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Transcript

Post-Colonial Monopoly Capitalism

GLCs, GLICs, and the Ethnocapitalists

That private provision has increasingly opened up huge new markets for potentially profit-making – and capital accumulation to clientel-capitals’ related activities. Given the saturation of markets in many mature economies, and the inadequate growth of markets in poorer societies, and the intrusion of  global institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization (WTO), as well as more informal bodies such as the World Economic Forum that have actively encouraged private investment in formerly public sectors.

Simplified, these entities are more an expression of the modern imperialistic drive for control over economic territory than the neocolonial direct annexation of geographic territory, but that does not make it any less consequential.

As an instance, the privatisation of knowledge and its concentration in fewer and fewer hands – especially through the creation and enforcement of new ‘intellectual property rights’ – have become significant barriers to technology transfer and social recognition of traditional knowledge.

This is clearly evident in the case of access to medicines whose prices have been hiked up by patents that reward multinational companies and allow them to monopolise production and set high prices or demand very high royalties.

An overall excursion with a better understanding of monopoly-capital and capitalism can be acquired through these related readings:

Benjamin Selwyn and Dara Leyden, “World Development under Monopoly Capitalism,”  Monthly Review 73, no. 6 (November 2021): 15–28.

Intan SuwandiValue Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review , 2019).


John Smith, “The GDP Illusion,” Monthly Review 64, no. 3 (July–August 2012): 86–102.

John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna, “The Internationalization of Monopoly Capital,”   Monthly Review 63, no. 2 (June 2011): 1.


John Bellamy Foster, and Intan Suwandi, “COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism,”  Monthly Review 72, no. 2 (June 2020): 1–20.

STORM, 01/06/2021 Framing Monopoly-Capitalism , and

STORM, 05/03/2021  Capitalism

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