Re: [OPE] "A Letter from John Ketch, Esq. Asserting His Right to the Necks of the Over-Grown Brokers." (1721).

Jerry,
I'm sorry, but there are several questions that your last posts suggest to
me:
wouldn't it be necessary to make a distinction between commercial
monopolies, one of which was the South Sea Bubble, and industrial
monopolies, which could only have appeared after the Industrial Revolution
and maybe only after the second ind rev of around the last quarter of the
19th century? And wouldn't it be necessary to take into account the
changes experienced by the joint stock companie, in their juridical form,
from the first to the second of the mentioned historical periods? and the
same in relation to the banks and the framework of the banking industry
and their relations to both commercial and industrial capital in both
periods? The same with respect to the colonial systems of the period of
the domination of commercial capital and that of industrial capital?

Finally, I wonder what are the objective criteria you have in mind in
order to say that there was or that there wasn't free competition before
the changes of the late 19th century. It seems to me that one has to
consider that there are no pure situations, say a pure free competition or
a pure monopolisation. Thus, is it possible to define degrees of
competition and of monopolisation that would allow to characterize the two
periods?
comradely,
Claus.

>
>
>
>
> Had there been 'free competition' at that time, then the South Sea Bubble
> would
> not have happened since there would have been no South Sea Company (a
> British joint stock company and state created monopoly) to begin with. In
> that sense, both
> the Bubble itself and the Bubble Act which followed were indications that
> the
> free competition was a bourgeois fantasy (an ideal). Later, it became
> enshrined
> as a myth which is not even accurate as a 'stylized fact'.
>
> In solidarity, Jerry
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Received on Sat Apr 16 15:10:06 2011