German bourgeois learning—and not of German learning alone—such as Riesser, Schulze-Gaevernitz, Liefmann, etc.—are all apologists for imperialism and for finance-capital. Far from throwing light on the system which conditions the formation of oligarchies, their methods, their legal and illegal sources of income, and their relations with parliaments, they conscientiously obscure and camouflage these subjects. They dodge these awkward questions, in fact, by a few vague and pompous phrases: calling on "the sense of responsibility of bank directors," praising "the sense of duty" of Prussian officials, giving serious study to ridiculous little plans for "supervision" and "regulation" by law, playing with theories, like, for example, the following "scientific" definition, arrived at by Professor Liefmann. "Commerce is an industrial activity tending to the collection and conservation of goods which are then placed in use."42
The conclusion is that primitive man, who knew nothing of exchange, understood "commerce," and that it is going to continue in a Socialist society!
But the facts concerning the monstrous rule of the financial oligarchy are so striking that in all capitalist countries, notably America, France and Germany, a whole literature has sprung up which gives a fairly accurate picture of it from a bourgeois point of view, and a criticism—petty bourgeois naturally.
First and foremost comes the system of "participation" of which we have already spoken above. The German economist, Heymann, who, perhaps,
