MONOPOLY CAPITAL
HILARY JOFFE: Share ownership can be force for change
‘Monopoly Capital was very much a book of its time. Yet it does touch on some of the crucial questions around ownership and control of SA’s economy’
For those of us brought up with the Marxism of the 1970s, all this stuff about white monopoly capital is a bit puzzling. Mzwanele Jimmy Manyi’s Progressive Professionals Forum (PPF) calls for the dismantling of the oligopolistic nature of white monopoly capital and talks of more than 90% of SA’s wealth being in the hands of a few white families and white-owned corporations. We’re told UK public relations agency Bell Pottinger crafted the white monopoly capital narrative. Whoever did so seems sadly unfamiliar with the Marxist texts from which the notion of monopoly capital comes and unaware that in its original form monopoly capital could not, strictly speaking, have been white, black or any other colour. It was, rather, a particular stage of capitalism, and who owned the means of production didn’t have much to do with it. US Marxists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, authors of the seminal 1966 book Monopoly Capital, went out of their way to emphasise that control of the oligopolistic "gi...
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