Monopoly-finance capital and the paradox of accumulation

Monthly Review

Volumn 61, Issue 5, 2009, Pages

  McChesney, Robert W ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77950116706     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. Paul Krugman, "Averting the Worst," New York Times, August 10, 2009. Go back
2. Thomas I. Palley, America's Exhausted Paradigm (Washington, D.C: New America Foundation, 2009), 32, www.newamerica.net. Go back
3. Larry Elliott, "Comic-Book Economics and the Markets," The Guardian, July 6, 2009.
4. See also John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009). Go back
5. Elliott, "Comic-Book Economics." Go back
6. The next few pages draw heavily on Paul M. Sweezy, Four Lectures on Marxism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), 36-38. Go back
7. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1942), 90. Go back
8. Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005. For an opposing view,
9. see John Bellamy Foster, "The Imperialist World System," Monthly Review 59, no. 1 (May 2007), 1-16. Go back
10. Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 245;
11. Sweezy, Four Lectures, 34-36.
12. See also Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (New York: Vintage, 1981), 352-53. Go back
13. J. B. Clark, "Introduction," in Karl Rodbertus, Overproduction and Crisis (New York: Scribner, 1898) 15. Clark himself suggested in the same passage that, while this posed no absolute contradiction, it was nevertheless "an unreal case." Go back
14. Sweezy, Four Lectures, 39. Go back
15. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 108. Go back
16. Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, The End of Prosperity (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 15-20. Go back
17. The classic "kinked-demand curve" treatment of oligopolistic pricing is to be found in Paul M. Sweezy, "Demand Under Conditions of Oligopoly," Journal of Political Economy 47 (1939) 568-73. Go back
18. Josef Steindl, Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 9-14. Go back
19. Martin Mayer, Madison Avenue (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), xiii. Go back
20. On the role of advertising see Robert W. McChesney, John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Inger L. Stole, "The Sales Effort and Monopoly Capital," Monthly Review, 60, no. 11 (April 2009), 1-23. Go back
21. Henry Ford Il quoted in Barry Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet (New York: Free Press, 1992), 80-81. Go back
22. See John Bellamy Foster, Harry Magdoff, and Robert W. McChesney, "The New Economy: Myth and Reality," Monthly Review 52, no. 11 (April 2001), 1-15. Go back
23. Michal Kalecki, Theory of Economic Dynamics (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1954), 161. Go back
24. Joseph A. Schumpeter, "Depressions," in Douglas V. Brown, et al., The Economics of the Recovery Program (New York: McGraw Hill, 1934), 3-21. Go back
25. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: Macmillan, 1973), 249. Go back
26. Alvin H. Hansen, Full Recovery or Stagnation? (New York: W.W Norton, 1938). Go back
27. Alvin H. Hansen, "The Stagnation Thesis," in American Economic Association, Readings in Fiscal Policy (Homewood, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin, 1955), 549;
28. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Business Cycles, vol. 2 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1939), 1032-1050. Go back
29. Robert Heilbroner, The Future as History (New York: Harper an Brothers, 1960), 134. Go back
30. Joan Robinson, Essays in the Theory of Economic Fluctuations (London: Macmillan, 1962), 54. Go back
31. Susan Strange and Roger Tooze, eds., The International Politic of Surplus Capacity (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981). Go back
32. Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Income and Product Accounts, Table 1.1.1. Go back
33. See Magdoff and Sweezy's The Dynamics of U.S. Capitalism (1972),
34. The End of Prosperity (1977),
35. The Deepening Crisis of U.S. Capitalism (1981 ),
36. Stagnation and the Financial Explosion (1987), and
37. The Irreversible Crisis (1988) - all published by Monthly Review Press. Go back
38. Paul M. Sweezy, "The Triumph of Financial Capital," Monthly Review46, no. 2 (June 1994), 8. Go back
39. Hyman Minsky, Can "It" Happen Again? (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1982), 94-95. Go back
40. Foster and Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis, 121 ;
41. Henry Kaufman, The Road to Financial Reformation (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, 2009), 161. Go back
42. Kaufman, The Road to Financial Reformation, 174;
43. Federal Reserve Board of San Francisco, FRBSF Economic Letter, January 19, 2007. Go back
44. Fourteen of the fifteen major financial crises since the 1970s are listed in Kaufman, The Road to Financial Reformation, 134. An additional one was the financial crash in Japan in 1990 that led to a decade or more of stagnation. Go back
45. Kaufman, The Road to Financial Reformation, 57;
46. Peter Gowan "U.S. Hegemony Today," in John Bellamy Foster and Robert W, McChesney, eds., Pox Americana (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 57-76. Go back
47. Kaufman, The Road to Financial Reformation, 67, 97-103, 229. Go back
48. On the role of military spending see John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Robert W. McChesney, "The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending," Monthly Review60, nc 5 (October 2008), 1-19. Go back
49. On the repressive aspects of the neoliberal state see James K. Galbraith, The Predator State (New York: The Free Press, 2008),
50. and Hannah Holleman, Robert W. McChesney, John Bellamy Foster, and R. Jamil Jonna, "The Penal State in an Age of Crisis," Monthly Review 61, no. 2 (June 2009), 1-17.
51. On the class struggle, see Michael D. Yates, Why Unions Matter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009). Go back
52. In his last book, John Kenneth Galbraith declared that the "renaming of the system" as "the market system" in neoliberal ideology was little more than a circumvention of reality, a "not wholly innocent fraud." Related to this, in his view, was the abandonment within the mainstream (and even among much of the left) of the concept of "monopoly capitalism." John Kenneth Galbraith, The Economics of Innocent Fraud (Boston: Houghtor Mifflin, 2004), 3-9; 12. Go back
53. Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heidi Shierholz, The State of Working America, 2008/2009 (Ithaca, New York: Corne University Press, 2009), Table 3.1 ;
54. Foster and Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis, 129-31. Go back
55. See "The Household Debt Bubble," in Foster and Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis, 27-38. Go back
56. "Financial Rescue Nears GDP as Pledges Top 12.8 Trillion," Bloomberg.com, March 31, 2009;
57. Kaufman, The Road to Financial Reformation, 213. Go back
58. "Dollar, Yen Decline as Recovering Economy Eases Refuge Appeal," Bloomberg.com, April 22, 2009. Go back
59. See, for example, "An Astonishing Rebound," The Economist, August 13, 2009. On China as the next hegemon see Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing (London: Verso, 2007). For a less sanguine view taking into account China's (and emerging Asia's relation to "transnational accumulation" see Martin HartLandsberg and Paul Burkett, "China and the Dynamics of Transnational Accumulation," Historical Materialism 14, no. 3 (2006), 3-43. Go back
60. Kaufman, The Road to Financial Reformation, 223. Go back
61. "Old Banks, New Tricks," Business Week, August 17, 2009, 20-23. Go back