State capitalism has recently come to the fore as a transversal research object in the social sciences. Renewed interest in the notion is evident across several disciplines, in scholarship addressing ...government interventionism in economic life in major developing countries. This emergent field of study on state capitalism, however, consistently bypasses the remarkable conceptual trajectory of the notion from the end of the 19th century to the present. This article proposes an intellectual-historical survey of state capitalism’s many lives across different ensembles of writing: early Marxist pronouncements on state capitalism at the time of the Second International; theories of state capitalism evolved in the first half of the 20th century in response to the European experience of war and fascism; dissident portrayals of the Soviet Union as state-capitalist; post-Second World War theories of state-monopoly capitalism in the Western Bloc; examinations of state capitalism as a development strategy in ‘Third World’ nations in the 1970s and 1980s; and finally, today’s scholarship on new patterns of state capitalism in emerging economies. Having contextualized each of these strands of writing, the article goes on to interrogate definitional and conceptual boundaries of state capitalism. It then maps out essential institutional features of state-capitalist configurations as construed in the literature. In sharp contrast to 20th-century theories of state capitalism, present-day scholarship on the topic tends to retreat from the integrated critique of political economy, shifting its problematics of state-market relations to meso- and micro-levels of analysis.
This paper analyses the role of intangibles in global value chains (GVCs). We find that the intensification of the use of intangible assets within these chains has created new sources of market ...power. The analysis builds the notion of Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism, where government protections of intellectual property have the effect of locking in the monopoly power from intangible asset creation. We extend it to 'information rents' arising from the presence of scale economies and network externalities associated with the production of intangible assets. GVC integration requires a dense circulation of information flows to communicate specifications, standards, technical know-how in addition to costs and other operational details. The expansion of GVC trade is thus linked to a rising mobilization and circulation of intangibles and the monopoly dynamics arising from intangibles need to be assessed in this context.
This essay is the fruit of bibliographic research and offers reflections about the Marxist concepts of method, ideology and state, to question the idea that there is an economic determinism in the ...work of Karl Marx. It then dialogs with current Marxist authors who address the state in the era of monopoly capitalism, reaffirming Marxs legacy as an essential starting point for the development of studies about the modern and contemporary state.
Notes from the Editors
Monthly review (New York. 1949),
05/2024, Volume:
76, Issue:
1
Magazine Article
Peer reviewed
Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy's May 1974 article, "Notes on Watergate: One Year Later" is remembered. This article dealt, as is now apparent, with a historical turning point, separating the ...conditions of global monopoly capitalism in the early 1970s from those of the first quarter-century after the Second World War. It started off by addressing the then-dominant concern on the left, cultivated also by the Democratic Party, as to whether Watergate represented a struggle between fascism and democracy. This was to be taken seriously, Magdoff and Sweezy argued, in the sense that the "fascist bacillus" definitely existed in US society. Probably the best indication of this was the archvillain of Watergate, President Richard M. Nixon himself. Nixon had made his reputation as one of the leading, and ultimately the most successful, of the "exorcists of the red devil" during the right-wing McCarthyite inquisition of the 1950s.
Through ethnographic fieldwork as a Teaching Assistant (TA) at the University of California, Berkeley, I advance that pedagogical labor can be conceptualized as two labor games. In the didactic game, ...I utilize hierarchical lecturing to simplify complex concepts in the pursuit of student comprehension of material, while the experiential game centers nonhierarchical dialogue and students’ personal experiences to promote consciousness-raising. TAs’ ability to create and switch between games underpins my broader theorization of labor games as one of two types: institutional games – shared among workers in similar structural circumstances and persistent across worker entry and exit – and innovation games – created by individual workers with relative autonomy amidst an absence of worker co-presence. Just as institutional games provide a template for obscuring and securing the extraction of surplus value under monopoly capitalism, innovation games do the same for the increasingly flexible, autonomous capitalism of the twenty-first century.
