Planning the Future, I

A Marxist critique of ressentiment against monopoly

A Gentle Scolding

George Grosz, The Pillars of Society, 1926

Progressives and reactionaries alike tend to share similar grievances around the monopolization of industry. Monopolies tend to stifle competition, become bureaucratic, disconnect from local—or in some instances, human—needs, and cut corners to save on costs while raising prices once consolidated. Progressives are generally concerned with price-fixing, planned obsolescence of product fleets, and their outsized influence in politics. Reactionaries, on the other hand, are more concerned with their stifling of market competition, their social and legal engineering, and—once more—their outsized influence in politics. Their primary grievances differ slightly but overlap substantially, though on the point of “social and legal engineering” they often diverge on the details.

Progressives often favor regulation of monopolies, up to and including breaking them apart—“trust-busting.” They often hold monopolies to higher legal standards than small businesses, resulting in reams of paperwork: compliance trainings, safety codes, environmental reviews, legal retainers and so on. The result is remarkable inefficiency that has slowly ground industry to a near-halt. Progressives expect to reap reward from monopolization’s many benefits while using the state to mediate away its worst excesses. Once a firm has cemented itself as a monopoly, its primary drive becomes rent extraction. The more regulations added, the more difficult this becomes for the monopoly itself, and the more rent is instead extracted by intermediary layers that must be consulted simply to get projects off the ground.

This dynamic is visible even in critiques of Uber, DoorDash, and other monopolistic “service” companies. The primary complaint is rarely that these firms are unproductive or socially unnecessary, but that they are monopolies. The concern is not over the quality or character of any given monopoly, merely that it is a monopoly.

The reactionary position differs in form but not in outcome. Reactionaries are generally anti-regulation and believe the market to be the primary economic organizing principle, but that they feel monopolies destroy the ethos of capitalism rather than drive it to its logical conclusion. They, like Adam Smith, see monopolies as a distortion of perfect market conditions, usually the result of government interference. Indeed, there are clear examples of this—utilities companies, public transit, the aerospace industry, etc. However, these are not merely the result of government interference.

In almost all cases, monopolistic firms arise in industries where standardization, economies of scale, and capital-intensive research lead to a commensurate rise in profitability. Such firms then game the market in order to corner it, offering below-market rates in order to drive local competitors out of business. Nothing about this violates competitive market logic. But competition presupposes a victor; monopolies are the victors of capitalist competition. They stand alone, and can only be dismantled either by the state (which holds a monopoly on the use of violence) or by another monopolistic firm which subverts the existing monopoly’s business model.

It is only once rising monopolies are acknowledged as such that the state steps in to support them, and they are only supported in their monopolistic forms because they have become critical infrastructure that the rest of the economy cannot do without. Truly unrestrained markets tend towards consolidation; thus, the reactionary simultaneously opposes their consolidation and any regulation which would dissolve such consolidation—a contradiction.

The progressive position is also in contradiction. Progressives do not believe the market can operate unrestrained because this produces all manner of social externalities: pollution, foreseeable accidents, catastrophically low wages, unreasonably high prices, etc. However, by regulating the market to account for these externalities, they create conditions which accelerate monopoly formation, since only monopolistic firms can comply with swaths of regulatory demands and still be able to turn a profit.

Ultimately, once a monopoly accedes to progressive regulation and continues to return profits to shareholders, it can expect to be broken up once such a move becomes politically expedient. In practice, anti-trust interventions are largely superficial: a single large firm is divided into three or four smaller ones that remain anti-competitive, retain enormous political influence, and continue to exploit massive economies of scale. More commonly, anti-trust legislation functions as a tool for extracting political favors from firms seeking to merge, rendering its populist roots moot and subordinating long-term economic concerns to short-term political gain.

A Full-Throated Defense

Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry Murals (partial), 1933

Monopolies are a historically progressive force. I use “progressive” here not in the American liberal sense, but in its Marxist one. The continued rise and persistence of monopolistic firms signals the waning of purely competitive market logic as the dominant economic organizing principle. This development is neither inherently “good” nor “bad.” It is historically contingent, much as competitive markets were themselves progressive relative to feudalism. So-called “natural” monopolies—those arising from organic market consolidation rather than direct state sponsorship—have transformed relations of production to a staggering degree. In doing so, they have oriented economic life toward a new historical configuration, one defined less by competition among many firms than by planning, coordination, and scale.

Monopolistic industrial firms often excel at productive planning, research and development, economies of scale, and large-scale capacity to meet human needs. In many cases, they function as closed economic systems in their own right, operating according to internally coordinated—often explicitly planned—logics rather than competitive ones.

Boeing, for instance, must coordinate the production of innumerable highly sensitive, fragile, and technically complex components, all of which must conform precisely to the designs of both its commercial and military aircraft. This requires long-term planning and close partnerships with suppliers, many of whom are themselves monopolistic firms producing a narrow range of specialized components exclusively for the aerospace industry.

