The Political Economy of Fidelismo

Baran and Sweezy may have felt that in writing Monopoly Capital they were doing for the Space Age what Karl Marx had done for the Textile Age and Lenin for the Steel Age. Let it be said from the outset that in scholarship they don’t compare with either and are not on a par even with their own earlier efforts. Their reading is limited, their quotations are often secondhand, and they don’t understand the methodological apparatus they have borrowed from Kalecki and Steindl. To prove that capitalism is now bound to collapse or, perhaps worse, to stagnate and lapse into barbaric wars, the authors state that monopoly has wrought a decisive change. Free competition used to keep profits low and hence helped maintain the equilibrium; under monopoly, on the contrary, prices may rise while costs are falling, and the “surplus” which is thus created will spread like a cancer through the whole body of society.

I shall say later why I think that “surplus”...