other, by joining in military operations for the sole purpose of securing for themselves all the advantages of the situation. Based on the American tombola method, Wilson's stake was not high, but it was the last, and he won.
By reason of the war the contradictions of the capitalist order have become for mankind the animal pangs of hunger and cold, and epidemics of moral savagery. The academic quarrel of Socialists over the theory of impoverishment, and the undermining of Capitalism by Socialism, has thereby been finally decided. Statisticians and pedants of the theory of the reconciling of contradictions have for some decades been at pains to collect from all parts of the world real and apparent facts which testify to the improvement in the welfare of various groups and categories of the working class. To-day the impoverishment faces us, not only of a social but also of a physiological kind, in all its frightful reality.
Finance capital, which mankind has thrown in the abyss of war, has itself suffered catastrophic changes in the course of the war. The dependence of paper money on the material basis of production is completely destroyed. While losing more and more its significance as means and regulator of the circulation of capitalist commodities, paper money is transformed into a means for requisition, for robbery, especially of social-military administration. The complete degeneration of paper money reflects the universal death throes of the capitalist exchange of commodities. If free competition as the regulator of production and distribution in the chief social spheres had been supplanted by the system of trusts and monopolies during the decades preceding the war, so the progress of the war snatched the direction of things from the hands of the economic associations and delivered it straight into the hands of the power of the military States. The distribution of raw materials, the utilisation of the petroleum of Baku or Roumania, of the coal of Donetz, of the wheat of Ukraine, the fate of the German locomotives, railways and automobiles, the provisioning of hungry Europe with bread and meat—all these vital questions of the social life of the world were not regulated by free competition, or by associations of national and international trusts, but by the direct employment of military power, in the interest of its continued existence. If the complete subjection of the State power to the power of finance capital has led mankind to the imperialist shambles, this gigantic massacre has not only militarised the State,
4
