per cent. of the total number, receive only 7 per cent. of the driving power, electric and steam. A few tens of thousands of big enterprises are everything; millions of small ones are nothing.
In 1907, there were in Germany 586 establishments employing over a hundred workers. They held a tenth (1,380,000) of the manual labour, and almost a third (32 per cent.) of the driving power.1 Finance-capital and the banks make this superiority of the biggest enterprises, as we shall see, still more crushing, in the most literal sense of the word, since millions of employers, small, average, and even great are in reality attached completely to some hundreds of millionaire financiers.
In another advanced country of modern capitalism, the United States, concentration of production is still greater. Here statistics deal with industry in the narrow sense of the word, and group enterprises according to the size of their annual output. In 1904 there were in the United States, 1,900 enterprises (out of 216,180, that is 0.9 per cent.) with an annual output valued at more than a million dollars. They employed 1,400,000 workers (out of 5,500,000, i.e., 25.6 per cent.)), and their annual output was valued at $5,600,000,000 (out of $14,800,000,000, i.e., 38 per cent.). Five years later, in 1909, the corresponding figures were:
Big enterprises: 3,060 out of 268,491, i.e., 1.1 per cent.;
Employing: 2,000,000 workers out of 6,610,000, i.e., 30.5 per cent.;
Producing: $9,000,000,000 out of $20,700,000,000 i.e., 43.8 per cent.2
1For references see appendix.
