, however, antitrust places too much faith in law as a source of normative authority and in an administrative state whose legitimacy is evaporating before our eyes.
LPE Originals

Capitalism and Democracy: Always, Weimar, and Now

By

In the current moment, it is not a crisis of capitalism that challenges democracy, but its triumph. For this reason, our political-economic situation is quite different from that of Weimar Germany, whatever continuities and similarities may exist.
LPE Originals

Anti-Monopolism as an Ideology of the Left

By

Some on the left dismiss anti-monopolism as a distraction from the core conflict between labor and capital. But this view misunderstands both history and strategy: antitrust has long been a tool for democratizing economic power, and it remains essential for resisting attempts to control economic production wherever and whenever it occurs.
LPE Originals

Predistribution and the Law and Economics of Income Inequality

By

Law and Economics scholars argue that if income redistribution is to happen at all, it should occur exclusively through the tax system, rather than through supposedly less efficient methods, such as the minimum wage, collective bargaining, or housing regulation. Yet even by their own lights, these arguments fail: in many cases, predistributive policies are actually more efficient than the tax and transfer system. More fundamentally, to address economic inequality, we must move beyond narrow issues of distribution and transform the mode of production itself.
LPE Originals

Rebuilding State Authority In A Post-Trump America

By

In the ruins of the administrative state after Trump, many on the left see an opportunity to design a New Deal-type reconstruction agenda. But building state capacity requires a government that is seen as legitimate, and it is precisely the erosion of legitimacy in the eyes of the public that has enabled Trump to carry out his deconstructive agenda.
LPE Originals

The Laws of the Market: A Response to Winant

By

Antitrust law is important not only for its potential in reforming our current economic system, but also analytically, because of law’s irreducible role in structuring economic competition and coordination. Contra any picture of markets operating via quasi-automatic mechanisms, the organization and operations of any market are as much a product of contingent rules as any law of nature.