Monopoly and competition in twenty-first century capitalism

Monthly Review

Volumn 62, Issue 11, 2011, Pages 1-39

  McChesney, Robert W ^a   Jonna, R Jamil ^b  

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

^b UNIVERSITY OF OREGON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79955776971     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.14452/mr-062-11-2011-04_1     Document Type: Review

References (191)

1. "U. S. Firms Build Up Record Cash Piles", Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2010.
2. Sam Bowles and Richard Edwards note: The term "monopoly power" refers both to the situation of a single firm (perfect monopoly) and to that of a small group of firms (oligopoly or shared monopoly); in either case, if some firm or firms can exclude others, monopoly power exists."
3. Sam Bowles and Richard Edwards, Understanding Capitalism (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 141.
4. Paul M. Sweezy, Modem Capitalism and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 8.
5. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Economics of Innocent Fraud (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 12.
6. The twenty-two barriers are: (1) capital requirements, (2) economies of scale, (3) absolute cost advantages, (4) product differentiation, (5) sunk costs, (6) research and development intensity, (7) asset specificity, (8) vertical integration, (9) diversification by conglomerates, (10) switching costs in complex systems, (11) special risks and uncertainties, (12) information asymmetries, (13) formal barriers set up by government, (14) preemptive action by incumbents, (15) excess capacity, (16) selling expenses, including advertising, (17) segmenting of the market (18) patents, (19) exclusive control over strategic resources, (20) taking actions that raise rivals" costs, (21) high product differentiation, and (22) secrecy about competitive conditions. William G. Shepherd, The Economics of Industrial Organization (Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1997), 210.
7. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 777-80.
8. Simon Johnson, The Bill Daley Problem", The Huffington Post, January 11, 2011.
9. Joel Magnuson, Mindful Economics (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 283-87;
10. Barry C. Lynn, Cornered. The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (Hoboken, New Jersey" John Wiley and Sons, 2010), 42-52.
11. On monopolistic pricing under the specific conditions of monopsony, see Josef Steindl, Economic Papers, 1941-88 (New York: St Martin's Press, 1990), 309-10.
12. Eric A. Schutz, Markets and Power (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), 80-81.
13. Lawrence J. White, "Aggregate Concentration in the Global Economy: Issues and Evidence", Stern School of Business, New York University, Economic Working Papers, EC-03-13 (2003), 3-4, http://archive.nyu.edu.
14. Today's giant corporations can be seen as pursuing a twofold, interrelated strategy of the pursuit of maximum sales revenue and maximum profitability, which converge over the long-run, since larger market share provides the basis for higher monopoly profits, and higher profits are used to expand market share. See Peter Kenyon, "Pricing", in Alfred S. Eichner, ed., A Guide to Post-Keynesian Economics (White Plains, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1979), 37-38.
15. "Fortune 500: Profits Bounce Back", Fortune, April 15, 2010, CNNMoney com.
16. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 97-98.
17. Paul M. Sweezy, The Triumph of Financial Capital", Monthly Review 46, no. 2 (June 1994):1-11.
18. Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Random House, 2000), 13.
19. John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (New York: New American Library, 1967)
20. James K. Galbraith, The Predator State (New York: Free Press, 2008), 115-25.
21. Richard B. Du Boff and Edward S. Herman, "Mergers, Concentration, and the Erosion of Democracy", Monthly Review 53, no. 1 (May 2001):14-29. (Pubitemid 33610113)
22. "M&A Deals Hit Record $1.57 Trillion in 2007", New York Times, December 21, 2007.
23. World Motor Vehicle Production, 2009, OICA Correspondents Survey without double counts, http://oica.net/wpcontent/uploads/ranking-2009.pdf.
24. "Global 500 2010", moneycnn.com (accessed February 20, 2011). Data is for fiscal year 2009. Japan Post Holdings, Sinopec, State Grid, and China Petroleum were not included in the top twenty-five here, since state-owned, rather than private, companies.
