>> From: "christian a. gregory" <driver at nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu>
>> ... he seems to bank on the notion of competition as
>> a way of describing the historical evolution of economic fields--of the
>> "progress" of forces of development--but doesn't, from what i can tell, say
>> a whole lot about the tendency toward monopoly that subtends that...
>
>Why is this necessarily true? The ability of capital to
>conglomeratize and jump from one to another circuit means that
>monopolistic processes in particular sectors are perfectly consistent
>with intensively competitive processes throughout the economy, right?
Yeah, I worry about how lots of lefties play down competition. Just the other night, I interviewed Martin Khor of the Third World Network in Penang on the radio, and he mocked the use of free market rhetoric in a world of monopolies and market manipulation. I wanted to hear about what Malaysia was up to, so I didn't challenge him, but economies now are more competitive than they were 20 or 30 years ago, no?
Doug