Class & Monopoly

9255 Words38 Pages
Class and Monopoly by Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff in Robert Pollin, Editor. Capitalism, Socialism, and Radical Political Economy: Essays in Honor of Howard J. Sherman. Cheltenham, UK and Northhampton, Ma, USA: Edward Elgar Publishers, 2000, pages 154-176. Monopoly refers to a power or political process, whereas class refers to economic processes. This paper offers a systematic examination of the diverse possible relationships between monopoly power and class structure. The conceptual differentiation of power from class is central to the logic of our argument (Resnick and Wolff 1987, especially chapter 3).i Power, for us, is a process of wielding authority over or directing the behavior of individuals. These behaviors may be economic, cultural, political, and so on. Class is a different process; it entails producing, appropriating, and distributing surplus labor. There are different kinds of class processes - communist, capitalist, feudal, and so on - which vary according to who produces, appropriates, and distributes the social surplus and how that process is organized. No doubt, the distribution of power in society contributes to - participates in the overdetermination of - what kinds of class processes occur in that society and their particular qualities. Similarly, a society's particular class process overdetermines its power processes. However, the interaction of power and class processes is no warrant for collapsing them, reducing either to an effect of the other, or ignoring how both also are overdetermined by the natural, cultural, and indeed all the other processes that comprise any society. Monopoly designates a particular distribution of power in and over a particular institution, namely a market. By market we mean a social institution that accomplishes - in the sense of quid-pro-quo exchanges - the passages of products and resources among
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