25. Samir Amin, The Law of Worldwide Value (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010, 110-11, 118.
26. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 119-20.
27. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 120. Definitions of monopoly and competition similar to Friedman's can be found in the National Resources Committee, The Structure of the American Economy (1939)
28. directed by Gardiner Means, which observed that the term "monopoly" could be "used on the whole to refer to situations in which sufficient control would be exercised over price by an individual producer or by a colluding group of producers to make possible monopoly profits, i.e., profits above the rate necessary to induce new investment in other industries not subject to monopoly control." Conversely, "a situation was in general classified as competitive if there was insufficient control over price to make monopoly profits possible." For Means, this suggested that monopoly was pervasive in the key sectors of the U. S. economy Gardiner C. Means, ed., The Structure of the American Economy, Part 1 (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1939), 139.
29. Marx, Capital, 776-81;
30. Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital (London; Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981);
31. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932);
32. V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1939), 88.
33. The natural result would be something closer to the price structure of a single monopolist which, rather than producing up to the point that marginal cost equals price, instead produces to where marginal cost equals marginal revenue, leading to higher prices and lower output
34. Joseph A Schumpeter, Essays (Cambridge: Addison-Wesley, 1951), 47-72;
35. and Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942), 90-91.
36. Joan Robinson, The Economics of Imperfect Competition (London: Macmillan 1933);
37. Edward Chamberlain, The Theory of Monopolistic Competition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933).
38. "Monopolistic competition" is often used in neoclassical economics to refer to a realm of small and medium firms, excluding almost by definition the typical firm structure of oligopoly. Chamberlin, who himself introduced the term "oligopoly" to economics, is clear that such a separation was not his intention. Edward Hastings Chamberlin, Towards a More General Theory of Value (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 31-42.
39. See also Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978, 415.
40. Paul M. Sweezy, "Demand Under Conditions of Oligopoly", The Journal of Political Economy 47, no. 4 (August 1939):568-73;
41. Gavin C. Reid, The Kinked Demand Curve Analysis of Oligopoly (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981);
42. John M. Blair, Economic Concentration: Structure, Behavior and Public Policy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 468.
43. John E. Elliott Comparative Economic Systems (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey-Prentice Hall, 1973), 62-63;
44. Eric A Schutz, Markets and Power (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), 7.
45. J. R. Hicks, Value and Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 83-84.
46. See John Bellamy Foster, The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986), 53-55.
47. George J. Stigler, Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 95.
48. For a scholarly treatment of the TNEC monopoly studies, see Inger Stole, Advertising at War: Business, Consumers, and Government Policies during the Second World War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming, 2012).
49. Adolph A. Berle, and Gardiner C. Means, The Modem Corporation and Private Property (New York: Macmillan, 1932);
50. Arthur Robert Bums, The Decline of Competition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1936);
51. Roosevelt quoted in Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 412.
52. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 83, 87-106;
53. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), 7.
54. On Schumpeter's larger system of thought see John Bellamy Foster, The Political Economy of Joseph Schumpeter: A Theory of Capitalist Development and Decline", Studies in Political Economy 15 (Fall 1984):5-42
55. and Theories of Capitalist Transformation: Critical Notes on the Comparison of Marx and Schumpeter", Quarterly Journal of Economics 98, no. 2 (May 1983):327-31.
56. Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), 49;
57. John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), 14-15.
58. Galbraith, American Capitalism 32-44
59. The Affluent Society (New York: New American Library, 1984), 32-34
60. and The New Industrial State, 85-108;
61. Sweezy, Modem Capitalism, 33-37.
62. In The New Industrial State, Galbraith weakened his argument by attempting to substitute a notion of a planned corporate sphere governed by a technostructure for the capitalist economy itself (a view from which he later backed away). The result of this was to rigidify the U. S. economic conditions of the immediate post-Second World War period, exaggerating the independence of management in the big industrial firms from capitalist ownership and external financial influences, thereby undermining the realism that was the hallmark of Galbraithian critique.
