Political Capitalism and the Afterlife of Monopoly Capital

Dylan Riley’s recent essay, “The USA Is Living Under Political Capitalism”, identifies something important about the present. American capitalism is increasingly difficult to describe as a system in which profits are secured mainly through productive investment, technical advance, and ordinary market competition. A growing share of accumulation runs through political access, legal privilege, asset inflation, public contracts, procurement systems, tax advantages, intellectual property, monetary policy, standards, zoning, bailouts, and the state management of scarcity. The return does not always appear as a monopoly price in the classical sense. It may appear as a capital gain, a government contract, a patent-protected revenue stream, a privatized public function, a tax expenditure, or a protected position inside a regulatory architecture.

Riley is right to insist that these mechanisms cannot be reduced to a simple story of firms charging above-competitive prices because they dominate a product market. His account of political capitalism usefully emphasizes wealth extraction through political position rather than through productive investment alone. The Trump family’s conversion of political office into private asset appreciation is a particularly vulgar example of this tendency, but its vulgarity should not distract from its broader significance. It shows a mechanism that is increasingly general: wealth accumulates not only by producing commodities or controlling product markets, but by occupying positions where political authority can be translated into claims on future income.

Yet Riley may concede too much in trying to distinguish political capitalism from monopoly capitalism. The distinction is useful at the level of mechanism. It is less convincing as a description of a new historical formation. Political capitalism should not be treated as an alternative to monopoly capitalism. It is better understood as monopoly capitalism after financialization, assetization, and the weakening of the old productive investment regime. The root formation remains the same: concentrated capitals face limited profitable outlets for investment and therefore depend increasingly on unproductive, politically mediated, legally protected, and asset-based channels for absorbing surplus and securing returns.

Baran and Sweezy remain indispensable here. Monopoly Capital was never merely a theory of large firms charging high prices because they face no competitors. Nor was its argument that production disappears or that competition ends. The point was that advanced capitalism had moved away from the textbook world of small competitive firms into a world dominated by large corporations, oligopoly, administered markets, chronic excess capacity, and a growing economic surplus that could not be easily absorbed through productive investment. The problem was not a shortage of surplus. It was a surplus that outran the profitable outlets available for reinvestment.

That is why Baran and Sweezy devoted so much attention to surplus absorption. The sales effort, civilian government spending, militarism, imperialism, and other forms of waste were not incidental to monopoly capitalism. They were among the means by which monopoly capitalism managed its own contradictions. A system that cannot absorb surplus through productive investment alone must find other outlets. It must spend, advertise, militarize, subsidize, speculate, and politically organize demand. Waste becomes functional. Unproductive expenditure becomes stabilizing. The irrationality is not an accident in the machinery. It is part of the machinery.

The term “leakage” is useful, provided we are clear about what leaks and where it goes. Surplus does not leak out of capitalism. It leaks out of productive accumulation and into the apparatuses that sustain accumulation indirectly: advertising, finance, militarism, intellectual property, asset markets, procurement channels, platform infrastructures, speculative development, and the political protection of claims on future income. These outlets are not external to capitalism. They are among the ways monopoly capitalism manages the limits of profitable production.

Riley’s political capitalism thesis should be read through this problem. Political accumulation is not a break from monopoly capitalism. It is one of the contemporary solutions to the monopoly-capitalist surplus problem. The older Fordist corporation sought price leadership, market stabilization, administered demand, and corporate planning within concentrated industrial sectors. The contemporary asset holder seeks protected income streams, legal enclosure, guaranteed contracts, public subsidies, tax advantages, capital gains, and state-backed balance sheets. The form has changed. The structural problem remains recognizable.

