Editorial: Trusts and Soap. (1906)

Editorial from the December 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was the Liberal Star, mouthpiece of that great progressive, democratic, Liberal and Labour combination of which Mr. Lever is so distinguished a member, that hooted its horn gleefully because it was of opinion that Mr. Lever’s soap combine was undone—smashed by a great wave of popular and righteous Liberal-Labour indignation forcefully and fearlessly expressed out of a knowledge of the rascally rapacity of the capitalists who dominated the Trusts which are so emphatic a feature of American commercialism. The yankee Trust has had a most unhappy time of it, thinks the Star, in endeavouring to fix its tentacles upon British industry. The hard-headed practicability of sober-minded Englishmen is a guarantee of the invincibility of free and unfettered English commerce against the threatening advance of the monopolist market-riggers across the herring pond, even if it were not the fact (which of course it is) that the anti-protectionist policy of the great Liberal-Labour combination aforesaid was in itself a sufficiently insurmountable barrier. Trusts as is well known (in Liberal-Labour circles), are only the accompaniment—the necessary and inevitable accompaniment of production within a tariff ring.

The True Blue Variety.

Instead of which the English Sewing Cotton Trust has just absorbed the few sewing cotton manufacturers who until now have maintained a precarious and financially disastrous existence in competition with the trust which has been able, owing to its command of capital and its control of more highly organised and economical methods of production and distribution which command of practically unlimited capital gives, to show profits on its working of about three million pounds sterling per annum.

Then the tobacco manufacturers after a short, sharp fight with the American trust, found that their only way of escape was by combination, and as a result we have the Imperial Tobacco Co., a true blue British trust operating, not in opposition to its American fac simile, but hand-in-hand with it to control the British and American markets and avoid the waste of competition. Then we have the Wall Paper Trust, a most eminently respectable hall-marked product of merry England. The Railway Companies also, although not yet in the trust stage, are recognising the value of combination and are avoiding unnecessary expenditure over certain competitive routes by pooling receipts and so on.

The Evolution of Capitalist Combination.

It would almost seem that the Star chortle is only possible because of the Star’s stupidity. The Star has been so taken up with its efforts to scintillate that it has forgotten that it is not a celestial body far removed from mundane affairs but quite an earthy sort of a product, whose coruscations depend for success upon the measure of their power to reflect facts. And the facts are that unrestricted competition engenders waste which can only be avoided by combination. Competition goes on until the dwindling margin of profit warns the competitors that they are approaching an abyss. And the smaller the capital at their command the more rapid their approach to the abyss is. They perceive that the competitors who are offering best resistance, to the profit-ebbing tide are those whose larger capitals have enabled them to improve their machinery and perfect their methods so that for them production is cheaper. They have the advantage in competition. Then the smaller capitalist comes to himself and offers the bit of the market he can influence, to his larger competitor. He is swallowed up in a combination or if he is stubborn and stupid he is crushed out. The combination grows snowball wise until out of the tussle of interests emerges victoriously in free trade England or protectionist America—the trust.

Inevitable and Necessary.

The trust form of industry, therefore, is the outcome and the necessary product of the competitive form. It is the highest expression of capitalist production. It has eliminated waste. It produces economically in the least time and with a minimum of effort. It is the perfection of production. But it has in its growth developed something else. It has eliminated the capitalist director—the man who under the old competitive system performed some service at any rate in organising and supervising. He is now, perhaps, hundreds of miles from the seat of commerce; perhaps never sees the mill or the factory and is only concerned in them on dividend days. The direction and organisation of the business has passed into the hands of a managerial staff wage servants all. That is to say the whole process as such is now out of the control of the capitalist class and in the hands of the working or wage-earning class. They produce all wealth but as they do not own the machinery by which that wealth is produced, they do not own the wealth itself. Therein is an anomaly that cannot stand for long. Distribution is out of harmony with production. It cannot remain so. Directly the workers who produce recognise their position and their power they will restore the harmony by appropriating the product of their toil and—out goes the capitalist.

The Cry of Wolf !

