From: dredmond at efn.org
Quoting John Mage <jmage at panix.com>:
> > So where's the increasing concentration?
>
> Just eyeballing it from a couple of recent world almanacs and one older
one:
> Aerospace
> Airlines
> Beverages
[Etc.]
Accumulation isn't the same thing as concentration. Everything I've seen on post-Civil War US trusts suggests they were far bigger as a percent of GDP and in terms of market share than their Information Age counterparts. And what's even more striking is the horizontal division of labor: firms from China, India, Eastern Europe, and Latin America are major players in the world-market. Boeing and Airbus may be the Big Two in aerospace, but they're at the apex of vast networks of decentralized suppliers.
-- DRR
^^^^
CB: In Marxist writings, "monopoly" must be thought of dialectically as "monopolizing", as a process, and as a process that has ups and downs, ebbs and flows , dare I say, coming into being, being and passing away. It is a tendency among other tendencies,developments and trends, some of which are countervailing to monopoly, or tending toward decentralization/deconcentration. ( See chapter on the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in Vol.III of _Capital_ as an analogy) Really, it is a tautology/contradiction within the logic of capitalist competition explained by Marx, because sometimes in competition, one competitor succeeds completely and the others are destroyed. Of course, the game _Monopoly_ demonstrates the principle.
Take auto. I think there were hundreds of car companies in the U.S. ( I gotta check google) in the early, entrepreneurial nineteen hundreds. So, the Big Three was some kind of culmination of a monopolizing trend, and victory of those three over a larger number of other entrepreneurs. This historical period (1900 to late 1900's) is very much in the neighborhood of Hilferding/Hobson's monopoly theorists period :>).
The Marxist theory, lets say law, law of the tendency of monopolizing does _not_ say there can't come a time when a new _tendency_ of "the" economy , transnationalization of captial (commonly referred to as "globalization"),arises and by it Japanese and Korean capital , et al. form a countervailing tendency to the tendency of monopolization, in the sense that they add a few more giant companies to the industry, so the actual concentration number goes down. This is fudged the other way too , because this transnationalization includes partial "mergers" of the U.S. based transnationals and other national based trans, as GM, Ford and Chrysler ( now Daimler) owned parts of Japanese and Korean companies.
The Leninist proposition on monopoly is _not_ that if you keep calculating the composite index of all companies to all wealth ratio that it will continuously and inexorably and monotonically go down.
We could make the whole thing a dialectical contradiction if we see transnationalization as resulting from monopolization. The spread across national borders by corps is a monopoly process that turns into its opposite when it reduces monopoly (slightly), say in the auto industry in the early 2000's.
A test will be whether in the long run, the number of auto monopolies/corporations falls again, that is a test as to whether the law of the tendency to monopoly is still expressed in capitalist auto industry.
Oh , yes I wanted to add, note that Lenin, in _Imperialism_ emphasizes that monopoly , and even imperialism, are _progressive_ processes in that they are increases in the socialization of labor (big issue with Marx and Engels) , and thereby lay the infrastructure for socialization of enterprises,( as in socialism). Thus, even Lenin's _Imperialism_ might be cited by Doug or others for support of the proposition that ...you know. In this case, transnationalization lays the "groundwork" for a world socialist system ( a worldwideweb of labor) , as monopoly laid the "groundwork" for socialist nations.
However, also note, that Lenin's practice is not to advocate the "promotion" or "support" of imperialism, which would be a form of "the worst the better" tactic , as discussed here a while ago. Lenin opposes imperialism, despite its progressive silverlining of laying the foundation for socialist organization of production.
Yes, Lenin discusses "monopoly" as a contradiction, progressive and reactionary at the same time.
Footnote: "Bicycle mechanics J. Frank and Charles E. Duryea of Springfield, Massachusetts, had designed the first successful American gasoline automobile in 1893, then won the first American automobile race in 1895, and went on to make the first sale of an American-made gasoline car the next year. Thirty American manufacturers produced 2,500 motor vehicles in 1899, and some 485 companies entered the business in the next decade. In 1908 Henry Ford introduced the Model T and William C. Durant founded General Motors."
http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/ah_006400_automobiles. htm
^^^^^^
Doug, sorry for fourth post yesterday. It was not intended to go to the list. Next time I'll try to accidently make a Freudian slip and send a love letter so everybody can be entertained. Transgressively, Charles