by Ryan Rafaty for New Left Project
Reflecting on the vast monopoly scandalously accrued by Rockefeller’s Standard Oil during the first Gilded Age, William Vanderbilt remarked in 1879 before the New York Assembly: “I don’t believe that by any legislative enactment you can keep such men as them down; you can’t do it; they will be on top all the time.” Under the framework of state-capitalism, this might still very well hold true for today’s oil sheikhs and coal barons. But all of our hopes are pinned upon the notion that Vanderbilt might have been wrong.
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