Re: The economy - a new era?

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Julio Huato wrote:

> Why would concentration be more propitious for progressive politics?

I can think of several reasons. Less competition means less pressure
on wages (though this would be partly offset by higher prices in
noncompetitive markets). Large firms are easier to organize,
regulate, and supervise. The big bourgeoisie is often more socially
tolerant than their smaller comrades. Small business in general is
often a font of reactionary social attitudes - in the U.S., they're
much more anti-regulation, anti-union, anti-green, and are more
likely to support the right wing of the Rep party. Small biz can be
ideologically toxic, promoting a lot of nonsense about the beauties
of competition and laissez-faire. Empirically, Canada is more
industrially concentrated than the U.S., and despite other broad
similarities, is more politically progressive. Sweden is also highly
concentrated. Also, dispersed shareownership in the Anglo-American
mode seems like more hostile soil for social democratic politics than
Teutonic-style banko ownership, because the stock model imposes more
severe profit maximization discipline (and because it looks
agentless, makes it look more "natural" and "spontaneous"). I once
had a paper that made this argument more rigorously, but lost it to a
hard disk crash.

Doug