63. Sumner H. Slichter, "The Growth of Competition", The Atlantic Monthly (November 1953):66-70.
64. See Blair's classic treatise: Economic Concentration.
65. Michal Kalecki, Theory of Economic Dynamics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965), 17-18:
66. Sweezy, Modem Capitalism, 39-41.
67. Kalecki's basic analysis of the degree of monopoly had been set out earlier in his Essays in the Theory of Economic Fluctuations (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1939).
68. It was developed further in his Selected Essays on the Dynamics of the Capitalist Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 156-64.
69. See also Steindl, Economic Papers, 1941-88, 303-16;
70. Robert A. Blecker, "International Competition, Economic Growth, and the Political Economy of the U. S. Trade Deficit", in Robert Cherry, et al., ed., The Imperiled Economy, vol. 1 (New York: Union for Radical Political Economics, 1987), 227.
71. Josef Steindl, Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976).
72. Radial Perspectives on the Economic Crisis of Monopoly Capitalism (New York: Union for Radical Political Economics, 1975).
73. On the influence of Monopoly Capital on radical political economics in the United States see Paul Attewell, Radical Political Economy Since the Sixties (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1984).
74. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 6.
75. For a statistical accounting of the tendency of actual surplus in the U. S. economy to rise in the two decades following the publication of Monopoly Capital see Michael Dawson and John Bellamy Foster, "The Tendency of the Surplus to Rise, 1963-1988", in John B. Davis, ed., The Economic Surplus in Advanced Economies (Brookfield, Vermont: Edward Elgar, 1992), 42-70.
76. These results, however, are limited by the fact that they measure actual surplus, not potential surplus (with the difference between the two having its statistical trace in unemployment/underemployment/unused capacity.)
77. Sweezy, Modern Capitalism, 41;
78. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).
79. For a general discussion of inequality and the position of labor in the contemporary political economy see Michael O. Yates, Naming the System (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003).
80. U. S. Senate, Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, Administered Prices: Steel, Committee on the Judiciary, 85th Congress Second Session, March 1958, 85-89, 97.
81. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 57-64.
82. "A Pricing System that Works Only One Way-Up" Business Week, June 15, 1957, 188-98.
83. "Buffet Says Pricing Power Beats Good Management", Bloomberg.com, February 17, 2011.
84. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 51.
85. Paul M. Sweezy, Four Lectures on Marxism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), 63-65.
86. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 73-74;
87. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 84-85.
88. Sweezy, Four Lectures on Marxism, 65-66
89. and Modem Capitalism, 45-47.
90. The hierarchy of profits associated with economic concentration and firm size has been empirically demonstrated numerous times both with respect to the United States and other advanced capitalist countries. See, for example: Bagicha Singh Minhas, An International Comparison of Factor Costs and Factor use (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Co., 1963), 54-73;
91. Josef Steindl, Small and Big Business (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1947);
92. Howard Sherman, Profits in the United States (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1968)
93. and The Business Cycle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 307-10;
94. Norman R. Collins and Lee S. Preston, "Price-Cost Margins and Industry Structure", Review of Economics and Statistics 51, no. 3 (August 1969):271-86;
95. Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 82-83, 219-31;
96. Kathleen Pulling, "Cyclical Behavior of Profit Margins", Journal of Economic Issues 12 (June 1978):287-306;
97. Joseph Bowring, Competition in a Dual Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 151-80.
98. Willard F. Mueller, "Conglomerates: A Nonindustry", in Walter Adams, ed., The Structure of American Industry (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 427;
99. William M. Dugger, Corporate Hegemony (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 17-21.
100. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 193-201.
