Chapter 11
Surplus Value and Surplus Labor
The atomized and competitive model of capitalism, in which the individual owner of capital (or family group, or small group of partners) and the capitalist firm were identical, and production in each industry was distributed among a reasonably large number of firms, is no longer the model of capitalism today. Economists and social observers of a variety of persuasions are in general agreement that it has been displaced by a substantially different structure, although they may disagree in their descriptions and analyses of the new structure. Marxists have used various names for this new stage of capitalism since it made its appearance: finance capitalism, imperialism, neocapitalism, late capitalism. But since it has been generally recognized that, as Lenin put it in one of the pioneer treatments of the subject, “the economic quintessence of imperialism is monopoly capitalism," it is the latter term that has proved most acceptable.' The most substantial recent discussion of this new stage from the Marxist point of view is found in Monopoly Capital, by Paul Baran and Paul M. Sweezy.²
Monopoly capital had its beginnings, it is generally agreed, in the last two or three decades of the nineteenth century. It was then that the concentration and centralization of capital, in the form of the early trusts, cartels, and other forms of combination, began to assert itself; it was consequently then that the modern structure of capitalist industry and finance began to take shape. At the same time, the rapid completion of the colonization of the world and the international rivalries and armed clashes over the division of the globe into spheres of economic influence or dominance opened the modern imperialist era. Monopoly capitalism thus embraces the increase of monopolistic organizations within each capitalist country, the internationalization of capital, the international division of labor, imperialism, the world market and the world movement of capital, and changes in the structure of state power.
It will already have been noticed that the crucial developments in the processes of production date from precisely the same period as monopoly capitalism. Scientific management and the whole “movement" for the organization of production on its modern basis have their beginnings in the last two decades of the last century. And the scientific-technical revolution, based on the systematic use of science for the more rapid transformation of labor power into capital, also begins, as we have indicated, at the same time. In describing these two facets of the activity of capital, we have therefore been describing two of the prime aspects of monopoly capital. Both chronologically and functionally, they are part of the new stage of capitalist development, and they grow out of monopoly capitalism and make it possible.
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