All very simple. Curious the Star hasn’t seen it! Well, perhaps not so curious. Perhaps the Star does see it but wants to stave off the inevitable as long as possible by shouting wolf. But it won’t do. Trustification is inevitable and just as inevitable is the appropriation by the working class for their own use of the undertaking perfected by capitalism. Try as it may, capitalism cannot destroy that germ within itself which will presently outgrow the shell in which it is evolving to maturity. Then behold a revolution. Capitalism (production for profit) dead. Socialism (production for use) on its feet, established and secure.

As for Mr. Lever’s soap combine, it may of course happen that by vociferously crying wolf the Star and the Daily Mail and the rest of the organs may inspire a successful opposition to this particular organisation. They may even kill poor Mr. Lever of the great Liberal-Labour combination. But they will not kill the soap trust. That is going to happen. Whether it is Mr. Lever’s or not doesn’t matter. The trust’s the thing. “We’ve got to have it whether we like it or not” as the poet puts it.

Peace where there is no Peace.

Indeed, at the present moment there are indications that the free and independent firms who are outside the soap trust are forming themselves into a combine in order to combat the plaguy and malignant trust. In other words they are forming a trust of themselves to fight a trust of others than themselves. And in this delightful occupation it must be a great satisfaction to them to know that they have the sympathies of a trust-hating, hard-headed British nation and the active support of those champion “trust-busters” the Star and the Daily Mail ! We are a great people !

The Communists and the Trusts. (1928)

From the August 1928 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The Communist Party declares that such trusts and combines can only be successfully fought by initiating an energetic price war.”

The above is the advice tendered to the Co-op. Societies by the Communist Party (“Workers’ Weekly,” July 6th). The particular trusts referred to are the drapery and cotton combines. Poor Teddy Roosevelt years ago had an election slogan, “Bust the Trusts,” but he demanded State Control as the means.

The Communists have a simpler method—”lower prices” ! While economic evolution inevitably causes competition to lead to monopoly, these Trust Busters—Capitalist or Communist—are doomed to failure. But it is somewhat pathetic to see the so-called Revolutionary Communists advocate a “remedy” which the Trusts themselves have used to “bust” would-be competitors. And the notion that Co-ops. can sustain lower prices than international trusts with large resources to gamble with—well, to say the least, the idea belongs to petty bourgeois and small shopkeepers’ “economics.” How are lower prices going to benefit the working class, whose wages are based on the cost of living?

Adolph Kohn

Editorial: Nationalisation or Trust Busting? (1952)

Editorial from the May 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

While capitalism in Britain, Continental countries and the British Dominions has gone in for a certain amount of nationalisation and Russia has carried it to the point where all important industry and about half of agriculture is run under the State, capitalism in America has followed a different policy. In Britain Liberal and Tory governments in the 19th century nationalised telegraphs and telephones when the capitalists as a whole felt their interests adversely affected by those two services being in the hands of private monopolies. For the same reason Gladstone in 1844 was responsible for the first Act giving die government power to nationalise the railways, a power that was not used because the government held that the mere threat of it served to keep the railway directors in check.

In the United States nationalisation has so far made little headway as the capitalists have preferred to use Anti-Trust laws as a means of curbing too-powerful monopolies.

Because of the pre-eminence of the United States in world production and because private capitalism still holds the field there, more than half of world production, transport, etc., is still in the hands of private concerns. This applies to basic industries such as coal, steel, food, rubber, oil, textiles, motor cars, railways, shipping, road transport, telephones and telegraphs, banking, insurance and manufacturing generally.

In the past few years nationalisation has had a certain set-back in a number of countries and British capitalism, following the American example is now experimenting with the Monopolies Commission as a means of checking monopoly; both the Conservatives and the Labour Party being committed to developing this line of attack.

But this does not mean that the Anti-Trust legislation in America has fulfilled the expectations of those who backed it. Loopholes in the law have enabled the big monopolistic group such as the American Telephone and Telegraph company with its concentration of telephone services and the manufacture of equipment, to go on expanding. When an amending bill to the Gayton (Anti-Trust) Act of 1914 was being debated on 15th August, 1949, Congressman Celler, New York, stated that between 1940 and 1947 more than 2,500 formerly independent concerns had disappeared as a result of mergers and acquisitions, and that “two hundred and fifty concerns now control two-thirds of the industrial facilities of the country that were controlled by 15,000 companies before the war.” He added, “The anti-trust laws are a complete bust unless we pass this bill.” (“Labor and the Nation” New York, September-October, 1949.)