101. Stephen Herbert Hymer, The International Operations of National Finns: A Study of Direct Foreign Investment (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1976), 25, 92-93, 117-22; (Hymer's 1960 doctoral dissertation);
102. Robert B. Cohen, et al., "General Introduction", in Stephen Hymer, The Multinational Corporation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 2-3;
103. John H. Dunning and Alan M. Rugman, The Influence of Hymer's Dissertation on the Theory of Foreign Direct Investment", American Economic Review 75, no. 2 (May 1985):228-32.
104. Hymer was closely associated in his last years with Sweezy and Magdoff at Monthly Review and wrote for the magazine. At his death in an automobile accident in 1974 at age 39, he was scheduled to be part of a debate at the United Nations Staff Club in New York, to consist of himself, Magdoff, and Sweezy in opposition to Kindleberger and other defenders of the multinationals.
105. See Charles P. Kindleberger, "Introduction", in Hymer, International Operations of National firms, xxi.
106. Charles P. Kindleberger, American Business Abroad (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 27.
107. John H. Dunning, ed., The United Nations Library on Transnational Corporations, vol. 1
108. The Theory of Transnational Corporations (New York: Routledge, 1993), 17-43.
109. Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, The Dynamics of U. S. Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 93-100.
110. For a realistic, post-Keynesian theory of the modern oligopoly see Alfred S. Eichner, The Megacorp and Oligopoly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
111. See Thomas R. Navin and Marian V. Sears, "The Rise of a Market for Industrial Securities, 1887-1902", The Business History Review 29, no. 2 (June 1955):105-38.
112. For a historical treatment of the rise of monopoly capital in the United States, including the role of finance in the process, see Richard B. du Etoff, Accumulation and Power (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1989).
113. Frederick Engels, On Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 118-20.
114. Sweezy, "The Triumph of Financial Capital", 1-11;
115. John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 63-88.
116. Similar views on the structural relation of neoliberalism to financialization can be found in a number of different left analyses. See Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, Capital Resurgent (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004), 110-18;
117. Harvey, The Enigma of Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 11.
118. Joyce Kolko, Restructuring the World Economy (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 178-81.
119. See Kolko, Restructuring the World Economy, 297-301;
120. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
121. R. H. Coase, "The Nature of the Firm: Meaning, "in Williamson and Winter, ed., The Nature of the Firm, 54.
122. See also in the same volume: Coase, "The Nature of the Firm", 18-33
123. The Nature of the Firm: Influence", 61-74
124. and Oliver E. Williamson, "Introduction", 6.
125. Coase, "The Nature of the Firm: Influence", 61-63.
126. For a critique of the Coasian theory of the firm see Keith Cowling and Roger Sugden, Beyond Capitalism (New York: St Martin's Press, 1994), 38-42.
127. Justifications for both horizontal and vertical integration of firms are often made in terms of the efficiencies associated with various economies of scale. Yet, as Schutz points out "given the pervasiveness of significant barriers to entry in real-world markets, it would be a mistake to suppose that wherever monopoly power exists in free markets (i.e., aside from cases of state intervention) it must be due to economies of scale." Logically, barriers to entry, which are assiduously cultivated by firms, would be unnecessary if their superior market power were simply the result of greater efficiency. Schutz, Markets and Power, 58.
128. Oliver E. Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies (New York: The Free Press, 1975), 258-61;
129. Herbert J. Hovenkamp, "Harvard, Chicago and Transaction Cost Economics in Antitrust Analysis", University of Iowa College of Law, Legal Research Paper, no. 10-35 (December 2010):1-35, http://ssrn.com/abstract= 1592476.
130. Dunning and Rugman, The Influence of Hymer's Dissertation on the Theory of Foreign Direct Investment" 228-32.
131. Hymer, in some of his later work, before moving more decisively into a Marxian perspective, had himself incorporated Coase's work and transactions costs. But he made it secondary within a perspective that emphasized monopoly capital abroad.
