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In part or whole, a multitude of above arguments has been part of those Marxist
studies which have outright announced that capitalism has indeed changed. However,
as to the political economy of crisis, one study within this controversy has installed a
more austere unanimity or at least a default thinking about the post-war
transformations and the tendencial or otherwise consequences of this particular epoch
for the overall contradictions of the capitalist mode of production until the early
1970s. Many today note that Baran and Sweezy’s book Monopoly Capital(1966) is
simultaneously a paradigmatic underconsumptionist theory of crisis for the epoch of
monopoly capitalism qua Tugan-Baranowsky, Hilferding and Luxemburg and the
ultimate debut of Marxist Keynesianism. Keynes’ theory of effective demand is a
counterpart to Marxist analysis of realisation crisis –this had already littered Sweezy’s
earlier study, The Theory of Capitalist Development(1949). Marxian theory of
concentration and centralisation of capital(monopolisitic structures) were also a chief
part of that analytical effort. But he and Baran had not considered effective
demand/realisation of surplus value together with monopolistic economies before the
mid-1960s and especially not before Steindl’s reproaches in his Maturity and
Stagnation in American Capitalism(1952). For Steindl, in a wage economy, effective
demand is weak; it incrementally is less effective and this infinitely commoves large
corporations. ‘New investment could conceivably pick up the slack’. However, this
would afford a further growth of productive capacity, and ultimately overproduction
of commodities vis-a-vis effective demand. In such an economy of giant firms, price
competition is not fierce(this is an economy of ‘administered prices’). To that effect,
large corporations would be hesitant towards further consumption out of surplus, as a
large segment of their extant productive capacity is already redundant. That is, when
demand is low, monopolistic firms would not lower prices but resort to slack in
production and productive consumption. Steindl is ever so close to Kalecki with his
injunctions on monopoly capitalism and the terms of economic stagnation in such a
system. Kalecki, with his concept of ‘degree of monopoly’(qua price make-up on
chief production costs), was the first economist who considered economic crises in
terms of both monopoly capitalism(capital concentration and centralisation) and wage
economy(i.e. realisation of suprlus value through wage income) and the historical
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