Contemporary capitalism is a capitalism of generalized monopolies. By this I mean that monopolies are now no longer islands in a sea of other still relatively autonomous companies, but are constitutive of an integrated system. Therefore, these monopolies now tightly control all the systems of production. Small and medium enterprises, and even the large corporations that are not strictly speaking oligopolies, are locked in a network of control put in place by the monopolies. Their degree of autonomy has shrunk to the point that they are nothing more than subcontractors of the monopolies. This system of generalized monopolies is the product of a new phase of centralization of capital in the countries of the Triad—the United States, Western and Central Europe, and Japan—that took place during the 1980s and 1990s. The generalized monopolies now dominate the world economy. “Globalization” is the name they have given to the set of demands by which they exert their control over the productive systems of the periphery of global capitalism (the world beyond the partners of the Triad). It is nothing other than a new stage of imperialism.
This capitalism of generalized and globalized monopolies is a system that guarantees these monopolies a monopoly rent levied on the mass of surplus-value (transformed into profits) that capital extracts from the exploitation of labor. To the extent that these monopolies are operating in the peripheries of the global system, monopoly rent is imperialist rent. The process of capital accumulation, which defines capitalism in all its successive historical forms, is therefore driven by the maximization of monopoly/imperialist rent-seeking. This shift in the center of gravity of the accumulation of capital is the source of the continuous concentration of income and wealth to the benefit of the monopolies, largely monopolized by the oligarchies (plutocracies) that govern oligopolistic groups, at the expense of the remuneration of labor and even the remuneration of non-monopolistic capital.
This imbalance in continued growth is, in turn, the source of the financialization of the economic system. By this I mean that a growing portion of the surplus cannot be invested in the expansion and deepening of systems of production, and therefore the “financial investment” of this excessive surplus becomes the only option for continued accumulation under the control of the monopolies.
The implementation of specific systems by capital permits the financialization to operate in different ways:
1. Subjugation of the management of firms to the principle of “shareholder value”;
2. Substitution of pension systems funded by personal saving and capitalization (pension funds) for systems of pension distribution paid by current taxation (transfer payments);
3. Adoption of the principle of flexible exchange rates;
4. Abandonment of the principle of central banks determining the interest rate—the price of liquidity—and the transfer of this responsibility to the market.
Financialization has transferred the major responsibility for control of the reproduction of the system of accumulation to some thirty giant banks of the Triad. What are euphemistically called “markets” are nothing other than places where the strategies of these actors who dominate the economic scene are deployed. In turn, this financialization, which is responsible for the growth of inequality in income distribution (and fortunes), generates the growing surplus on which it feeds. The “financial investments,” or rather the investments in financial speculation, continue to grow at dizzying speeds, not commensurate with growth in GDP (which is therefore becoming largely fictitious) or with investment in real production. Among other things, the explosive growth of financial investment requires, and fuels, debt in all its forms, especially sovereign debt. When the governments in power claim to be pursuing the goal of debt reduction, they are deliberately lying. The strategy of financialized monopolies requires the growth in debt, which they seek rather than combat, as a way to absorb the surplus profit of monopolies. The austerity policies imposed to reduce debt have indeed resulted, as intended, in increasing its volume.
It is this system—commonly called neoliberal, the system of generalized monopoly capitalism, globalized (imperialist) and financialized (of necessity for its own reproduction)—that is imploding before our eyes. This system, apparently unable to overcome its growing internal contradictions, is doomed to continue its wild ride. The crisis of the system is due to its own success. Indeed, so far the strategy deployed by monopolies has always produced the desired results: austerity plans and the so-called social (in fact antisocial) downsizing plans that are still being imposed, in spite of resistance and struggles. To this day the initiative remains in the hands of the monopolies, “the markets,” and their political servants—the governments that submit to the demands of the so-called “market.”
In this analytic perspective of monopoly-capitalism’s transformation, it seems necessary to reformulate the theory of surplus (a distinct concept from that of surplus-value) and, by extending its field of action to the global system, to unveil the nature of the monopoly rent/imperialist rent that has come to exert a unilateral dictatorship over the accumulation process on a world scale.
Continue to "Beyond Surplus-Value: The Concept of Surplus"
Excerpt from: Samir Amin. "The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism"
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