Most of the demand for action against the Trusts and for amendments to strengthen the laws comes of course from the small traders and businessmen.

In addition to the Anti-Trust laws the charges that may be made in America by such services as the telephones and telegraphs are subject to regulations issued by the State Utility Commissions and the Federal Communications Commission. If complaint is made that charges are too high these bodies are empowered to investigate whether the companies are making an unduly high profit. The companies may and, of course, do appeal to the Courts against Commission rulings. In 1934 the American Telephone and Telegraph company reported that through adverse court decisions one of its associated telephone companies had the prospect of refunding 20 million dollars to subscribers.

One of the leading anti-trust politicians, Senator Benton, spoke on the Trusts to the Anglo-American Press Association in Paris in November last He maintained that in Britain the electors have had to choose between nationalisation as advocated by the Labour Party and the Conservative policy of leaving industry to private monopoly, and that if American electors had the same choice they “would line up for Government ownership" and that by an overwhelming majority. (Manchester Guardian, 8.11.51.)

He also made the curious suggestion that if Marx were alive today “he would certainly have approved" of American capitalism though not of the “cartel-ridden capitalism of Europe.”

But later on the same Senator Benton charged that the British Imperial Chemical Industries group “has a deal with the DuPont firm not to go into the United States.” (Daily Mail, 22.11.51). As this must be a violation of the American Anti-Trust laws it suggests that the laws are by no means as effective as the Senator believes.

In the meantime the alternative capitalist method of dealing with monopolies by nationalising them is under fire in Great Britain where the Conservative Government, having disowned responsibility for the rise in railway, etc., fares, now professes to discover that under the Act which nationalised the railways the government has no power in the matter of fares except to refer them to the Consultative Committee which can merely make recommendations. A group of Conservative M.P.'s are now therefore proposing an amendment to the Act to enable the government “to put the Transport Commission under more effective Parliamentary control.”

It need only be added that whether nationalisation is carried very far, as in Russia, or much less far as in Britain, or whether the government relies on Anti-Trust laws as in America the state of the mass of the population continues to be that of poverty existing alongside the great wealth and large incomes of the privileged few.

Alladin's Lamp. Another Conjuror Fails. (1919)

Pamphlet Review from the August 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The New Way. To Pay Old Debts. To Find New Money, and Reduce Taxation." By John T. Day, Editor of the "Shoe and Leather Record."

The Sign of the Loose Jaw

In the above pamphlet Mr. Day, like most capitalist writers on economic subjects, makes quite a number of ill-considered statements, easily seen of the to be false or absurd. Most of these statements are unsupported by evidence of any kind, and no reasoning whatever is attempted to justify them. Sometimes in a further statement the author even supplies evidence, unconsciously, that exposes his previous utterances, as, for instance, when he says that "Money is only counters," and further on explains that "When we send money abroad in settlement of international balances, it goes as metal and not as money. It may or may not have been minted into sovereigns, but if it has it is more likely than not to be melted down at the end of its journey."

Surely this is direct and conclusive evidence that the metal contained in a sovereign is equal to the value stamped on its face. All Mr. Day's subsequent jeers at the gold standard, therefore, fall flat, because gold as a standard of price is real value, and the sovereign, being the unit of measure, is exchangable for other forms of wealth in multiples or fractions of itself.

The Frailty of Bradburys.

For the same reason our author's statement that "paper money is as good as any other for internal purposes" is only true up to a certain point and under favourable conditions. But why a difference between internal and external purposes ? If it is lack of confidence which makes gold international money, then lack of confidence in the home government, industrial crises, or financial panic, will transform credit notes into mere "scraps of paper," and gold immediately asserts itself as the only general equivalent embodying value—the only equivalent desired because its value is the result of embodied labour, which, of course, is the only source of exchange value. Credit in all its forms is only the acceptance of a promise to pay in the recognised medium of exchange. Neither commodities that are unsaleable, nor businesses that are redundant, are acceptable as equivalent or as security.

