John Bellamy Foster — Absolute Capitalism

The French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1864 that “the cleverest ruse of the Devil is to persuade you he does not exist!” I will argue here that this is directly applicable to today’s neoliberals, whose devil’s ruse is to pretend they do not exist. Although neoliberalism is widely recognized as the central political-ideological project of twenty-first-century capitalism, it is a term that is seldom uttered by those in power. In 2005, the New York Times went so far as to make neoliberalism’s nonexistence official by running an article entitled “Neoliberalism? It Doesn’t Exist.”

Behind this particular devil’s ruse lies a deeply disturbing, even hellish, reality. Neoliberalism can be defined as an integrated ruling-class political-ideological project, associated with the rise of monopoly-finance capital, the principal strategic aim of which is to embed the state in capitalist market relations. Hence, the state’s traditional role in safeguarding social reproduction—if largely on capitalist-class terms—is now reduced solely to one of promoting capitalist reproduction. The goal is nothing less than the creation of an absolute capitalism. All of this serves to heighten the extreme human and ecological destructiveness that characterizes our time....

Monthly Review
Absolute Capitalism
John Bellamy Foster | Editor of Monthly Review and Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon

See also

WSWS
May Day 2019: The resurgence of the class struggle and the fight for socialism

Joseph Kishore and David North

Russell A. Whitehouse — The Myth Of Capitalism – Book Review

A complement of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century.

The principal point is that competition is the driver of capitalism as companies strive in the marketplace to achieve efficiency and effectiveness in anticipating and meeting demand. When competition decreases, the engine fails to function as an evolutionary force. This is hardly a new idea. See "What Is Monopoly Capital?" by  John Bellamy Foster and "Monopoly Capitalism" by Paul M. Sweezy. But the authors of The Myth of Capitalism document what is happening with it recently.

This also affects labor and the labor market:

...T&H write, “When workers have fewer employers to choose from in their line of work, their bargaining power disappears. Corporate giants can squeeze their suppliers, but the main thing companies buy is labor, and they have been squeezing workers.” Thus, wages have struggled to keep up with inflation for decades. Benefits are cut, while stock buybacks soar. Unhappy workers in all but 3 states can be shackled to soul-sucking jobs via non-compete clauses. Furthermore, “56% of private sector non-unionized workers are forced into mandatory arbitration and of those, 23% were also denied any access to class-action lawsuits. This means that nearly a quarter of working Americans in the private sector don’t have the basic right to sue their employer.”...

Eurasia Review
The Myth Of Capitalism – Book Review

Russell A. Whitehouse

ProMarket — Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (November 11-18)

"Is monopolization threatening capitalism?" Facebook, Google, Amazon.

ProMarket
Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (November 11-18)

Editors

Olivia Solon — Tim Berners-Lee: we must regulate tech firms to prevent 'weaponised' web

The inventor of the world wide web warns over concentration of power among a few companies ‘controlling which ideas are shared’

The Guardian
Tim Berners-Lee: we must regulate tech firms to prevent 'weaponised' web

Olivia Solon

While the chattering class is obsessing over social media, the deep state is operating behind the scenes.

Advanced capitalism leads to corporate statism, the symbiotic relationship between the state and capital, which is the definition of fascism.

"It can't happen here."

Insurge Intelligence — Medium
How the CIA made Google — Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet—part 1

Why Google made the NSA — Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet—part 2

Nafeez Ahmed

also

World Economic Forum
This is the future of the internet

Paul Laudicina | Chairman, A.T. Kearney Global Business Policy Council

also

Moscow also building alternative Domain Name System

Asia Times
Russia could disconnect from global internet in event of war: Putin advisor

Also

Disobedient Media
On The Weaponization Of Artificial Intelligence And Its Ties To The ‘Paypal Mafia’
Elizabeth Vos

Ed Walker — The Dialectical Imagination by Martin Jay: Economics in Critical Theory

In The Dialectical Imagination, Martin Jay says that economics was not a central part of Critical Theory, but that several scholars of the Frankfurt School worked in the area. One of the leading economists was Friedrich Pollock, especially after the Institute moved to New York. Like the other scholars of the Institute for Social Research, Pollock was trained in Marxist economics. This school mosttly followed Marx in thinking that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. One of those contradictions was that the aggressive accumulation of capital would impoverish the working class, which would then rise up and lead the revolution. 

