Lazar Radic on Marxism and Competition

Federal Trade Commission – ICLE Senior Fellow Lazar Radic was cited by FTC Commissioner Christine S. Wilson in a speech to the Joint Conference on Precautionary Antitrust. You can read full speech here.

Lazar Radic has described how these concepts become interwoven with the concepts of capitalism and competition in the Marxist worldview. In a market economy, capitalists seek to gain an advantage over their rivals by driving down costs, increasing productivity, and decreasing the price of goods and services. They reinvest the surplus value (wrongfully) appropriated from labor to facilitate increases in productivity and acquisitions that increase scale. In other words, competition is the engine of capitalism. And the capitalist that can lower costs, appropriate the most surplus value, and reinvest the most is both the most exploitative and the best-positioned vis a vis its rivals. The bottom line, according to Marx, is that capitalists steal from workers to obtain scale, lower costs, cheapen commodities, and beat their rivals in the market.