Economic discourse and the capitalist order

This paper uses the concepts of business model and financial ecosystem to analyse the relation between the US capital market and corporate business. Under a capital market double standard, from 1995 to 2000, new companies with digital prospects could recover their costs from the capital market; but, after the tech stock crash in 2000, all companies were required to generate profits from the product market. This encourages a blurring of old and new firm identities, because sectoral power is increasingly necessary to secure cost recovery. But this does not imply any return to business as usual when the financial ecosystem for new technology survives the crash and large-scale venture capital investment continues. From this point of view,the new economy illustrated, concretely, the determining role of finance in the broader processes of financialization.     

Why green grabs don't work in Papua New Guinea

In recent years, private companies have acquired long-term leasehold titles to more than five million hectares of what was formerly customary land in Papua New Guinea (PNG), but hardly any of this land has been devoted to production of the four green commodities in which PNG might have some comparative advantage – sustainable palm oil, bio-ethanol, biodiversity and carbon credits. Nearly all of it is dedicated to so-called ‘agro forestry’ projects that appear to be short-term salvage logging projects justified by the promise of a purely virtual form of large-scale agricultural production. I argue that the ‘agro foresters’ have been more successful than the green investors because of a set of political and institutional factors that distinguish PNG from many of the other countries where land grabbing has become the order of the day.     

On discourse ∗

This article attempts to contribute to the theorisation of the relations between subjectivity and language through an investigation of the use of the term ‘discourse’ in the work of two linguists: Emile Benveniste and Zellig Harris. The positive aspects of Benveniste's emphasis on intersubjectivity are considered as well as the problems raised by the failure to grasp the necessary division of the subject in language. Harris's work provides formal procedures which analyse discourse independently of subjective interpretation but without a theory of institutions or ideology the constitution of the corpus to be analysed finds no justification outside a banal empiricism. The possibilities and problems of Michel Pecheux's attempt to elaborate Harris's work in relation to Althusser's theory of ideology occupies the final section of the article.