Australian Left Review
Article Title
Book Reviews: Europe Versus America? Contradictions of Imperialism
Abstract
MANDEL’S BOOK is a Marxist economist's answer to Servan-Schreiber’s The American Challenge (Penguin Books, 1969). T h e framework of the analysis is L en in ’s theory of imperialism, which in the most general terms is the analysis o f the relationships between capitalist nation states in th e era of monopoly capital. While non-Marxist, or bourgeois economists do not use the term "monopoly capital”, the phenomenon of concentration of ownership and control of industrial enterprises in advanced capitalist countries in to fewer and fewer hands over the last 100 years and the associated increase in monopolistic forms of market structure is not disputed. Nor is there any dispute over the analysis in chapter 2 of Mandel’s book th at there has been a new wave of mergers which has resulted in yet more highly increased concentration of capital control over the last 15 years or so, and associated with this, an enormous increase in direct foreign investment by the so-called multi-national corporation. However, the implications of this phenomenon for the relations between two of the biggest spheres of capitalism — the United States of America and Western Europe, is more controversial.