Competition: a Marxist view

摘要

Despite his initial intentions, Marx never wrote an organic treatise on competition. This is a pity, since nowadays competition has become a sort of political myth, apparently supported by the results of mainstream economics. In this paper, I develop an organic conception of competition from Marx's work, which contributes to demystify this myth. Marx describes competition as an 'external coercive law', which imposes capital logic over the individual and the overall society, regulates the reproduction of class relations and produces a number of economic tendencies. He shows that, historically, it develops with the development of capital and argues that even the appearance of a competitive 'human nature' is part of this process.