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The term ‘exploitation’ is much used both in common parlance and as a research term when examining environmental phenomena. However, when examining the plethora of writings on the environment it quickly becomes obvious that neither is there a commonly accepted definition of the term, nor has there been a critical examination of the concept. Consequently, the term ‘environmental exploitation’ is currently poorly understood, left unexplained or undertheorized. The failure to properly comprehend the concept is a serious gap in the environmental literature which needs to be addressed since it leads, inevitably, to normative confusion and policy errors.

It is widely accepted among critical human–animal scholars that an absolute ontological distinction between humans and animals, the human–animal dualism, is an ideological construction. However, even some of the most radical animalists make use of a softer version of it when they explain animal exploitation and domination in capitalism. By criticizing the reintroduction of the human–animal dualism through the back door, I reopen the terrain for a historical–materialist explanation of bourgeois animal exploitation and domination that does not conceptualize them as a matter of species in the first place. Rather, with reference and in analogy to ecosocialist arguments on the greenhouse effect, it is demonstrated that a specific faction of capital – animal capital – which uses animals and animal products as means of production, is the root cause, key agent, and main profiteer of animal exploitation and domination in the current mode of production. Thus, the reworked concept of animal capital presented here differs from the original, postoperaist notion introduced by Nicole Shukin since it is based on a classic sociorelational and value theoretical understanding of capitalism. According to this approach, animals are integrated socioeconomically into the capitalist class society via a relation of superexploitation to capital, which can be called the capital–animal relation.

This paper presents evidence to suggest that despite obstacles that made predatory pricing essentially impossible, the National Cash Register Co. (N.C.R.) managed successfully to deploy an arsenal of non-price predatory strategies that permitted it to consolidate and maintain a nearly complete monopoly of the cash-register trade. N.C.R. took actions to raise the costs and reduce the revenues of its rivals, actions that made sense only to the extent that N.C.R. could recoup their costs through the maintenance of monopoly rents. Our analysis suggests that antitrust prosecution was a significant threat to N.C.R., and ultimately forced the company to agree to abandon its most objectionable practices.

Giorgio Agamben has used the notion of the state of exception to describe the United States’ detention camps in Cuba. Agamben argues that the use of the state of exception in the U.S. can be traced back to President Lincoln's suspension of the right of habeas corpus during the Civil War. This paper suggests that this argument obscures more relevant legal and political precedents that can be found in U.S. territorial legal history. Moreover, while Agamben's argument obscures conceptual distinctions between a state of emergency and a state of exception, his argument also provides resources that can expose the limits of liberal interpretations of the relationship between the State, the citizen, and the law.