A Definition of "Tick."

The credit system, therefore, depends for its stability on expanding trade. Directly markets show signs of failure to absorb the increasing mass of commodities flung indiscriminately upon them, up goes the bank rate. If this does not restrict production, a certain proportion of commodities become unsaleable, prices fall, small capitalists, unable to pay the high rate of interest or push their sales by extensive advertising, are the first to go to the wall—hence their agitation for "cheap money."

The Finger of Gord.

Mr. Day, as a champion of the smaller fish in the capitalist sea, is desirous of saving these smaller fish from the cannibal greed of the bigger fish, who in every industrial crisis scoop them up wholesale through bankruptcy. He, therefore, calls upon the Government to nationalise the Bank of England and provide State credit, i.e., provide the smaller capitalists with the necessary capital to carry on production in spite of a falling market.

But the large capitalists reply, in the language of Malthus, that the world is for the fittest, and when the world's commerce is convulsed with repeated shocks that shake down business houses in every crisis, a divine purpose is revealed because the big concerns, with their wider scope, can effect economies in production and cheapen commodities for all mankind. To the small capitalists, as to the large, exploitation of the workers is natural, and is a necessary part of what would be the best of all possible systems, if they could only retain the plunder.

The predicament in which the small capitalists find themselves is due entirely to the natural development of the capitalist system. Competition between capitalists for a limited market must necessarily result in the success of those who operate with the largest amounts of capital. We see this truth emphasised daily, large concerns acquiring others in competition with them and amalgamating into groups with the object of controlling entire industries or markets.

The extinction of the small capitalist is no concern of the workers. Their immediate concern is how to escape exploitation altogether. If they side with him and endeavour to stop the progress of the big concerns, their action must be as futile and foolish as was that of the Luddites, who sought to hinder the march of machine production by smashing a few of the machines. It is no more possible to arrest the development of a social system than it is to reestablish the conditions of a former period or system.

In the United States a movement against the trusts has been on foot for years. A number of Acts have been placed on the Statute Book and, as one writer put it, "there is a growing hostility towards wealth"; but the power of the trusts has not diminished, and the amalgamation and absorption still go on.

In this country men like Mr. Day, instead of agitating against trusts, invent wonderful schemes for providing unlimited credit. Much more marvellous than the slave of the magic lamp, who only created wealth from nothing, he would transform the national debt—which is on the wrong side of nothing—into its equivalent of assets, or real wealth, by a magic systena of book-keeping all his own.

Briefly, Mr. Day's idea is 

"that the Bank of England should be nationalised. That the Treasury should offer to exchange outstanding war bonds for what might be called national credit bonds, bearing a higher face value, but carrying no interest. These would be received at the Bank of England, and credit given for them at their face value. Thus the Bank and the Treasury would be as it were two pockets of the same garment, and when and whether the debt was paid to the Bank would be of little consequence. The whole transition would be merely a matter of book-keeping. No money would pass. Consequently, the entire debt might be quickly wiped out, in form as well as in substance, without a penny being raised by taxation."

If the matter were as simple as this the question might well be asked, why did not the Government print credit and treasury notes for the payment of everything they needed to prosecute the war ? Mr. Day's scheme is the same in substance, the only difference being that he defers its adoption till after the war and increases the face value of the bonds by three per cent.

Those capitalists who availed themselves of the offer would gain the three per cent., but in doing so would renounce the interest periodically due to them, while at the same time their opportunities for investment would diminish as the amount withdrawn in this way increased. It must be obvious that no bank would receive and pay interest on credit or treasury notes unless a large percentage could be profitably loaned by them. The result would be a diminution, and possibly the disappearance, of interest on deposits. Mr. Day would, in any case, have not only cheap money, but, as the experiment progressed, vast quantities of idle money.

Of course, the scheme could never get as far as this. Some of the small capitalists, already tired of their five per cent. patriotism and hard up for capital, might avail themselves of it, but the vast majority would hang on to their five per cent. until they could see opportunities of using their capital in the ordinary way of exploitation for a higher return.