Similarly, Bell operated for decades in the twentieth century with no meaningful competition. Rather than eliminating innovation, this condition compelled continuous technological advancement, resulting in massive investments in research and development. Much of this research did not immediately generate profit, yet what did emerge proved transformative. Bell Labs pioneered revolutionary technologies and secured substantial returns through the patents that followed. By effectively subsidizing research, Bell was able to pool extraordinary human capital, pairing genuinely exceptional engineers and inventors with resources and institutional support they could never have accessed in isolation.

Monopolistic economies of scale are most visible today in firms such as Walmart and Amazon, with U.S. Steel serving as a useful historical case study. All three are logistical behemoths: vertically integrated, globally coordinated, and capable of directing trillions of dollars in fixed capital. Each possesses a core business model—retail for Walmart and Amazon, steel production for U.S. Steel—that demands massive resource and labor inputs drawn from across the world.

Their strategy for securing these inputs has consistently been absorption. Inputs are brought in-house, folded into subsidiaries, or otherwise subordinated to the firm’s internal planning logic. In some cases, this results in profitable spin-offs; in others, firms deliberately subsidize unprofitable segments of the supply chain in order to gatekeep access to critical inputs, exclude potential competitors, and stabilize the profitability of the system as a whole. The general outcome has been persistent deflationary pressure on their goods—not because of any commitment to consumer welfare, but because internalized planning allows costs to be reduced at scale.

Whether consumer prices are later raised to extract rent is irrelevant to this point. Economies operating at this scale are only possible under monopolistic logic, and they clearly do meet human needs (albeit imperfectly). The competitive market was never able to do this as efficiently as these mega-firms, and moreover, the competitive market can never be reinstated.

A General Critique

Hannah Höch, Untitled (from the series “From an Ethnographic Museum”), 1929

Though I have shown that monopolies are historically progressive, they are still presently inefficient and their capacity to meet human needs is breaking down due to the financial logic of the early 21st century. In the next installation, I will provide a general critique of monopoly under modern capitalist conditions. But for now, I provide a general critique of trust-busting and regulation which lays bear why the contradictions of the progressive and reactionary postures toward monopoly are destructive, rather than generative.

First, anti-trust law introduces arbitrary thresholds for what constitutes a monopoly, distorting market behavior by preventing economically efficient consolidations while permitting others. These thresholds are not merely technical; they are political. Their arbitrariness invites state intervention driven by ideological preference or rent extraction rather than economic coherence. For example, two mid-sized media firms seeking to merge may be blocked on anti-trust grounds, often at the behest of a far larger incumbent that enjoys close relationships with regulators or employs former officials from agencies such as the FCC. The dominant firm remains untouched despite already functioning monopolistically, while simultaneously leveraging its political influence and legal expertise to prevent the emergence of a comparable competitor. This stifles innovation, prevents inefficiencies from being resolved, and prevents the market from consolidating in earnest.

Second, the breakup of monopolies cannot restore pre-monopoly market conditions. All actors in any reconstituted market would be aware that monopoly is possible and would therefore rationally optimize toward forming one themselves. Even if such awareness were somehow absent, the dynamics of market competition naturally tend toward monopolistic outcomes beyond certain thresholds which vary by firm according to their specific business models. Attempts to “reset” the market thus inevitably reproduce consolidation. Breaking up monopolies cannot eliminate the rational solutions monopoly provides, nor can it reverse the historical conditions that made monopoly viable in the first place. Moreover, progressive liberal anti-trust regimes rarely exist in isolation; they are typically embedded within broader regulatory frameworks that, as discussed earlier, further accelerate monopoly formation.

Third, anti-trust law and broader “progressive” regulatory frameworks push society toward an extremely inefficient and highly extractive form of central planning. Rather than articulating general goals for economic development, the state instead imposes a dense web of constraints. Firms must then maneuver around these limits in order to remain viable, often either rendering legislation ineffective for its stated purposes—such as fuel-efficiency standards like CAFE—or preventing otherwise beneficial economies of scale from forming at all. The state subsequently extracts rent from monopolistic firms as they grow in size, primarily through fines, legal fees, and compliance costs. These expenses are not prohibitive but anticipated. Monopolies incorporate them into their business models, periodically violating regulations when the temporary gains exceed the predictable cost of enforcement.

This tacit, politically contingent accommodation of monopoly produces an economic system that neither consistently meets human needs nor meaningfully empowers workers or consumers. To be clear, the immediate abolition of regulatory agencies such as the FDA or FCC would be socially catastrophic: food and drug adulteration would immediately proliferate, and advertising practices would become even more invasive. Yet it is equally clear that the present equilibrium—a system in which regulatory agencies exist but are structurally ineffectual, and monopolies persist but remain economically irrational—cannot be sustained indefinitely. The contradictions this arrangement generates demand not a return to pre-monopoly conditions, but a rationalization of central planning itself, along with a resolution of its own contingent contradictions.