Following Galbraith, I was arguing that these "monopolies" which Marx urged us not to forget would be advanced machine making industries (Galbraith's K sector) since they'll enjoy strong demand as the companies that first assimilate these machines will enjoy exceptional profit, though most of that exceptional profit will have been passed on to the machine maker (or machine maker of machines) through relations of exchange.
The prospect of these gains in exchange will inspire fierce competition and productivity gains in the capital goods sector (including that segment that produces capital goods for the production of capital goods)--Henryk Grossmann first noted this. As I understand Galbraith, since the market for capital, as opposed to consumer, goods is quite limited, only a few firms are needed to service it and will survive. To be one of these firms is equivalent to winning the lottery. Galbraith says something about their being able to set their reservation price (?)--don't remeber.
As James O Connor has further emphasized, the demand for these advanced means of production will become even stronger in deflationary periods since the need to increase relative surplus value has become acute--the profits and prospects of the machine makers should rise relative to machine users who will be passing excess profits on simply because the latest machine will allow only the first assimilators, usually fellow national firms, to maintain or not lose much profitability as co-respective competition breaks down; Jim O'C calls this accumulation through crisis. Seems quite relevant.
In short, industrial divergence (NASDAQ/tech vs. Dow Jones/consumer goods/Proctor and Gamble) is to be expected, though the divergence can evidently go way too far!
Yours, Rakesh
>So do you think "lengthen the working day" means move production to places
>around the globe so that somewhere there is always surplus value being
>generated? Or is this another way of talking about longer single-time-zone
>days?
I just meant the average working day doesn't shorten, even gets extended as technological advance accelerates. This is the great paradox that so puzzled John Stuart Mill.