political control, will be engineered by the financial magnates
who control the political destiny of America. The
strong and expensive American navy now beginning to
be built incidentally serves the purpose of affording
profitable contracts to the shipbuilding and metal industries:
its real meaning and use is to forward the aggressive
political policy imposed upon the nation by the economic
needs of the financial capitalists.
It should be clearly understood that this constant
pressure to extend the area of markets is not a necessary
implication of all forms of organized industry. If competition
was displaced by combinations of a genuinely
cooperative character in which the whole gain of improved
economies passed, either to the workers in wages,
or to large bodies of investors in dividends, the expansion
of demand in the home markets would be so great
as to give full employment to the productive powers of
concentrated capital, and there would be no self-accumulating
masses of profit expressing themselves in new
credit and demanding external employment. It is the
``monopoly'' profits of trusts and combines, taken either
in construction, financial operation, or industrial working,
that form a gathering fund of self-accumulating credit
whose possession by the financial class implies a contracted
demand for commodities and a correspondingly
restricted employment for capital in American industries.
Within certain limits relief can be found by stimulation
of the export trade under cover of a high protective
tariff which forbids all interference with monopoly of
the home markets. But it is extremely difficult for
trusts adapted to the requirements of a profitable tied
market at home to adjust their methods of free competition
in the world markets upon a profitable basis of
steady trading. Moreover, such a mode of expansion is
only appropriate to certain manufacturing trusts: the
owners of railroad, financial and other trusts must look
always more to foreign investments for their surplus
profits. This ever-growing need for fresh fields of investment
for their profits is the great crux of the financial
system, and threatens to dominate the future economics
and the politics of the great Republic.
The financial economy of American capitalism exhibits
in more dramatic shape a tendency common to the
finance of all developed industrial nations. The large,
easy flow of capital from Great Britain, Germany, Austria,
France, etc., into South African or Australian mines,
into Egyptian bonds, or the precarious securities of South
American republics, attests the same general pressure
which increases with every development of financial machinery
and the more profitable control of that machinery
by the class of professional financiers
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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