The classic monopoly-capitalism argument was never that competition vanishes. That is the easy caricature. Competition persists, but it takes place among large capitals already positioned within concentrated markets, legal enclosures, state-supported infrastructures, and institutionalized barriers to entry. Telecom firms compete, but they compete inside a market organized around spectrum allocation, infrastructural control, regulatory decisions, and enormous capital barriers. Pharmaceutical firms compete, but they do so through patents, regulatory exclusivities, acquisition strategies, pricing power, and control over distribution channels. Platform firms compete, but often by attempting to control the market infrastructure on which others depend. This is not the absence of competition. It is competition under monopoly conditions.

Seen through Baran and Sweezy, the contemporary picture becomes clearer. The sales effort has expanded into platform advertising, data extraction, behavioral targeting, brand infrastructure, influence operations, and the permanent engineering of attention. Civilian government spending now includes industrial policy, tax credits, public-private partnerships, infrastructure contracts, procurement systems, university-industry pipelines, and state-subsidized commercialization. Militarism now stretches across the defense-tech-security complex, where surveillance, logistics, artificial intelligence, border control, and military contracting increasingly merge into a single field of accumulation. Finance has become one of the main ways that claims on future income are priced, inflated, protected, and redistributed.

The contrast between monopoly capitalism and political capitalism can therefore mislead. Riley is right that there is a difference between rents extracted through monopoly pricing and rents extracted through political power. But the older monopoly-capitalism tradition already had the conceptual resources to explain why political power would become increasingly central. If surplus cannot be absorbed through productive investment alone, then the state becomes more than a night watchman, referee, or occasional rescuer. It becomes an organizer of outlets. It helps create the conditions under which surplus can be absorbed and converted into private claims.

A brief comparison with China clarifies the issue. If political capitalism means only that politics organizes accumulation, then China is obviously political capitalism. The Chinese state directs credit, disciplines firms, manages strategic sectors, plans infrastructure, sets industrial priorities, and subordinates markets to national-developmental goals. But this only shows that the category is too broad. There is no capitalism without politics. The sharper distinction is between politics that protects rent claims upward and politics that disciplines capital downward toward developmental, national, or ecological priorities.

China is not innocent of monopoly, exploitation, speculation, corruption, coal dependence, or state-backed accumulation. But its political logic differs from the American one. In the United States, the state increasingly acts as guarantor of assetized monopoly claims. In China, the state more often acts as planner, superior political authority, and disciplining force over private capital, including private platform monopolies. Its ecological transition is not being pursued through liberal market coordination alone, but through industrial policy, infrastructure investment, national planning, and state direction of strategic sectors. China therefore exposes the weakness of using “political capitalism” as a general regime concept. The question is not whether politics enters accumulation. The question is what politics does to capital.

Political capitalism, then, is not simply capitalism corrupted by politics. It is monopoly capitalism increasingly dependent on political mechanisms of surplus absorption. This includes crude forms, such as direct self-enrichment by politically connected elites. It also includes normal institutional forms: contracting, patent protection, zoning, infrastructure finance, tax subsidies, bond markets, central bank interventions, research grants, defense procurement, carbon credits, and the legal engineering of asset values. Corruption is not only the envelope of cash. It is also the ordinary architecture of accumulation.

The language of “productive investment” can obscure this architecture. Large firms obviously invest. Big Tech invests in data centers, chips, logistics, artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure, and research. Pharmaceutical firms invest in laboratories, trials, regulatory navigation, and acquisition pipelines. Auto firms still invest in production systems, battery platforms, software, and supply chains. The question is whether profits are organized primarily around production itself or around the control of bottlenecks, legal claims, infrastructures, standards, and state-backed asset values. Productive investment and rent extraction are not mutually exclusive. Under contemporary monopoly capitalism, productive investment is often the condition for building a defensible rent position.

Riley’s critique of Maher is strongest on this point. It is not enough to show that major firms invest or that they face competition. Monopoly capitalism never required the absence of either. The question is whether competition occurs under conditions in which dominant actors can translate scale, political access, legal privilege, and infrastructural control into durable claims on surplus. A firm can be innovative and rent-seeking. It can invest heavily and depend on state protection. It can compete intensely while benefiting from oligopoly, intellectual property, procurement, data moats, and regulatory capture.

