Monopolies depend on maintained sham-competition to continue appropriating surplus value.

Evidence

In a letter to Horkheimer from the spring of 1940, the same period in which Horkheimer’s ‘Authoritarian State’ originated, Adorno brings up ‘the question of the general cartel’. According to him, the concept is ‘entirely undialectical’ insofar as neither the ‘survival of pseudo-competition between the monopolies’, nor a ban on trusts, would be sufficient to ensure continued adherence to the ‘“unrational” form’ of ‘sham-competition between the concerns’ existing at the time ‘in monopolised America’. This assumption leads Adorno ‘to a much more principal observation’: ‘It is apparently the case that, economically, only this quasi-artificially maintained competition still makes it possible to appropriate surplus-valueat all, whereas, socially, the moment this competition were to disappear, the pretence for exploitation and domination would also disappear’. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 608

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s critique of political economy and debates with Pollock over state capitalism; the claim that competition must persist under monopoly echoes Marx’s law of value. — connects to: Monopolies themselves depend on continuing inter-monopoly struggle. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 613; Common ownership of competing firms suppresses competition and inflates prices; Commodity supply concentration determines how easily mafias monopolize markets — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 558
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Adorno here anticipate the ‘monopoly capital’ debates (Baran-Sweezy) about competition persisting beneath concentration?

Broader Connections

• Monopolies themselves depend on continuing inter-monopoly struggle. #corroborates (0.82) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 613
• Common ownership of competing firms suppresses competition and inflates prices #exemplifies (0.75)
• Commodity supply concentration determines how easily mafias monopolize markets #corroborates (0.74) — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 558