Jamil... "Now that you put it that way, I cannot even remember what I was thinking. Sorry, please excuse me."
My ocmment was simply offhand because I think we've had this conversation on Pen-L before and many people here are well versed in these debates. To be brief, I think Paul Sweezy was misled by his training in neoclassical economics. Under Neoclassical "perfect competition" firms are infinitesimally small and have no "market power". Clearly this is not and was not the case at the time, so left keynesians and Neo-Marxists like Sweezy came to the logical conclusion that perfect competition wasn't functional. The mistake he made was thinking that it had ever been functional and that simply "relaxing" the assumptions of neoclassical economics one could get close to reality. As a result, he drops the assumption of infinitesimally small firms but keeps the relationship between firm size and the level of competition. I don't think the level of competition is determined by the amount of firms that are in an industry or economy. I don't expact to convince you in a short paragraph, but I would encourage you to read the literature critical of monopoly capital views. Although I haven't finished reading it yet, the book I cited above would be an excellent place to start. Here's a paper on this from a much more historical perspective: ftp://wuecon195.wustl.edu/opt/ReDIF/RePEc/mcd/pdf/dp112011.pdf -- -Nathan Tankus ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
