Archiv für die 'Nichts als eure Ketten' Kategorie

[Fer­nand] Brau­del pro­vi­des us with a lovely bit of uncon­ven­tio­nal wis­dom: capi­ta­lism is inher­ently anti-market. Any sen­si­ble capi­ta­list avo­ids a pro­per func­tio­ning mar­ket because that is not where the big­gest pro­fits are to be made. Put the other way round, mar­kets are bad for capi­tal accu­mu­la­tion because they do not allow enough of it. If capi­ta­lism does not equal mar­ket what does it equate with? For Brau­del the ans­wer is sim­ple: mono­po­lies, that is where the big pro­fits are to be made. […]

I have cal­led this argu­ment Braudel’s pro­vo­ca­tion and by now you will have seen why: instead of mono­poly being ‚a sprea­ding rot in the fabric of com­pe­ti­tive capi­ta­lism‘ (She­pherd 1970, 14) as is com­monly sup­po­sed, it is its­elf capi­ta­lism. Rather than mono­poly indi­ca­ting an imper­fect mar­ket, the mar­ket is a sign of fai­led mono­poly. […] In fact once we begin to focus on mono­po­lies, not as spe­cial excep­ti­ons to the mar­ket, but as the nor­mal ope­ra­tion of capi­ta­lism then much old and new work in geo­gra­phy and the social sci­en­ces in gene­ral take on a new perspective.

From P.J. Taylor’s 1999 Annual Poli­ti­cal Geo­gra­phy Lecture