By the early 1900s, it was obvious that the problem of pauperization of the proletariat was at least partially solved, and capitalism didn’t collapse. The leading Marxist explanation was the rise of what Marxists call “monopoly capitalism”, as taught by the Austrian economist Rudolf Hilferding, discussed here. Classical economics treated the economy as made up of many firms (or, as Marx called them, capitals) each too small to affect prices, and all responding to the demands of buyers....

emptywheel
The Dialectical Imagination by Martin Jay: Economics in Critical Theory
Ed Walker

A Critique of Crisis Theory — Three Books on Marxist Political Economy

Important if you are into economic theory or the history of economics. It is chiefly an exploration comparing and contrasting Anwar Shaikh's Capitalism, Competition and Crises and Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital.

The third book is John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century. It is not reviewed in this post.

The post is longish but not wonkish. It is an easy read that is well worthwhile.

A Critique of Crisis Theory
Three Books on Marxist Political Economy
Sam Williams

Here is an interesting tidbit. Walrus, who is the most single most influential economist historically as the founder of general equilibrium based on marginalism, is widely disparaged by heterodox economists for basing his theory on perfect competition theoretically and at least nearly so in practice.

Was Walrus really that naïve?

Well, it turns out that Walrus was no dummy. He understood what it would take practically — nationalization of land and zero income on wages, advocated for this as policy.

I have explained elsewhere in this blog that the term “socialism,” unlike “communism,” is imprecise. The Bolshevik Party of Lenin used the term “socialist,” but so did the bourgeois centrist Radical Socialist Party (7), which dominated the French Third Republic, which existed between 1871 and 1940. It was also used by Adolf Hitler and his extreme-right National Socialists—the Nazis. Could Leon Walras, the economist whose ideas more than any other form the basis of present-day neo-liberalism, also be a socialist? Yes! Indeed, Walras considered himself a “democratic socialist.”

Like certain radical followers of David Ricardo and Henry George and his followers in the United States, Walras believed that the land should be nationalized. The government would then depend on ground rent alone for its revenue. Walras was especially opposed to taxes on wages. If wages were not taxed and land was nationalized, Walras believed, wage workers would be able to transform themselves into self-employed individual businesspeople if they so desired. If the government followed these “democratic socialist policies,” Walras believed, the number of independent business people would explode, creating the conditions that would allow an approximation of perfect competition to be achieved in practice.

Today’s neo-liberal microeconomists, though their theoretical foundations are “Walrasian,” do not advocate the nationalization of the land nor do they oppose taxes on wages. On the contrary, they are both staunch supporters of private property in land just as they support private ownership of capital. And they support policies that attempt to shift the balance of taxation onto the shoulders of workers.

Andrea Germanos — "It's About Letting Giant Corporations Rig the Rules": Warren Skewers TPP

Warren makes the remarks about the 12-nation trade deal, which still needs Congressional approval, to progressive activists in a video released Thursday by social change network CREDO Action.

The deal, Warren says in the video, "isn't about helping American workers set the rules. It's about letting giant corporations rig the rules—on everything from patent protection to food safety standards —all to benefit themselves."

Even in the drafting process industry representatives could exert influence—but there was no voice to represent American workers or consumers, she says. "A rigged process produces a rigged outcome," she says.

One specific provision of the deal drawing Warren's ire (as it has before) is the "wonky-sounding" Investor State Dispute Settlement, or ISDS.

"This is the part that gives a huge boost to big multinational companies when they want to challenge a country's laws they don't like," she says. They do that not through courts but "industry-friendly arbitration panels staffed with corporate lawyers." Faced with potential billions in fines, "some countries will just back down and change their regulations," she says.

