The Jacobin article: Contemporary Capitalism Is Brutally Competitive by Stephen Maher, Scott Aquanno
https://jacobin.com/2026/06/brenner-foster-rent-monopoly-capitalism

The Monthly Review response: https://monthlyreview.org/articles/mr-078-02-2026-06_0/

Two articles by Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno challenging the notion of monopoly capitalism, and in particular the tradition of thought associated with Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, were published early this year in Jacobin and the Review of Radical Political Economics, in February and March, respectively. Reappraising a debate that goes back a half century or more, Maher and Aquanno argue that the United States and other industrialized economies are highly competitive and that the concept of monopoly capital does not apply to present-day conditions. More specifically, they contend that Amazon, along with today’s high-tech firms, such as Meta, Alphabet (Google), and Microsoft, do not have monopoly power, but are engaged in intense competition, and that the entire theory of imperfect competition that arose out of mainstream economics in the 1930s and ’40s is no longer relevant. The idea of monopoly capitalism, we are told, is a “gesture toward social democratic politics of class compromise” and far from revolutionary in its political implications—charges that they direct specifically at “the Monthly Review school of Marxian economics” (Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno, “Under Capitalism Democracy Stops at the Economy,” Jacobin, February 9, 2026; Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno, “Monopoly or Competition?: Unraveling the Amazon Paradox,” Review of Radical Political Economics [March 2026]. Note: all references to Maher and Aquanno’s work below are from these two articles).

The key to Maher and Aquanno’s argument is Marxist economist Anwar Shaikh’s concept of “real competition,” as opposed to the concepts of “perfect” and “pure” competition of neoclassical economics. Maher and Aquanno suggest that “real competition”—as opposed to Karl Marx’s theory of accumulation itself—is the basis of what they call the “classical Marxian school” (often also referred to as “fundamentalist” Marxist political economy). This is associated, in their view, with the classical notion of the tendential law of the rate of profit to fall, something they mention but do not analyze. To be clear, no Marxist economic theorist would ever accept the neoclassical concepts of perfect and pure competition as anything but a fiction. But Maher and Aquanno try to suggest such a thing, by arguing that for Marx, unlike neoclassical theory and unlike monopoly capital theory, competition was not affected by the number of firms in an industry, a view that they criticize as “the quantity theory of competition” (a term that originated with John Weeks). According to this perspective, to refer to the quantity (number and size) of firms is to go against Marx’s own conception of real competition. But in this they contradict Marx himself, who in discussing the concentration and centralization of capital wrote: “The smaller capitals…crowd into spheres of production which large-scale industry has taken control of only sporadically or incompletely. Here competition rages in direct proportion to the number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitude of the rival capitals. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, and partly vanish completely.” Here Marx indicates that the larger the number of firms in an industry, the more intense the competition; the greater the magnitude or scale of the firms (and thus smaller numbers), the less intense the competition. The number and size of firms matter (Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016], 259–71; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 [London: Penguin, 1976], 777; John Weeks, Capital, Exploitation and Economic Crisis [London: Routledge, 2010], 105).

Having taken their stand on the basis of “real competition” in contrast to neoclassical economics—while suggesting, wrongly, that monopoly capital theory with its “quantity theory of competition” conforms to neoclassical notions of “perfect” and “pure competition”—Maher and Aquanno then take an additional step of arguing that the theory of monopoly capitalism is entirely rooted in the narrow neoclassical theory of “imperfect competition.” We are then told that Amazon and the other big-tech firms are not monopolistic in the terms of neoclassical imperfect competition theory, so the monopoly capital perspective is wrong. The fact that Marxian monopoly capital theory never limited itself to the narrow confines of neoclassical imperfect competition theory but rather advanced a notion of what could be called real monopoly seems to pass by these authors completely. For example, monopoly capital theorists, while not denying competition in general, rest their case heavily on the effective banning of price competition in oligopolistic mature industries. In the nineteenth century, price competition was fierce, with the result that in the U.S. economy prices in general, measured by the wholesale price index, trended downward for most of the century (outside the U.S. Civil War and its immediate aftermath). In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the general price level has risen nearly every year (outside the Great Depression). This is because, due to indirect price collusion by giant corporations, the general price level goes only one way: up. Nevertheless, while monopolistic/oligopolistic corporations generally avoid serious price competition (which they refer to as “price warfare”), since this would threaten profit margins across the board, they still compete in other ways, most significantly in the struggle for low-cost position, but also in the sales effort.* Sweezy, in his landmark essay on “Competition and Monopoly” in 1981, spelled out a theory of real monopoly in exactly these terms. Maher and Aquanno ignore this. Denying that monopoly capital theory is concerned with real monopoly as well as real competition, they fault Lina Khan, the determined antitrust fighter under the Biden administration, for using a real-monopoly analysis (not just traditional imperfect competition theory) in taking on Amazon, Meta, and other corporations, as if this is somehow illegitimate—an issue that should not be confused with questions about Khan’s political position (she is now Zohran Mamdani’s economic adviser). For Maher and Aquanno, while there is plenty of room for realism in relation to competition, realism with respect to the exercise of monopoly power is out of bounds—a view that parallels that of conservative neoliberal economists opposed to antitrust actions (Paul M. Sweezy, Four Lectures on Marxism [Monthly Review Press, 1981], 55–70; Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, The End of Prosperity [Monthly Review Press, 1977], 15–20; Lina M. Khan, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” Yale Law Journal, 126 [2017]: 710–805; Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Sues Amazon for Illegally Maintaining Monopoly Power,” September 26, 2023; Cory Doctorow, “Amazon Is the Apex Predator of Our Platform Era,” New York Times, September 27, 2023).

This brings us to Maher and Aquanno’s extraordinary—at least for socialists—argument that Amazon lacks monopoly power and is in a desperate competitive struggle for mere survival. Here we are told, somewhat ahistorically, that Amazon is just a “merchant capitalist firm” and one which has not been characterized by a high rate of profit. Amazon Web Services, it is noted, has considerable monopoly power, including network effects, but this is played down and treated as a separate entity in order to present Amazon as merely a merchant firm alongside other large retail businesses. Amazon’s manipulation of costs and prices (it uses its monopoly power at the apex of the system to prevent other online firms from undercutting its prices) is not seriously considered. Maher and Aquanno mistakenly refer to “Amazon’s control of 80 percent of the US e-commerce marketplace market” (the real number is about half that) while claiming this is simply a manifestation of competition and gives Amazon no monopoly power. Yet where online purchases are concerned, Amazon, as everyone knows, is the market. Amazon’s use of its monopolistic power to impose robots and surveillance on workers receives almost no mention in Maher and Aquanno’s analysis, as if Harry Braverman’s classic Labor and Monopoly Capital was never written. The fact that 200 million individuals are now enrolled in Amazon Prime and seeing their payments inexorably increase is presented by Maher and Aquanno as simply a case of “competitive success” (Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital [Monthly Review Press, 1974, 1988]).