| A number of influential theories of capitalist class formation assume that the transition from competition to monopolistic concentration and, in turn, the eventual hegemony of corporate capitalists over large-scale industry, is inevitable and automatic in the course of capitalist development. This study of America's bituminous coal industry in the late 19th and 20th centuries challenges this assumption and focuses, in particular, on one aspect of the intracapitalist struggle over economic consolidation that took place in the industry, as well as the causes and consequences of this struggle. I argue that collective bargaining and the question of union recognition was the principal arena within which this struggle took place. The bituminous coal mining trade's large producers sought to consolidate their over-capitalized industry by recognizing the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Their objective was to make production costs prohibitive for the industry's small producers and thus drive them out of business. But by the time the United States entered WWI, it was clear that the large coal producers had failed to impose highly concentrated and oligopolistic conditions on the industry and, with this, had failed to win hegemony over the bituminous coal trade. The unintended outcome of their protracted conflict with the small producers was therefore a coal mining trade that, taken as a whole, was highly differentiated internally. And this internal differentiation had profound consequences for the economic development (or mis-development) of the industry after the war. I therefore demonstrate that industrial consolidation is not a product of ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable’ economic processes. Rather, the specific nature of economic development is contingent upon the outcome of political conflicts over particular social interests. |
