This article draws on the case of Amazon to highlight the inadequacy of theories of imperfect competition and monopoly capital to explain corporate capitalism. As it demonstrates, recent revisions to these frameworks to account for the apparently competitive behavior of Amazon and other large tech firms perpetuate a longer-term trend of compensating for theoretical shortcomings by introducing additional complexity without addressing core problems. We argue that the classical Marxian theory of real competition offers a more coherent and parsimonious explanation for Amazon’s behavior: simply, Amazon does not exhibit the conventional signs of monopoly because it is not a monopoly.
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