A Prime Competitor: Understanding Amazon’s Market Power

A recording of this November 20, 2024, event is available on our YouTube channel.

Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno present an innovative analysis of Amazon’s market power, drawing on major themes from Marx’s Capital, volume 2. In a recent report prepared for Amazon Worker Solidarity, they challenge understandings of “monopoly” common in mainstream economics as well as among sections of the left.

Amazon’s “bigness” and lack of a direct competitor would seem to suggest that it should be considered a monopoly. And yet, far from exhibiting the tell-tale signs of increasing monopoly prices, inefficiency, and technological stagnation, Amazon has engaged in cutthroat price competition, built a highly efficient and technologically advanced logistics system, and unleashed competitive forces whose effects have reverberated across the retail sector and beyond. Moreover, Amazon’s distinct vertically integrated structure, competing across a range of sectors including retail, e-commerce, logistics, online search engines, and media entertainment – each dominated by large firms – suggests that today’s giant corporations are not significantly encumbered by barriers to entry.

Stephen Maher is Assistant Professor of Economics at SUNY Cortland, and Co-Editor of the Socialist Register. With Scott Aquanno he co-authored The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From J.P. Morgan to Blackrock (Verso, 2024). Steve is also the author of Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power (Palgrave, 2022).

Scott Aquanno is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Ontario Tech University, and a Visiting Associate at the Global Labour Research Centre at York University. With Stephen Maher he co-authored The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From J.P. Morgan to Blackrock (Verso, 2024). Scott is also the author of Crisis of Risk: Subprime Debt and US Financial Power from 1944 to Present (Edward Elgar, 2021).