Sport and monopoly capitalism. Images from the tradition of the critical theory of sport. This paper aims to analyse the most noteworthy theoretical contributions of the critical theory of sport and ...its reflections on the relationship between sport and monopoly capitalism in the twentieth century. These contributions provide us with an image of the main characteristics of monopoly capitalism, through the mirror of sport, and of the view through which Marxist critics have selected primary themes, problems and arguments. The main thematic focuses are: sport as a central area of industry, in the twentieth century, where capital was able to seek new markets; the capitalist mode of sport production with its productive, social and power relations; the homology between sport and work, characterized by alienation; the use of sport as an ideological, repressive and socializing tool. A fundamental need, expressed by critical theorists, is to emancipate individuals from all the multiple forms of domination that they find in the synergy between sport and monopoly capitalism.
Intellectual property rights have played an increasingly important role in the global economy since the 1994 TRIPS Agreement. The nature of this role has since come under the spotlights: do ...intellectual property rights foster innovation or rent seeking? Do they promote knowledge diffusion and development, or do they skew global competition in favor of Western economies? This article explores some of the most striking developments that recently occurred in the world economy, namely, the rise of inequalities and the emergence of the secular stagnation, in the light of the intellectual property rights debate. This article contends that income inequalities, both between and within countries, are partially driven by monopoly rents accumulated by a minority of large Western corporations (inequality between countries) and redistributed to a minority of employees (within countries). In both cases, the imbalance of profit and wage distribution may be contributing to global slow growth by depressing investments and consumption, ushering in an era of secular stagnation, thereby explaining some of the current trends in the global economy.
Abstract Data and digital platforms have simultaneously upended entrenched positions in some industries, opening-up greater and disruptive competition, while driving overall higher levels of ...concentration through the growing power of multi-sided digital platforms. The coexistence of rivalry and collusion – a key feature of Cowling’s monopoly capitalism – persists and takes new forms in the digital economy. Taking into account the heterogenous nature of platforms, this paper analyses the relationships between large digital platforms and the development of industrial capabilities, especially in middle-income countries and the implications for industrial and competition policies. We advance an analytical-policy framework connecting the different dimensions and sources of platform power responsible for value capture and extraction, and the different platform capability-functions responsible for value creation. Building on this recasting of Hymer’s ‘efficiency contradiction’ and Cowling theory of monopoly capitalism, we advance an integrated industrial-competition policy approach to overcome it and propose a conception of an ‘entrepreneurial-regulatory state’. Complementary industrial and competition policies are required to foster optimal rivalry, being a rivalry which rewards the development of dynamic capabilities and enables contestation by different business models.
Many countries have started pursuing tobacco 'endgame' goals of creating a 'tobacco-free' country by a certain date. Researchers have presented models to attain this goal, including shifting the ...supply of tobacco to a monopoly-oriented endgame model (MOEM), wherein a state-owned entity controls the supply and distribution of tobacco products. Although not designed to end tobacco use, the Regie in Lebanon exhibits some of the key features identified in MOEM and hence can serve as a practical example from which to draw lessons.
We comprehensively review previous literature exploring tobacco endgame proposals featuring a MOEM. We distil these propositions into core themes shared between them to guide a deductive analysis of the operations and actions of the Regie to investigate how it aligns (or does not) with the features of the MOEM.
Analysing the endgame proposals featuring MOEM, we generated two main themes: the governance of the organisation; and its operational remit. In line with these themes, the investigation of the Regie led to several reflections on the endgame literature itself, including that it: (i) does not seem to fully appreciate the extent to which the MOEM could end up acting like Transnational Tobacco Companies (TTC); (ii) has only vaguely addressed the implications of political context; and (iii) does not address tobacco growing despite it being an important element of the supply chain.
The implementation of tobacco endgame strategies of any type is now closer than ever. Using the Regie as a practical example allows us to effectively revisit both the potential and the pitfalls of endgame strategies aiming to introduce some form of monopoly and requires a focus on: (i) establishing appropriate governance structures for the organisation; and (ii) adjusting the financial incentives to supress any motivation for the organisation to expand its tobacco market.
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