Marx's Mergers and Enlightenment Again?

1. Wallerstein illustrates how the cost of production has been rising for the past five hundred years and sales prices have not been able to keep pace. Additionally, an expansion in the number of producers increases competition and reduces the possibility of an oligarchy. This "puts a squeeze on profits." After reading the beginning to Wallerstein's piece, I can't help but think of the stage of mergers and acquisitions that we constructed when speaking of Marx. With profits being harder to attain and a high number of producers or a high number of capitalists, is the next stage for this economic landscape a reduction in the capitalist group and the formation of a smaller number of producers through mergers?

2. The world revolution of 1968 sounds like another kind of enlightenment era that we discussed with Kant's handout. I posit this as there seems to be an awakening of citizens in that they have lost the optimism in the glorious economy after the war and are frustrated with empty promises from anti-systemic movements. Wallerstein says that the hidden stabilizer of the system was the optimism of the oppressed. Now that the optimism has vanished, the oppressed have been awakened to the menacing structure of USA hegemony and capitalism. Do you also view this world revolution as a sort of enlightenment period? How else can this era be described?

In response to part 2, I would reframe the argument of the optimism of the oppressed to propose that the oppressed have self-actualized within the materialist world, noting their place within the bureaucracy. But not only the oppressed, but also those within the oppressors, as they are realizing the structure within society and some came to understand the need for change. So in terms of the enlightenment period, I believe it could also be considered a period of self-actualization.

In all honesty, your hypothesis of a reduction in the capitalist group and the formation of a smaller number of producers through mergers is highly plausible. Wallerstein introduces to us a productive structure, in which there is an increase in renumeration (worker demand higher wage), taxes, and inputs. With these three situations occurring, I would believe there to be a transfer in wealth from the capitalist group to the producers. If the monetary funds move out of the hand of capitalist, along with growing inflation nowadays, the will not be able to keep control of the production of means. Instead they too will have to become producers for an even smaller group of proletariat, which eventually could lead to a revolution.