The Review of Radical Political Economics often publishes articles of interest to Marxists. One recent piece, by Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno, “Monopoly or competition? Unravelling the Amazon paradox” (https://doi.org/10.1177/04866134261415639) is well worth a look for those able to access it. The authors reject the neoclassical fantasy of “perfect competition” between firms and the heterodox alternative, accepted by some Marxists, of “monopoly capitalism”. They instead draw on authors such as Anwar Shaikh to argue that the growth of the size of units of capital tends to lead to intensifying competition.
The authors take Amazon as an example of a giant firm that, despite often being presented as a monopoly, engages in intensive investment to raise productivity. Challenging authors such as Lina Khan, for whom this presents itself as a “paradox”, they argue that Amazon cannot, in reality, be regarded as a monopoly “unless monopoly is equated with competition itself”. For the largest firms, able to mobilise vast amount of their own or borrowed capital, barriers to entry into most areas are limited. Competition reigns within specific sectors but also between sectors, as capital flows across these divides to seek to maximise profitability. Amazon is best known for its operations in the extremely competitive sphere of circulating commodities (some of which it now contributes to producing). In recent years, its cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services, initially a spin off from its core commercial activities, has become its main source of profits. Here, too, there is growing competition, necessitating continued investments.
Maher and Aquanno’s approach leads them to question the faddish notion, advocated by figures such as Yanis Varoufakis or Cédric Durand, that we are seeing a shift from capitalism to technofeudalism. Although genuine monopoly situations, created by sustained barriers to capital flow, can lead to firms attracting “rents”, accounts of technofeudalism—or those of “rentier capitalism” by authors such as Brett Christophers—tend “to conflate rent with profit, and thus come to see monopoly and rent everywhere”. As well as obscuring the dynamics of capitalist competition, this obscures the source of the profits of these huge firms, which ultimately lies in the exploitation of labour. As well as making these useful theoretical arguments, the authors support their claims with data on Amazon’s operations, showing these dynamics at work.
The latest issue of the journal Historical Materialism to reach us (volume 33, issue 2) has a collection of articles on the Austro-Marxists, an important left current in the interwar period in particular. As well as rejecting Bolshevism following the Russian Revolution, they are often noted for their position on the national question, which they saw mainly as a question of achieving cultural autonomy for all nations, an approach Lenin rightly criticised as a concession to bourgeois nationalism.
The main inspiration for this position was Otto Bauer, through his 1907 work, The Nationalities Question and Social Democracy. However, in this collection we have a more obscure piece by him: his very first theoretical paper, “Marx’s theory of economic crises”, from 1904. It is largely a historical curiosity—an introduction by John E King notes that the most original element is an unsuccessful effort to give algebraic expression to what Bauer regards as Marx’s theory of underconsumptionism and disproportionality between sectors of the economy. It will still be of interest for those wanting to know more about the reception and development of Marxist crisis theory.
Particularly striking is the absence of any interest in Marx’s “law of the tendency of the falling rate of profit”, elaborated in the third volume of Capital, which had appeared a decade earlier. This reinforces a point made by King and Michael C Howard, in their two volume A History of Marxian Economics: that prior to Henryk Grossman’s work in 1929, there was surprisingly little interest among Marxists in Marx’s law.
Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi has analysed the situation in Iran since the mass uprising at the beginning of January 2026 for various left-wing publications. He shares many of the views advanced by International Socialism. In January, he set out his thoughts for Sidecar, the New Left Review’s online blog (https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/scylla-and-charybdis). There, he traces the regime’s organic crisis, as well as the difficulty for movements in asserting themselves both against their own heavily repressive government and against foreign influence from the United States and Israel. A more recent update appeared in Phenomenal World, in which Sadeghi-Boroujerdi discusses Sayyid Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s new supreme leader (www.phenomenal-world.org/analysis/war-and-succession).
JC & SR