this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2024
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Why do you believe it is stronger? The fact that Capitalism's decentralized markets result in centralized monopolist syndicates is exactly why Marx predicted Socialism to be the next stage in Mode of Production. Marx said it best in the Manifesto of the Communist Party:
Lenin further analyzed these monopolist syndicates and described why we are seeing dying, decaying Capitalism in his work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Once competition begins to die out, the Rate of Profit sinks and these Monopolist Syndicates strangle each other. The only way to fight this rate of falling, other than further automation which further lowers the rate of profit, is joining each other in ever larger syndicates, which is not infinitely replicatable. Capitalism is in its death throes.
A good, quick read if you don't want to dive into books is the article Why Public Property?
I mean, the idea of socialism has certainly seen setbacks since the end of the last century, hasn't it? While gross inequality is still a huge problem, and I hope it will be solved somehow, the Lenin/Stalin version of socialism feels like it has basically lost.
I hadn't seen this one before, thanks for that. There's some great examples in here, on the subject of monopolies.
Monopolies and particularly oligopolies are having a moment, but the chart only goes back to the 70's, and implicitly shows total company number going up (why is hard to say, it's a paywalled article, and they mixed data from two other sources). If you go back further, I think it would look pretty different - the old gilded age ended, Standard Oil was broken up, and some of the giants of the postwar era got knocked down a peg or more. Further, the trend is pretty uneven by sector. Mom and pop shops are dead now, but independently owned franchises and publicly traded whatevers are hella dominant, and contractors (or "contractors") are everywhere.
I actually know quite a bit about semiconductor manufacturing. It may be the most capital intensive endeavor of all, but you don't quite need to be Samsung to do it. If you want to build your own at scale, a fab might be "only" a billion dollars. That's a lot, but many startups have raised it (for other things), so it's a different story from being Samsung on day 1.
If you just want your chip design made, it's way easier. TSMC exists to build other people's designs. Companies like Sam Zeloof's new enterprise exist for small scale printing of your prototypes. Most of the basic design tools can be found open source.
The network effect has made some genuine monopolies and definitely many oligopolies, but other things are less affected. Individual rich people get rich by chance (if you don't mind me introducing my own source, which happens to be my favourite one).
All this to say, I don't think concentration is going to kill capitalism in the near future, or even come close.
It's a tangent, so I've separated this out, but this is also an interesting claim. The end of feudal economics is an actively researched bit of history, and was far from neat and tidy. IIRC some of those old fealty-type agreements lasted into Marx's time, if being mere formalities by their end. And I'm not sure why we (correctly) decided slavery was bad after doing it since before recorded history, either.
Socialism hasn't been perfect, the only people that think leftists are arguing for perfection are right-wingers. Marxism-Leninism is still correct analysis, and the USSR was still a massive improvement on existing conditions. It has not "lost," it is continued by Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, and more. Blackshirts and Reds debunks a lot of common anti-communist myths.
One thing you seem to be misunderstanding is the idea that because there are mom and pop shops, that there aren't fewer and fewer, with decreasing portions of the overall share of Capital. The barriers to legitimately compete with these megacorporations like Samsung are getting higher, you can't legitimately compete with their resources and design work.
Finally, your mark on the presence of new modes of production emerging from the old is a misconception of the Marxist argument. What is Socialism? explains that in further detail, and Productive Forces explains societal progression. Slavery resurging was an aspect of settler-colonialism, a notion that remains to this day, this was not a resurgence of old pre-feudal economics.