Baran and Sweezy also help avoid a second mistake: treating political capitalism as if it were mainly a parasitic layer resting on top of an otherwise productive economy. The extractive sector is not simply attached to the productive sector. It is intertwined with it. The sales effort shapes what gets produced. Finance shapes which firms survive. Procurement shapes technological trajectories. Intellectual property shapes research agendas. Defense spending shapes entire industries. Subsidies shape regional development, investment decisions, and corporate strategy. Political accumulation does not merely drain capitalism after production has occurred. It increasingly organizes the field in which production takes place.

That is the deeper continuity between Fordist monopoly capitalism and the present. Under Fordism, monopoly capitalism stabilized markets through large corporations, administered prices, mass production, mass consumption, union contracts in strategic sectors, military spending, and Keynesian demand management. Under contemporary conditions, the stabilizing mechanisms are weaker, more financialized, more unequal, and more openly predatory. Instead of a broad wage-productivity compromise, there is asset inflation. Instead of mass consumption underwritten by rising wages, there is debt, household balance-sheet fragility, and speculative appreciation. Instead of administered prices alone, there are administered assets. Instead of the corporation as the privileged site of accumulation, there are portfolios of legally protected claims distributed across corporations, funds, platforms, contractors, landlords, and politically connected asset holders.

Riley’s concept is valuable, but its best use is as a specification of monopoly capitalism’s present form. Political capitalism describes the means through which accumulation is increasingly secured. Monopoly capitalism describes the structure that makes those means necessary and profitable. The state protects monopoly power, but monopoly power no longer appears only as product-market dominance. It appears as control over standards, licenses, platforms, patents, data, infrastructure, land, contracts, debt, and asset prices. This is still monopoly capitalism, though less visibly organized around the factory and more visibly organized around the state-backed claim.

The implication is not semantic. It changes how we understand the politics. If political capitalism is treated as a new deviation from capitalism proper, then the solution can appear to be a cleaner capitalism: less corruption, more competition, better rules, a restored productive bourgeoisie, perhaps a new developmental state disciplined by public purpose. If political capitalism is an evolved form of monopoly capitalism, the problem runs deeper. The state is not merely captured by bad actors. It is structurally tasked with preserving a regime of accumulation that increasingly depends on protected claims rather than broad-based productive expansion. Reforming corruption does not touch the underlying dependency on asset protection, surplus absorption, and legalized scarcity.

This is also why nostalgia for productive capitalism is politically dangerous. The old productive regime was never innocent. Fordism depended on imperial hierarchy, racialized labor markets, gendered household labor, ecological destruction, military Keynesianism, and oligopolistic planning by private corporations. The point is not to mourn the lost honor of General Motors. The point is to understand how the older monopoly-capitalist formation has mutated. It has become more political, more financial, more assetized, and less capable of presenting its own domination as general progress.

Riley has identified a real tendency: accumulation increasingly runs through political maneuvering rather than productive investment. Baran and Sweezy help us see why this tendency does not require a new name for the whole system. Political capitalism is monopoly capitalism under conditions in which surplus absorption increasingly takes the form of state-backed rents, asset inflation, legal enclosure, and politically organized claims on future income. The rentier is not outside capitalism. He is what monopoly capitalism looks like once the productive alibi begins to rot.

The old question was how monopoly capital absorbs surplus when productive investment is insufficient. The contemporary answer is that it absorbs surplus through platforms, patents, procurement, militarized technology, public-private contracting, financial engineering, and the political defense of asset values. Riley’s political capitalism describes this answer well. But the question remains Baran and Sweezy’s.

References

• Baran, Paul A., and Paul M. Sweezy. 1966. Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order. New York: Monthly Review Press.
• Riley, Dylan. 2026. “The USA Is Living Under Political Capitalism.” Jacobin.