132. See Hymer, The Large Multinational Corporation", in Dunning, The Theory of Transnational Corporations, 34-43;
133. Paul Marginson, "Firms and Corporations", in Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer, The Elgar Companion to Radical Political Economy (Brookfield, Vermont: Edward Elgar, 1994), 158-61.
134. Stigler, Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist, 92, 162-63.
135. George Joseph Stigler, Kurt R. Leube, and Thomas Gale Moore, ed., The Essence of Stigler (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), 269, 284.
136. George J. Stigler, "Competition", The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1987):531-35
137. Stigler, The Organization of Industry (Homewood, Illinois: R. D. Irwin, 1968);
138. Shepherd, The Economics of Industrial Organization, 30.
139. Stigler, Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist, 102, 161-63.
140. For systematic refutations of Stigler's point on Standard Oil see Michael Perelman, Railroading Economics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006)
141. and Richard B. du Boff and Edward S. Herman, "Alfred Chandler's New Business History: A Review", Politics and Society 10, no. 1 (January 1980):100-01.
142. For a useful assertion of reality-based economics in the face of such irrealism, which he labels "Utopian economics", see John Cassidy, How Markets Fail (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2009).
143. William J Baumol, John Panzar, and Robert D. Willig, Contestable Markets and the Theory of Industry Structureo (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), xix.
144. Stephen Martin, Advanced Industrial Economics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 324;
145. Shepherd, The Economics of Industrial Organization, 30-31;
146. Edwin G. West "Monopoly", The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, vol. 3 (London: Macmillan, 1987), 540;
147. Schutz, Markets and Power, 54-58.
148. Robert H. Bork, The Antitrust Paradox (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 164;
149. Hovenkamp, "Harvard, Chicago and Transaction Cost Economics in Antitrust Analysis", 7.
150. Another area of theoretical innovation in economics that has tended to muddy the waters on the issue of monopoly was a proliferation of formal game-theory models (of which Sweezy's kinkeddemand curve analysis was recognized as a forerunner) designed to analyze imperfect competition. The majority of these studies concentrated on abstruse models and anecdotes that were far removed from real-world conditions or empirical testing. See Martin, Advanced Industrial Economics, 560-64 In a letter to one of the authors on February 14, 2011, noted industrial organization economist Eric A. Schutz confirmed our conclusions that the most important developments in the theoretical shift away from the traditional industrial organization literature and antitrust with the conservative shift in economics in the 1980s, were transaction cost economics, contestable markets, game theory, and Bork's "antitrust paradox" argument: the four pinpointed in our argument Schutz would also add a fifth: public choice theory.
151. Stigler, Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist, 104.
152. Thomas E. Weisskopf, Samuel Bowles, and David M. Gordon, Two Views of Capitalist Stagnation", Science & Society 69, no. 3 (Fall 1985):268-70.
153. Robert J. S. Ross and Kent C Trachte, Global Capitalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 38, 49, 145.
154. David Gordon, The Global Economy: New Edifice or Crumbling Foundation", New Left Review 168 (March/April 1988):24-64.
155. John Weeks, Capitalism and Exploitation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 165.
156. For other examples of such fundamentalist views see Willi Semmler, "Competition, Monopoly, and Differentials of Profit Rates", Review of Radical Political Economics 13 (Winter 1981):39-52;
157. Ben Fine and Andy Murfin, Macroeconomics and Monopoly Capitalism (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1984).
158. For responses from the perspective of monopoly capital theory see Howard J. Sherman, "Monopoly Capital vs. the Fundamentalists", in Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolffa Rethinking Marxism (Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia, 1985), 359-77;
159. Michael A. Lebowitz, Following Marx (Boston: Brill, 2009), 225-46;
160. Foster, The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism.
161. Magdoff and Sweezy, The Deepening Crisis of US. Capitalism, 28.
162. Arguing from a left standpoint (and falling prey to the ambiguity of competition), James Clifton insisted, in contradistinction to Baran and Sweezy, that: The fact that it is typically the modem corporation rather than the individual capitalist that pursues this search [for profits] today does not at all imply a lessening of competition in the capitalist economy.... It seems clear that the large firms which dominate the economic process as a whole cannot be so characterized [as monopolies] for that process [the struggle between large firms] is a highly competitive one.
