Monopoly Capital
Monopoly Capital by Paul M. Sweezy and the late Paul A. Baran is an important and extremely readable book, well worth the modest 8/6 that it costs. It is an attempt by marxists to explain the functioning of the capitalist system in the United States. Further it attempts to explain aspects of American society - its foreign policy and the crisis in the educational systems the militant upsurge of the Negro movement and the rise of mental illness in terms of their socio-economic roots.
TECHNIQUE AND METHOD
In conjunction with techniques that have been developing in the last few decades, Baran and Sweezy use a methodological concept mainly associated with marxian thought. What distinguishes their economic analysis from an orthodox economic analysis is the division of the gross National product into "social necessary costs" and "economic surplus". For orthodox economic analysis the cost of producing a given total product is equal to the value of that product, even when total product falls below full capacity level. It is impossible to identify the surplus unless economic society is viewed as a whole. Which is why the concept of the surplus is integral to marxian economic method and totally foreign to orthodox economic method.
MAIN THESIS
The authors show, in MONOPOLY CAPITAL, that the dominant corporations in the United States are so strong that they can practically stop price competition and price cutting. But that technological innovation continues at the same time, and the dominant corporations continue to respond to incentives for cutting production costs. This produces an even larger gap between production costs and selling prices and as a result profits tend to increase sharply. As Baran and Sweezy put it: "The economic surplus tends to grow constantly". But the monopolies must dispose of the surplus and the normal outlets for surplus absorption seem to be blocked. Consumption by capitalists does not grow at an ever increased pace. Productive investment cannot grow at such a pace, as this would create an ever bigger surplus absorption problem, Consequently new means of absorption must be found.
These, which have developed since the first, and especially the second, world wars, are
1) Stepping up of the sales effort;
2) an expansion of the means put at the disposal of civilian governments and
3) An expansion of military expenditure.
ROLE OF THE CLASS STRUGGLE
One weakness of MONOPOLY CAPITAL is the authors' failure to deal with the exploitation of labour by capital and their consequent failure to deal with the capitalist need to increase relative surplus value, They point out that in the United States reserves of labour dropped during the Second World War and this in turn led to an improvement in the living standards of poor people. to quote the authors: "nothing short of dramatic." They continue to state that in the fifties: "unemployment crept steadily upward, and the character of the new technologies of the post war period sharply accentuated the disadvantages of the unskilled and semi-skilled workers." This was due to new technologies, That for ten years real wages in the United States stagnated as compared with all other imperialist countries and that the increase in profit during this period was a result of the increase in relative surplus value thus produced, Therefore by excluding from their analysis of monopoly capitalism the continuous struggle of the capitalist class to maintain and increase the rate of exploitation of the working class, Baran and Sweezy put their whole economic concept of the present functioning of the capitalist system outside the realm of contending social forces, That is, outside the realm of the class struggle. They therefore deny any validity to the anti-capitalist potential of the American working class.
Nevertheless, this book, written with a clarity of thought and expression that is difficult to find on a subject so complex, considerably enriches the field of marxist economic analysis.
Martin Turner
* MONOPOLY CAPITAL: an essay on the American economic and social order, by Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy. Originally published by Monthly Review Press, Now published by Penguin at 8/6d.
The Last Great Cause
Books about the Spanish Civil War have usually fallen into three categories: serious marxist analyses of the situation; contemporary accounts written from a C.P. point of view, including a hefty percentage of "joy it was..."; weapons in the cold war that were lovingly prepared by western intellectuals to make people realise that ideas lead to revolutions, that revolutions end in tyranny and that it is therefore safer to proclaim an end to ideology.
Stanley Weintraub's book escapes from the usual categories. He has traced, sympathetically, the involvement of the intellectuals in the Spanish Civil War. His method is reportage; poems, prose and letters of those involved are quoted at length. In this way all three tendencies are allowed to appear and some idea is given of the complexity of response to the messy, heroic and betrayed struggle that was Spain; from André Marty's "sanatorium" at Alcala de Henares, where the Russian firing squads worked overtime to liquidate the trotskyists and anarchists, to the Catalonian villages where they solemnly abolished money; from tragic and dedicated figures like Cornford and Caldwell to Errol Flynn over for a quick publicity stunt; the book manages to encompass all this, This book is worth buying.
R. Kirk
* "The Last Great Cause", published by W.H. Allen