Monopoly capitalism

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Banner on the town hall of Halle (Saale) (1950), photo from the Federal Archives

In Marxism, monopoly capitalism is a developmental phase of capitalism in which the earlier competitive struggle is largely eliminated or takes on other forms through concentration , centralization and cartel formation of broad branches of the economy (see also imperialism ). In this phase oligarchs , large landowners and large corporations have a dominant position ( monopoly ), at least in key industries .

The monopoly and cartel formation at the end of the 19th century did not happen inevitably, but also had its cause in a policy that promoted the power of the markets as a contribution to slowing the economy and increasing productivity. Today, in most market-economy countries, attempts are made to prevent restrictions on competition through legal and institutional influence (in Germany, for example, through the GWB and the Federal Cartel Office ).

theory

Karl Marx

Karl Marx already describes the centralization process of capital in Volume I of Das Kapital . Marx assumes that profitability is increased above all by the fact that more and more constant capital is invested in each job . From this it follows that ultimately more and more rationalization investments are taking place at the expense of expansion investments. As a result, this means that overall employment is expanded less and less. Insofar as the individual companies still expand employment, this happens because other companies are pushed out of the market, bought up or otherwise swallowed up.

In Volume III this is described in detail again in connection with the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall . As a result, the various branches of the economy are controlled by fewer and fewer companies, in the extreme case of monopolies. This changes the appearance of the competition. Monopolies or oligopolies are less in competition with companies that make the same product. But it is still a matter of the highest possible rate of profit or long-term secured profits . There is competition between monopolies in different industries. For example, a steel company comes into conflict with a railway company that charges high transport costs. Oil, road construction and automotive companies come into conflict with railroad companies. A more recent example: companies that want to spread the Internet come into conflict with telephone monopolies, which charge high telephone charges.

These clashes between the giants are also about influence on the state. So the railway company with the high transport prices can be nationalized in order to then transport at cost prices. The telephone markets can be deregulated. Trusts can be smashed (in the interests of other monopolies). Competitors on the world market can be kept away with the help of state protectionism . Cheap raw materials can be secured with the help of imperialist politics. After all, the state can rescue large companies in distress through subsidies or, as a major client, often in the arms industry , support corporations. Monopoly capitalism will quickly develop into state monopoly capitalism in which the ruling monopolies are closely entangled with the state apparatus.

If competition shifts away from competition between companies in an industry to competition between capitalist nation-states and capital blocks, it also increasingly takes on military forms. A permanent arms industry with its own contradictions can develop.

Above all, Friedrich Engels pointed out in his comments on the volumes published after Marx's death that, while Marx had primarily started from competitive capitalism, there was now a strong concentration of capital.

Rudolf Hilferding and Lenin

Rudolf Hilferding, as a representative of Austromarxism, analyzed the further process of capital monopoly in his book Das Finanzkapital 1910, but in his later role as a social democratic politician of the Weimar Republic he saw state monopoly capitalism as a possible way to overcome the capitalist economic system.

Lenin's work Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism 1916/17 draws on other sources, including statistical sources, to prove that capital was monopolized. According to his theory, capitalism cannot be "defused" by a return to competitive capitalism, since monopoly capitalism emerged from precisely this basis. He often refers to Hilferding, but takes a clear opposite position to Karl Kautsky . In particular, he violently attacks its ultra-imperialism thesis - that is, the prediction of an end to imperialism through the entry of a new stage of capitalism, in which a war between them is improbable thanks to an organized management of interests between the imperialist powers and supported by mutual capital and trade ties or becomes impossible.

Modern interpretation

The previously mentioned treatises on monopoly capitalism came from before the end of the First World War . The following two authors , some of whom belonged to the New Left , analyzed monopoly capitalism after the major changes of the period 1918–1945.

Franz Neumann has in his detailed analysis, published under the title Behemoth. Structure and practice of National Socialism (1942/1944), the National Socialist economic and rule system characterized as a "totalitarian monopoly economy". His central thesis is that at the center of the dictatorship there is “the interest in securing the reproduction of capital within the framework of a monopoly formation”, “which is linked to the interests of the essential forces of the NSDAP ”.

According to Paul A. Baran and Paul Sweezy , competitive capitalism has long been superseded by monopoly capitalism. This is characterized by the fact that huge monopoly companies (the so-called mammoth corporations) dominate the economic and social order, as capital is increasingly concentrating on them. In their jointly written work Monopoly Capitalism - An Essay on the American Economic Order (1965), the two authors wanted to provide an analysis of monopoly capitalism using the United States. The core of her essay revolves around "the production and absorption of surplus under the conditions of monopoly capitalism".

Historical background

At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, there was increasing concentration of capital in countries such as Germany and the USA, which also caused concern outside of Marxism. In the US, the term was coined the "robber barons" of the " robber barons " (the term should actually have been inspired by the (Raubritter-) castles on the German Rhine, the information required by the passing merchants duties). Increasingly, the " trusts " were seen as a threat to the functioning of the economy. At that time, antitrust legislation came into being in the USA (see also German antitrust law ).

After the Second World War, the US President Dwight D. Eisenhower coined the term military-industrial complex . The Marxist theory of the permanent armaments economy traces the comparatively favorable development of capitalist economies back into the early 1970s to the very high armament expenditures of the Cold War .

The US economist John Kenneth Galbraith coined the term “technostructure” in the 1960s , according to which big business and “big labor” (the big unions) pursue a common policy at the expense of the rest of the economy.

Recently, especially against the background of the “oil wars”, Marxists have occasionally spoken of the “petro complex”, meaning the oil industry or the oil industry including the auto industry. Of the 25 largest corporations in the world, 16 are in the oil or automotive industry.

criticism

The theory of monopoly capitalism is criticized for the simple linear historical scheme: competitive capitalism - monopoly capitalism - state monopoly capitalism or, in other Marxist directions, state capitalism . In fact, as Karl Marx noted in Das Kapital, there are always centrifugal forces in addition to the “ centripetal ”. The interaction between the state and big business and the influence of banks on industry ( finance capital ) are also subject to more complex historical changes. The development of a world market can make national monopolies subject to competition again.

Quotes

"And as soon as capital formation fell exclusively into the hands of a few, finished large capitals, ... the invigorating fire of production would have been extinguished at all."

- Karl Marx : MEW 25, Das Kapital III, p. 269

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://wirtschaftslexikon.gabler.de/Definition/monopolkapitalismus.html
  2. ↑ Georg W. Osterdiekhoff (ed.): Lexicon of sociological works . Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden 2001, p. 500.
  3. ↑ Baran / Sweezy 1973: p. 17