The Negative Markets of Necrocapitalism: An Economic Model of Security Goods and Trades

Abstract

The concept of necrocapitalism (Banerjee, 2008) has been a remarkable achievement in that it combines approaches from history, political economy and critical theory to describe the contemporary form of global capitalism. It is a concept that accurately depicts the militarization of civil life (Green, 1999; Hobsbawn, 2007; and Orwell, 2003) as it is experienced by people who dwell near or on the US-Mexico border (Chacon and Davis, 2006). However, necrocapitalism remains strictly conceptual since there is no theoretical basis that accounts for how markets function in necrocaptialism. To address this shortcoming a heuristic model of necrocapitalist market mechanics will be presented in this paper based on a revised version of the IS/LM model (Hicks, 1937). This modified IS/LM model will illustrate how armed conflict can be represented in commodity-form (i.e. security) and provide a complementary approach to the conceptual way of looking at necrocapitalism that is prescriptive in nature.