163. James A Clifton, "Competition in the Evolution of the Capitalist Mode of production", Cambridge Journal of Economics 1, no. 2(1977):143, 150.
164. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982);
165. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1994);
166. Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble (New York: Verso, 2002);
167. and Dumlnil and Levy, Capital Resurgent.
168. Harvey did include a limited discussion of the issue of monopoly capitalism in The Limits of Capital but underscored his own hesitation on the issue.
169. Thus he responded to Baran and Sweezy's contention that monopoly should be put at "the very center of the analytical effort" by writing: The abandonment of the "competitive model" certainly does entail abandoning the law of valuewhich, to their credit Baran and Sweezy are fully prepared to do. The trouble is that we cannot withdraw this, the lynchpin of Marx's analysis, without seriously questioning or compromising all of the other Marxian categories." Harvey, Limits to Capital, 141.
170. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 218-19, 23943.
171. For a critique of Chandler's work for its rejection of monopoly power as a central factor in the growth of the firm and its close relation to transaction cost analysis see Du Boff and Herman, "Alfred Chandler's New Business History", 87-110.
172. Financialization, Brenner argued, far from encouraging monopoly, was actually a decided agent of dramatically increased market competition. "Banks most obviously, but other financial bodies as well, tend to have immediately at hand, or to be able to bring together, whatever amount of capital is necessary to enter any field that is displaying an unusually high profit rate." Moreover, "firms can resort to bank finance with particular ease." Brenner added: "The upshot is that more than temporary monopolies are difficult to maintain, without direct political action by governmental authorities to sustain them by controlling entry (and, of course, the tendency over the last couple of decades has been in the opposite direction, toward deregulation). "Stigler could not have put it better! Robert Brenner, "Competition and Class", Monthly Review 51, no. 7 (December 1999):35.
173. See especially Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, The End of Prosperity (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977)
174. The Deepening Crisis of U. S. Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981)
175. Stagnation and the Financial Explosion (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987)
176. and The Irreversible Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1988).
177. Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 177.
178. Magdoff and Sweezy, The Deepening Crisis of U. S. Capitalism, 23-30.
179. Schutz, Markets and Power, 66-67.
180. Keith Cowling, Monopoly Capitalism (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1982), 130-34.
181. Keith Cowling, "Monopoly Capitalism and Stagnation", in Tracy Mott, Nina Shapiro, eds., Rethinking Capitalist Development Essays on the Economics of Josef Steindl (New York: Routledge, 2005), 155-66.
182. Doug Dowd, Inequality and the Global Economic Crisis (London: Pluto Press, 2009), 31-32, 67-72
183. and Capitalism and Its Economics: A Critical History (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 89-90, 168-99.
184. Samir Amin, Seize the Crisis! Monthly Review 61. no. 7 (December 2009):3.
185. We have in mind here such works as Duménil and lévy, Capital Resurgent, Anwar Shaikh, "The First Great Depression of the 21st Century", in Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, and Vivek Chibber, eds., The Crisis This Time (London: The Merlin Press, 2010), 44-63;
186. and Robert Brenner, "What is Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America: The Origins of the Current Crisis", Center for Social Theory and Comparative History, Institute for Social Science Research
187. UC los Angeles, October 2, 2009. (This is the Prologue to the Spanish translation of the author's Economics of Global Turbulence [Verso, 2006] published by AK Press, 2009.)
188. We are now seeing in just the last few years works bringing all of these elements together, making for compelling results. See Harvey, The Enigma of Capital;
189. Amin, The Law of Worldwide Value;
190. Michael Perelman, Railroading Economics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006);
191. John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff in The Great Financial Crisis.