This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
IMPERIALISM
41

amongst the imperialists in every country. This author naturally tries to mask one "detail": that the "deliberate regulation" of economic life by the banks consists in a robbery of the public by a handful of "completely organised" monopolists. For the task of a bourgeois professor is not to lay bare the whole financial system, or to divulge all the intrigues of the finance monopolists, but rather to cover them up.

In the same way, Riesser, a still more eminent economist and a financier himself, disposes of facts which he cannot deny, by means of some hollow phrases: "The Stock Exchange is losing, to a greater and greater extent, its character, indispensable to economy as a whole, and to the exchange of securities in particular, of being not only the most exact means of measuring, but also of being an almost automatic regulator of economic movements, which are centralised in it."33

In other words, the old capitalism of free competition and its indispensable regulator the Stock Exchange, are passing away. A new capitalism is succeeding it, which seems to have a somewhat transitory nature, and representing a kind of mixture of free competition and monopoly. The question crops up naturally: to what is this transitory capitalism leading? But the bourgeois scholars are afraid to face this question.

"Thirty years ago, employers freely competing against one another carried out nine-tenths of the economic work which does not belong to the sphere of manual labour. At the present day, nine-tenths of this 'brain work' is performed by paid officials. Banking gives a lead in this evolution."34 This admission by Schulze-Gaevernitz leads us once