I need some help with this concept. If you want to post to me offlist instead of using up quota that is cool.
> This perspective, outlined in Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital, argued that Marx's "law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall" was no longer directly applicable to the monopoly capitalist economy that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, and had to be replaced by a "law of the tendency of surplus to rise"-where surplus was defined as the difference between the wages of production workers and total value added.
Ok, my understanding (don't laugh if I make too many mistakes or at my econ 101 approach) -- that the more value I add as a worker to a product, the better for the owner. So he is constantly trying to figure out how to get more value out of me without increasing my wages/benefits. Like the new hires at the supermarkets who will get lower starting salaries.
Now, in monopolistic capitalist systems, the tendency is for the owners to keep having more and more value added to a product without facing an equivalent rise in wage/benefits for the workers who are making that value in the first place. Monopolies help in that workers have fewer options of where to work and there will not be wage/benefit competition for workers.
Unrestricted free markets hurt since producers will keep trying to undercut each other and will, therefore, offer lower wages/benefits to keep costs down. Eventually the free market will have losers and the winners who are left will tend to monopoly.
Brian Dauth Queer Buddhist Resister