> have you read howard botwinick's book? (as an aside, i picked this > book up off of amazon when it was at 30 dollars, now it's priced in > the 100's, have i made a capital > gain?:http://www.amazon.com/Persistent-Inequalities-Disparity-Capitalist-Competition/dp/0691042977) > > i think the new school marxist vision of competition is very > developed. whether it's wrong in crucial respects, is another matter. > a matter by the way, i'm curious to here discussed on pen-l.
I read Botwinick several years ago, and I'm very hazy on the details, but I remember liking it. It's certainly good as a review and fleshing out of the stuff on competition and production-price formation in Capital Vol. 3, which deserves to be better known (in place of the rigidified 'transformation problem' and 'tendency of the rate of profit to fall', which is all most people get about Vol III). It's not my area so I don't know how well it stands up as a research program. On Marx, competition, monopoly and 'Monopoly Capital' in the Monthly Review sense, you could check out Dick Bryan's critique of the latter in Capital & Class, Summer 1985, vol 9 no. 2. It gives a good overview of Marx's theory of competition. It drew a response from Jane Wheelock in 1986 and a reply from Bryan. Here's the abstract for the original paper: Monopoly in Marxist method Richard Bryan Abstract The theory of competition and monopoly in Marxist analysis has started to receive attention and generate debate only in recent years. But with this development, analysis of the effects of competition and monopoly has extended ahead of analysis of their meanings within a Marxist discourse. This paper is concerned with the general question of how competition and monopoly might be defined in a specifically Marxist way, divorced from the preconceptions of neo-classical usage. A theory of monopoly defined in terms of the market power of large corporations is rejected. Instead, monopoly is defined at a more abstract level, within the circulation of social capital. Here, monopoly is identified with the reproduction of non-equivalence in the movement of value between the forms of money, production and commodities. Hence it is contended that monopoly does have a widespread existence but that, unlike the school of monopoly capitalism, which emphasises the power of giant corporations, monopoly is understood as just a form of competition, not its antithesis. Mike Beggs _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
