| | Monthly Review Paul M. Sweezy |
 | | The nature of the price mechanism under monopoly capitalism (an argument that went back to Sweezy’s earlier theory of the kinked demand curve) meant that capital tended not to adjust to shortfalls in final demand by lowering prices, but generated instead chronic excess capacity, as plants were idled to protect profit margins. |
| | As always the issue came down to the thesis that stagnation was the “normal” state of monopoly capitalism—so that the problem was less one of explaining stagnation, but rather periods of rapid growth. |
| | Monopoly Capital had argued that production should be for use not for exchange (or profit) and that enormous sales effort engendering unnecessary expenditures should be curtailed—a point that Baran and Sweezy also made in their important article “Theses on Advertising,” published in the Winter 1964 issue of Science and Society. |
| www.monthlyreview.org /paulsweezy.htm (10648 words) |
