Friday, November 14, 2014

Monopoloization process: One capitalist always "kills" many other capitalists

Media monopoloization, for example:
  • Dan Cordtz Not that I don't agree with the basic point, but I need to see a list ...
  • Charles Brown google has it I'm sure
  • Charles Brown http://en.wikipedia.org/.../Media_cross-ownership_in_the... See "big six" in this wikipedia item, Dan Cordtz

    Media cross-ownership is the ownership of multiple...
    en.wikipedia.org
  • Charles Brown Owners of American media
    The "Big Six"
    The Big Six[1] Media Outlets Revenues (2009)
    ...See More
    2 hrs · Like · 1
  • Dan Cordtz Actually it's the newspapers and magazines that puzzle me most.
  • Charles Brown http://en.wikipedia.org/.../Concentration_of_media_ownership

    Concentration of media ownership (also known as media consolidation or media convergence) is a process whereby progressively fewer individuals or organizations control increasing shares of the mass media.[1] Contemporary research demonstrates increasing levels of consolidation, with many media indus…
    en.wikipedia.org
  • Charles Brown Concentration of media ownership (also known as media consolidation or media convergence) is a process whereby progressively fewer individuals or organizations control increasing shares of the mass media.[1] Contemporary research demonstrates increasin...See More
  • Charles Brown http://www.freepress.net/ownership/chart

    Massive corporations dominate the U.S. media landscape. Through a history of mergers and...
    freepress.net|By Free Press
  • Charles Brown Print MEDIA

    Overview
    ...See More
    2 hrs · Like · 1
  • Charles Brown http://www.marxists.org/.../works/1916/imp-hsc/ch01.htm "alf a century ago, when Marx was writing Capital, free competition appeared to the overwhelming majority of economists to be a “natural law”. Official science tried, by a conspiracy of silence, t...See More

    The enormous growth of industry and the remarkably rapid concentration of production in ever-larger enterprises are one of the most characteristic features of capitalism. Modern production censuses give most complete and most exact data on this process.
    marxists.org|By V.I. Lenin
  • Charles Brown "One capitalist always kills many", Dan Cordtz. Capitalism in the real economy has a historical and inherent tendency to monopoly , analogously to the game Monopoly .
  • Charles Brown As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on ...See More

    Capital Vol. I : Chapter Thirty-Two (Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation)
    marxists.org|By Karl Marx
  • Dan Cordtz But I don't see THIS happening: "but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself."
  • Charles Brown Open your eyes (smiles) : Compared to 1867 , the working class, the numbers of wage-laborers is ten times bigger or more. The working class is the 99%. The vast majority of the population are working class. Just by population growth the working class gets bigger and bigger .It has happened quite a bit since 1867. The revolt aspect is happening most concentratedly in South America right now. It happens in the whole history of the trade union movement for decades, two centuries in all the capitalist countries. The revolt aspect rose to revolution in Russia in 1917; and then China, Then the Russian revolutionary changes forced the capitalists in the capitalist countries, US, Britain, France, etc. to grant many socialist reforms even still within capitalist relations of production. There is a lot of socialism within capitalism already because of that, socialized medicine, socialized municipal public works, much of government enterprises period.There is a back and forth, or a struggle, CLASS STRUGGLE, victories and defeats for each side; and of course the bourgeoisie have stolen back some reforms , and attacked the trade union movement. The class struggle is a true contest.
  • Charles Brown The factory system is what Marx refers to as "the capitalist production itself" organizing the workers. The division of labor in factories is highly organized. There has been a radical restructuring of the industrial and factory system due to the revolution in science and technology producing the digital revolution in communications and transportation; allowing a big scattering of the points of production that were concentrated in the past.
  • Dan Cordtz In the US, at least, I no longer see anything like the Solidarity that I witnessed in the 1950's in Detroit. And of course real manufacturing no longer makes up as large a share of employment. It appears to me that we are going in the wrong direction to overthrow capitalism. But I have been wrong before.
  • Charles Brown As I say it ebbs and flows, and in the US and Michigan , the trade unions are in retreat. But what you witnessed in Detroit in the 1950's was proof positive of the process Marx predicts in what you quote. It was a concrete historical high point of the rising working class, but the path to world revolution is a zig-zag, not a straight line.
  • Charles Brown Manufacturing points of production have been scattered and moved from the concentration points of the last period. There are concentrations in China , Brazil, Mexico, India where they were not before. There is ebb and flow of concentrations; old ones deconcentrate and new ones concentrate. It is a dynamic process with the pattern Marx notes continually arising in new conentrations.
    2 mins · Like



