Fwd: 'Gas-out' apr 7-9

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at Princeton.EDU
Sun Mar 12 12:33:40 PST 2000


Jim H wrote:


>The approach of the monopoly capital theorists was always suspect. It
>involved isolating reactionary capital (auto industry, finance etc) from
>"progressive" capital, small employers, farmers - all that populist
>stuff. The auto industry is no more or less evil than any other part of
>capital. It is the social relation that is reactionary, not a specific
>element of the production process.
>

I see here you are implicitly replying in critical fashion to my post in which I quoted Marx on isolating quasi monopolies in the world market. Perhaps you are saying that since any such isolation has politically suspect populist implications, one should simply not wonder whether there are any kinds of monopolies in the world market (even if Marx said never to forget it if we are better to understand how one nation can grow rich at the expense of another). Here we see in full force that fearless abandonment to science, no matter the political implications, you have championed.

Now the monopoly capital theorists would be Sweezy and Baran? Why have you left them unnamed? Did B and S isolate monopoly from 'progressive capital'? Do they even use the latter term? Don't recall it all, but this is probably why you left the monopoly capital theorists unnamed. Boccara may be who you had in mind. I thought Baran and Sweezy were interested in the way big corporation had risen in all markets at the expense of numerous, price taking small firms and how that had changed Marx's laws of production price and motion (putatively based on competitive relations), not so much the relation of a "reactionary" sector of monopoly capital to a "progressive" sector of competitive capital.

And in his critique of Monopoly Capital, Mattick Sr did not focus on the populist political implications of Baran and Sweezy's work. He criticized them as Marx had criticized Ricardo--that is, for not being abstract enough.Mattick never saw any reason to deny that there could be monopoly profits or that some capitals could stave falling profitability off through unequal exchange relations with other other capitals.

What he was most interested to demonstrate is that the onset of stagnation, crisis or general overproduction could not be explained however by the monopoly nature of present capitalism but ultimately only by reference to capital-labor relations *in the system as a whole* the analysis of which required heroic abstraction from inter firm relations. Not tracing crisis to horizontal inter firm relations as Baran and Sweezy and now Brenner have it but by vertical relations as Mattick had it.

Yours, Rakesh



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