On one hand we find a softening down—nay, sometimes even a complete cessation—of the competition in which the capitalists of a single branch of industry are engaged throughout their particular country, by means of employers' associations, trusts, &c. On the other hand, we see the accentuation of international competition through the rise of new capitalist countries, especially of Germany and the United States.
The employers' associations abolish competition among the masters, not only as against the buyers of their products, but also as against their workers. Instead of being confronted with numerous purchasers of their labour-power, the workers have now only to deal with a single master. How much the advantages of the employers are thereby increased, and also to what extent their opposition to the workers is thus accentuated, needs no further elucidation.
According to the last census of the United States, the wages of the workers in American industry have, during the decade 1890–1900, suffered an absolute decrease. If that is so, we cannot be far wrong in attributing it to the work of the syndicates and trusts.
In the same direction, moreover, works the growth of foreign competition. Here, too, in addition to the consumers, it is the workers against whose interests this development proceeds. Over and above the raising of prices by means of protective tariffs, which in their turn favour the formation of employers' associations, it is the increased exploitation of labour by which the capitalists seek to meet foreign competition. Hence the accentuation of their struggle against the militant organisations of the workers, political and trade union, which stand in their way.
Thus here, too, there is no softening down, but, on the contrary, an intensification of the class war.
To this may be added, as a third factor, the increasing fusion of the industrial capital with the money capital, with the haute finance. The industrial capitalist is an employer in the domain of production (this taken in the widest sense and including transport) in which he exploits hired wage labour and extracts a profit out of it. The money capitalist is, on the other hand, the modern form of the ancient usurer. He draws an income from his money, which he nowadays lends on interest, not simply to needy private individuals as formerly, but also to capitalist employers, local authorities. States, &c.
Between the industrial capitalist and the money capitalist there as a great antagonism, similar to that between the former and the landowner. Like the ground rent, the interest on borrowed capital is a deduction from the profit. The interests of both kinds of capital are thus on that point antagonistic. Nor do they agree politically. Just as the great landowners are to-day in favour of a strong, preferably a monarchical form of government, because so far as they are a court nobility they are in a position to bring personal influence
