Monopolization and industry concentration have powerful mimetic effects, which aren't only born out of pure mimicry, but also out of necessity. When one corporation concentrates and vies for monopoly in a given industry or market, it leads to a sense of panic and urgency within competing organizations, because the monopolizing entity is going for everything, which implies the death of its competitors.
And monopolization implies the re-coupling of corporate entities spanning multiple industries, so the patterns of monopoly eventually spread across all industries. Capital is constantly attempting to resituate itself so as to maximize the rate of profit - which functionally accrues to a minority of controllers - which necessitates minimizing the flow of costs to the body: labor, infrastructure, and resource inputs, say.
So as currency flows continue to constrict - and losing rivals are destroyed and/or subsumed - the remaining surviving smaller businesses also have to move to sap more resources in the ways that they can, or else constrict their own operations and costs. So there is a relentless and broad-based squeeze that advances the body politic to crisis.
At the same time as the rule of law is corrupted by the economic and political concentration, there is also a growing perception that anything goes, as long as one is powerful enough, a perception that reaches down into even the common citizen. Who knows what dormant schemes are now on their way to spawning and hatching out?
One could imagine that buried underneath that complex of imperial desires for conquest is the desire for that arch-monopolist, the leviathan government to put an end to the whole struggle altogether, historically with anti-trust measures and the like.
But the arch-monopolist itself must be remonopolized by the lobbies of anti-monopoly. Monopoly cannot be solved by substitution: it must be destroyed by those whose associations are agreed upon and situated to prevent further monopoly. Though of course this isn't always true. Sometimes it takes a king or a dictator. More broadly, a bad state of affairs must be replaced with a different state of affairs, which then persists for some time.
Underneath the process of monopolization is the desire for control. It was partially the hubris of rich reactionaries who didn't want to be subjected to government control that advanced us to this new era of monopolization, but it is always much more complicated.
Because the forces of financialization - through their processes of wealth concentration and sequestration - also threaten connected economic actors and introduce further chaos which produces further desires for control. And these are forces which were broadly welcomed across the Western political spectrum - that part of the spectrum with power at least - across the last 4 decades at least.
There are numerous other interconnected crises - some of them economic, some environmental, and still others political and social - which introduce greater levels of instability into this process, which evoke the desire to control, which leads to greater instability, and so on.
And this tendency, unfortunately for all of us, is built into the general nature of capital, which through massive and historical processes of social and political succession, is here to stay, at least until it triggers another successive stage. At this time, it is apparent that a profoundly destructive stage is much more likely.
