Carrol Cox wrote:
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > 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?
>
> It has been many years since I last reread Lenin's *Imperialism*, but as I
> understood it at the time one of its central concerns was to argue that monopoly
> did NOT eliminate competition -- i.e. that imperialism did not require any
> revision of marxism. Kautsky, on the other hand, argued that monopoly would
> develop to global cooperation of capitalists rather than competition, and that
> therefore capitalism had overcome all internal contradictions; and therefore the
> time for revolution had passed, the critique of capitalism and been reduced to a
> MORAL rather than a material critique, etc. etc.
>
> Capitalism is by its nature competitive; IF anything that could be called state
> capitalism could come into existence, even that would be fundamentally
> competitive. The elimination of competition is very nearly by definition the
> elimination of capitalism, and the concepts of non-competitive capitalism OR
> competitive (i.e. market) socialism are oxymorons.
>
> Carrol