    • Charles Brown Another way to see it theoretically, Dan Cordtz, is that eventually somebody wins all that competition, like in Monopoly. It's logical that free competition eventually leads to a few winners of the competition. Look at all the automobile companies that finally became the Big Three. I know the Japanese companies later competed , but that doesn't contradict the demonstration of the monopolization process that occurred before the Japanese companies entered the market.

  • http://graphicwitness.org/contemp/marx60.htm

    Graphic Witness home page

    Hugo Gellert: Karl Marx' 'Capital' in Lithographs



    HISTORICAL TENDENCY OF CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION

    Capitalist production is marked from the outset by two specific traits:

    (1) It produces its products as commodities. The fact that it produces commodities does not distinguish it from other modes of production. Its peculiar mark is that the prevailing and determining character of its products is that of being commodities.

    This implies, in the first place, that the laborer himself acts in the role of a seller of commodities, as a free wage worker, so that wage labor is the typical character of labor. In viewing the foregoing analyses, it is not necessary to demonstrate again that the relation between wage labor and capital determines the entire character of the ode of production. The principal agents of this mode of production itself, the capitalist and the wage worker, are to that extent merely personifications of capital and wage labor. They are definite social characters, assigned to individuals by the process of social production. They are products of these definite social conditions of production. . . .

    (2) The other specific mark of the capitalist mode of production is the production of surplus value as the direct aim and determining incentive of production. Capital produces essentially capital, and does so only to the extent that it produces surplus value. We have seen . . . that a mode of production peculiar to the capitalist period is founded upon this. This is a special form in the development of the productive powers of labor, in such a way that these powers appear as self dependent powers of capital lording it over labor and standing in direct opposition to the laborer's own development. . . .

    . . . To the extent that the labor process is a simple process between man and nature, its simple elements remain the same in all social forms of development. But every definite historical form of this process develops more and more its material foundations and social forms. Whenever a certain maturity is reached, one definite social form is discarded and displaced by a higher one.

    The time for the coming of such a crisis is announced by the depth and breadth of the contradictions and antagonisms, which separate the conditions of distribution, and with them the definite historical form of the corresponding conditions of production, from the productive forces, the productivity, and development of their agencies. A conflict then arises between the material development of production and its social form.

    . . .Capitalist monopoly becomes a fetter upon the method of production which has flourished with it and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point where they prove incompatible with their capitalist husk. This bursts asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

    The transformation of scattered private property based upon individual labor into capitalist property is, of course, a far more protracted process, a far more violent and difficult process, than the transformation of capitalist private property (already, in actual fact, based upon a social method of production) into social property. In the former case we are concerned with the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter case we are concerned with the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.


    ("The progress of industry, which the bourgeoisie involuntarily and passively promotes, substitutes for the isolation of the workers by mutual competition, their revolutionary unification by association. Thus the development of large-scale industry cuts from under the feet of the bourgeoisie the ground upon which capitalism controls production and appropriates the products of labor. Before all, therefore, the bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers. Its downfall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. . . .

    "Among all the classes that confront the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is really revolutionary. Other classes decay and perish with the rise of large-scale industry, but the proletariate is the most characteristic product of that industry. The lower middle class -- small manufacturers, small traders, handicraftsmen, peasant proprietors -- one and all fight the bourgeoisie in the hope of safe-guarding their existence as sections of the middle class. . . . They are reactionary, for they are trying to make the wheels of history turn backwards."
    -- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, London, 1848.)





    Charles Brown

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