Abstract
The role of competition is a frequently overlooked yet important feature for understanding the crisis-ridden nature of capitalism. One of the approaches that has consistently highlighted the nature and impact of capitalist competition in different historical periods is the social structures of accumulation (SSA) approach. Building on the understanding that competition can indeed be co-responsible for capitalist crises, this article theorizes the competition-crisis nexus further and reconstructs, first, the role of in the decline of the monopoly and post-World War Two SSAs, and second, in the current crisis of neoliberal capitalism, while focusing on antitrust rules as one of the wider institutional settings in the US economy inhibiting or facilitating the process of capital accumulation for each period.
