View Original - Middle East Technical University

capacity on the basis of the now increased threshold of profitability through monopoly
prices would cater towards excess capacity in the long-run; or better said, ‘the surplus
that the system was actually and potentially capable of producing normally exceeded
the capacity to absorb that surplus’(Bellamy Foster 2002:141). In these terms, though
the crisis of monopoly capitalism is determinately a crisis of overproduction in
circumspect of the lightness of profitabiliy under monopolistic competition; in the
final analysis, Baran and Sweezy anticipate a more stagnationist/excess capacity crisis
in the epoch of giant corporations.
For many, however, Monopoly Capital and its theory of underconsumption crisis are a
partial and prosaic fragment of Marxist theories of capitalist crisis. Still Baran and
Sweezy’s analysis is more than a rethinking of the ultimate contradiction of capitalist
mode of production with certain Keynesian fragments and heuristics; it is, in fact, a
rethinking of capitalist crisis in historical time and the analytical thoroughness of
multifarious Marxist theories of capitalist crisis under monopoly capitalism and/or in
terms of the historical(yet still long-term) contingencies of the organisation of
capitalist production. To this effect, Sweezy argued that rate of profit, tendencially or
otherwise, does not fall in monopoly capitalism. The organic composition of capital
very early on and only momentarily increased in the passage from labour-intensive
methods of production to capital-intensive methods of production; but since then,
excessive increases in the rate of exploitation more than undersold any falling-rate-of-
profit-based excess capital crisis.
Despite the fact that Monopoly Capital was not really the first analysis of
competitive/monopoly forms of capitalism(even reluctant towards, but perhaps still
complicit of, the often scanty descriptiveness of former political economy of finance-
or monopoly-capitalism) and, in terms of its design, was basically a follow-up to the
European Marxism of the time, it has nevertheless been a rarity within this relay of
historical political economy. Disclaimers to the underconsumptionism of Monopoly
Capital are also disclaimers to underconsumptionism elsewhere; in that stagnationist
contradictions of capitalism that (left-)Keynes(ians), Hilferding, Lenin and
28