Peripheral monopoly capital: business groups, class power, and the reproduction of dependency in Chile

Although the past decade has seen renewed interest in theories of monopoly capital, debates have largely focused on the leading knowledge-intensive corporations of the Global North, paying far less attention to monopoly power in dependent economies. Addressing this gap, this paper develops the concept of Peripheral Monopoly Capital (PMC) to theorize concentration, centralization and class power in contemporary peripheral capitalism. We elaborate PMC through an analysis of diversified, pyramidal, and interlocking business groups in the reproduction of dependency in Chile, arguably a paradigmatic case of centralization under dependency. Focussing on four major business groups, each representing a distinct configuration of monopoly power, we show how these groups articulate circuits of rent-based accumulation in antagonistic cooperation with global capital. Our main contribution is to reconnect monopoly capital theory with dependency analysis and to locate the organizational foundations of dependency in the business group itself. By conceiving business groups as class projects that link global and domestic circuits of rent-based accumulation, PMC offers a new lens on monopoly power in the Global South.