ties, with advances to build power stations, and with other credit operations.
"As for Chili, German export trade with that country rose to 45,200,000 marks in 1892 after the loan negotiated in 1889. The following year it fell to 22,500,000 marks. A new Chilian loan floated by the German banks in 1906 was followed by a rise of German exports in 1907, to 84,700,000 marks, only to fall again to 52,400,000 marks in 1908."97
From all these facts Lansburg draws an amusing petty bourgeois moral. He says that they illustrate how unstable and irregular is export trade when it is bound up with loans, how bad it is to invest capital abroad instead of "naturally" and "harmoniously" developing national production, how "costly" are commissions to be paid by Krupps when foreign loans are floated, etc!
But the facts are clear. The increase in export trade is closely connected with the swindling efforts of finance-capital, which cares not at all for middle class morality, but flays the same ox twice. First, it pockets the profits from the loan: then it pockets other profits from the same loan used by the borrower to make purchases from Krupps, or in obtaining railway material from the Steel Trust, etc.
Let us repeat that we by no means consider Lansburg's figures to be perfect. But we had to quote them because they are more scientific than Kautsky's and because Lansburg showed the correct way of approaching the question. When discussing the importance of finance-capital in export trade, etc., it is necessary to be able to distinguish the special relations of export trade with the operations of the financiers, with the circulation of the
