From: Louis Proyect
brad wrote: > Auto: you have the Japanese and Korean companies > taking up a larger share and China is emerging. But that is not contrary to Lenin. He said that monopolies compete with each other and ultimately the consequence is war. Now this aspect of Lenin's analysis is problematic but not the existence of competition between trusts. ^^^^^ CB: Lenin goes so far as to claim that monopoly competition is fiercer than competition in the previous stage of capitalism. Monopoly comp can be really cutthroat. One better have dialectic to understand Lenin's _Imperialism_. The concept of monopoly might (must ;smile) be thought of as a process, as an analysis of the specific fluxuations and changes, ups and downs, bubbles and bursts of capitalism.Deconcentrations of wealth occur , too. Brad looks at these deconcentrations and claims there is no monopoly, no concentrations of wealth at all. Capitalism has a tendency to create monopolies or concentrations of wealth in certain firms relatively great compared to the other piles of wealth in the industry and in the economy as a whole. Historically, specific companies that were the biggest at one stage decay, and fall. But new high levels of concentration of wealth take their place. The finance captialist concentrations of wealth at the beginning of the 20th Century were the pinnacle of international capitalism. Ironically, the concentrations in finance are the greatest today, too. Ironically, or predictably by Lenin's theory ? It might be said, maybe, that Lenin's theory in _Imperialism_ is deductively derived from Marx's thesis in the following paragraph from that profound summary of historical materialism found in the penultimate chapter of _Capital_ Vol. I. I say that because Marx puts centralization of capital, monopolization, concentration of wealth at the center of the contradiction driving the motion of the historical tendency of capitalism. "Centralization of capital" or monopolization is one of the " immanent laws of capitalistic production itself". Recall that Lenin claims that monopoly lays the groundwork for socialism. It does so by centralizing capital, increasing the overall division of labor, socialization of labor. Now we have a worldwideweb of labor, globally socialized, socalled. And it is monopolized capital that Marx claims is the fetter on socialized labor that must be burst asunder because of the incompatibility of highly socialized labor and highly privatized appropriation/expropriation, Waistline's antagonistic resolution. We'll see if it gets burst asunder anytime soon. Marx says: "As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialization of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralization of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the cooperative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. " Karl Marx. Capital Volume One Chapter Thirty-Two: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
