Corporations are a funny kind of alien intelligence. Producing a better product or a lower price is just one way to ensure their survival. Another is to manipulate the rules of the market itself, including the rule enforcers.

It's the product of an evolutionary process. You could scrap capitalism entirely and still get cartel formation, since you have agents with varied traits competing to gain the resources to be selected to reproduce [their continued existence, into the future].

A couple other ways of looking at it come from Bataille, Odum, Prigogine or Schmitt.

You can also just pay your workers in scrip and then hire Pinkertons to kill them if they get uppity about it. It's hard not to become cynical when people seem almost willfully ignorant of the despicable history of capital in this country...