Monopoly in Marxist method

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.