"Workers, environmentalists, and human rights advocates don't get the right to use ISDS; only big corporations do. That's a rigged system," she says. Warren cites specific examples of ISDS challenges— last year when Canadian taxpayers got stuck with a $300 million bill after the country said a company couldn't expand of a quarry off the coast of Nova Scotia, and when Keystone XL company TransCanada used the ISDS provision of NAFTA to seek $15 billion from the U.S. for its rejection of the pipeline.

With ISDS in the TPP, Warren says, "It will be open season on laws that make people safer—but cut into corporate profits."

Obama must be ruing the day he promoted Elizabeth Warren.

Common Dreams
"It's About Letting Giant Corporations Rig the Rules": Warren Skewers TPP
Andrea Germanos, staff writer

Beverly Mann — Phil Ebersole: Monopoly power and what to do about it

Phil Ebersole: The solution to this problem, [Elizabeth] Warren said, is simply to enforce the anti-trust laws as originally written.

The reason that they aren’t is a neoliberal philosophy of business regulation that took hold in the late 1970s, which held that the most important thing was not competition, but business efficiency. If Amazon can serve customers more efficiently that a local bookstore, then, according to this idea, there was no reason for the local bookstore to exist.

That could be true only if Amazon, Wal-Mart, Comcast and other big corporations were owned and operated by altruists, who passed along the gains in economic efficiency to customers, workers, suppliers and the local community.

But even when consolidation produces economic efficiency that benefits consumers, economic efficiency isn’t everything. Concentration of economic power means concentration of political power, which results in the kind of dysfunctional economic system we have now.…

Monopoly power = monopoly rent

Monopoly rent is one of the chief forms of rent along with profit as surplus value, land rent, and  financial rent.

Rent extraction is based on market power and market power is based on political power.

Somewhat ironically, government is both a source of political influence that enable special interests to garner market power and also a level of power through all, such as anti-trust, regulation, such as the which controls negative externality, and public goods and public utilities that provide goods that are more effectively and efficiently provided publicly than privately.

Beverly Mann: This movement, our movement, which began in the fall of 2011 with Occupy Wall Street, is on track to cause a political and economic earthquake.

Angry Bear
Monopoly power and what to do about it

Beverly Mann

See also

The Irish Review
Markets and states are complements

Kevin O'Rourke

ht Brad DeLong

Monthly Review
Monopoly Capital at the Half-Century Mark
John Bellamy Foster

David F. Ruccio — Monopoly straw

That’s precisely what is missing from mainstream economics, including its liberal wing: a theory of the contradictory class dynamics of capitalist firms and of capitalism as a whole.

Occasional Links & Commentary
Monopoly straw
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Lynn Parramore interviews Barry Lynn — How the New Monopoly Capitalism Will Crush You to Smithereens

Well, not exactly the "new" monopoly capitalism, rather the new improved monopoly capitalism.

I see the true populists on the left and the true populists on the right. I believe that those groups can absolutely come together and fight monopolists and restore democracy within our economy and within our political system. Because what they actually believe in is a distribution of power foremost. They believe in open markets, foremost. And what they’re aiming at is the distribution of power and the open and fair markets. And if you establish that, then you have real democracy. You have real liberty.

The problem with most of the libertarians—and certainly with the libertarians who are official libertarians, meaning they work with the Libertarian Party, they work with libertarian operations like the Cato Institute—is that they say we need to get rid of all regulation. We need to get rid of all government.

The true populists — what they understood is that, well, you might not want to use government to fix all your ills. You might not want to use government to fix even most of your ills. But what you do need is, you need to have government to keep yourself free. To keep markets open, to prevent the consolidation of power over markets by monopolists. If you don’t have government, then every single system will be taken over by a private monopolist, which really means private government….

The purpose of government, the reason we founded government, is to break up dangerous concentrations of power at home and abroad. Concentrations of power that threaten our liberty as individuals at home and abroad. That is the foremost purpose of government.

Truthout
How the New Monopoly Capitalism Will Crush You to Smithereens
Alternet's Lynn Parramore interviews Barry Lynn, senior fellow at the New America Foundation, where he directs the Markets, Enterprise, and Resiliency Initiative.