Review: The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, by Tim Wu

Purchase here: https://globalreports.columbia.edu/books/the-curse-of-bigness/

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, Tim Wu. The author is a professor at Columbia Law School, although he is probably better known as the originator of the net neutrality term, as well as a 2014 candidate for New York State Lieutenant Governor (as a ticket with Zephyr Teachout, the progressive gubernatorial candidate then).

Concise and easily digestible, Curse of Bigness provides a comprehensive overview of the monopolization movement and subsequent antitrust movement in the United States — an exposition very much in line with the Brandeis school of thought in using progressive governance and institutional power to protect the basic principles of competitive markets — beginning with the formation of the railroad, steel and oil monopolies in the latter half of the 19th century, to the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, the “trustbusters” of the Progressive Era in the (Theodore) Roosevelt and Wilson presidencies, through to the litigation of “big” cases such as the breaking up of Standard Oil or AT&T and the Bell System in the 1980’s.

Wu also engages in a much timely discussion on the zaibatsu system, the juggernaut that powered the economic and military rise of Imperial Japan, as well as monopolies in Nazi Germany such as biochemical behemoth IG Farben, at the time the largest monopoly in all of Continental Europe, and most notoriously the primary producer of Zyklon-B, the gas used to murder millions of Jewish, Romani, Slavic, and Gypsy people in the Holocaust.

On a tangential note, my experience is that socialists sometimes tend to be dismissive of the antitrust approach, or even outright antagonizing small businesses and small business owners as part of the “capitalist class” and favor vague platitudes to establish worker cooperatives everywhere without much of a step-by-step strategy to actually transition to a worker-owned economy. I find these criticisms to be aloof and even quite posturing and insubstantial at times. I don’t necessarily see the more militant “socialist” or the more institutionalist “progressive” options as necessarily in opposition to one another, and I actually think had things gone differently in the 2020 Democratic primary, Sens. Sanders and Warren and their respective bases (were it not for the unfortunate and in my opinion, unnecessary animus that existed between their camps) could have forged a formidable alliance to do battle with American corporate power.

On the other side of the token, I am also wary of extolling the progressive, trustbusting virtues of the Roosevelt and Wilson eras, both of whom were fervent imperialists and not at all truly opposed to the unprecedented concentration of state and private corporate power.

Any study of monopoly power should also necessitate an analysis through the lens of colonial exploitation, and the early decades of the 20th century were marked by American expansionist efforts in Latin America and the Caribbean (in particular, after the defeat of the Spanish Empire in 1898) and the conquest of local market and labor by American multinational corporations like the United Fruit Company in those regions.

Analogously, the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands took place in 1898 as well, in which the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom was in part motivated by the business interests of the Dole Fruit Company. The growth of American corporate power both at home and abroad also contributed to the Yellow Peril sentiment and the racialized immigration laws from the 1870’s through to the 1950’s, with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 being the first of its kind to exclude an entire group of people from immigration to the US on the basis of race — after Chinese coolie labor was brought to the West to be exploited by the Central Pacific Railroad for construction of the Western railways.

All-in-all — a quick, and wonderfully informative read.