Mr. Day's new way to pay old debts, etc., so far as he is concerned, is an "Arabian Nights" dream. It must remain a dream because the big financiers and capitalists, who in group form control the political machinery in every country, actually use the bank rate as a brake on production. When the world's markets are saturated with commodities and demand begins to slacken, they beat the smaller capitalists out of the market with their high rate of interest and ensure for themselves the bulk of the trade.

But who gets the trade, or who pays the taxes, or the national debt, is of small interest to the working class. They can neither pay out of wages based on the cost of living, nor obtain anything more from trade than such wages. Their obvious course is, therefore, to understand why it is that, although they produce all the national wealth, their share is a bare living wage.

Large and small capitalists are united in one class to exploit the working class. The elimination of the small capitalists, or the more equitable distribution of trade, or capital, among capitalists generally, matters nothing to the workers. The more closely the latter examine all such questions the more convinced will they become that, for them, the one question that transcends all others is their exploitation as a class. Their "New way to pay old debts" should be to gain control of the political
machine, and to use the power they thus obtain to take from all capitalists, nbig and little, the right to exploit.

F. Foan

Finance and Industry: Against Monopoly (1961)

The Finance and Industry Column from the December 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dip into English industrial history in any century since William the Norman and you will find monopoly and restraint of trade in the news: the early Acts forbidding traders to corner supplies; Acts fixing prices (not forgetting Selwyn Lloyd’s 12th century predecessors fixing wages); the Tudor and Stuart kings raising revenue by selling monopoly licences to manufacture certain articles; the corn laws which restricted imports to give the landed interest a monopoly of food production; the manufacturers' fight to get rid of the laws so that food prices, and wages, would come down; and the governmental inquiry in 1916 which found that “there is at present in every important branch of industry in the United Kingdom an increasing tendency to the formation of Trade Associations and Combinations having for their purpose restriction of competition and the control of prices." Always the same pattern of one interest trying to form a monopoly and other interests trying to break it; and always both sides saying that their only motive is to help the poor.

The monopolists have never been at a loss to present a defence: that they are not putting up prices but “stabilising" them; that it makes for efficiency in production; and, in recent years, that it provides regular employment for the workers at high wages.

In another column a paragraph is reproduced from our issue of December, 1911, about the foolishness of expecting the politicians to carry out their promise to bust the trusts and destroy monopoly. Four years before that, a university lecturer on political economy, Mr. Frank Bower, noted in his Dictionary of Economic Terms that although “attempts have been made to secure legal control over Trusts, in order to prevent the evil effects of monopolies, . . . these efforts have not been very successful."

Many laws have been passed since then to cut the giants down in size and enforce competition, but all that has happened is that the giants have grown fatter and stronger, and still the reformists are promising to do something about it. At the 1945 General Election the Labour Party pledged itself to enforce "public supervision of monopolies and cartels." The Tories countered with this promise that ‘'charges of abuse of their power by Monopolies should be brought before an independent tribunal for public hearing."

The Labour Party won the election and kept their promise by passing the Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Act of 1948—the effect of which was practically nothing. So the Tories at the 1951 election promised to strengthen the law, a move to which the Labour Party could hardly object, but at the same time the Tories said they intended to investigate restrictive practices by trade unions and the monopolistic aspects of nationalised industries. They later passed two more Acts, The Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Commission Act, 1953, and the Restrictive Trade Practices Act of 1956. Now it was the turn of the Labour M.Ps. to complain that it was next enough, but none of them seem to know quite what to do. So much so that the Fabian Society at the end of 1960 published a pamphlet by Mr. Patrick Hutber, not stating any Fabian Society conclusions, but putting forward personal suggestions for discussion in the “urgent ” task of formulating a new policy. (Wanted—a Monopoly Policy).

In the meantime, because of the spate of take-overs and mergers of the past few years, the problem has become bigger. How farcical it all is can be seen from the fact that the first Fabian Essays published 80 years ago were already discussing what to do about monopolies.

One of Mr. Hutber's proposals is that the Restrictive Practices Court should have power to threaten an offending company, that if it persisted in its evil ways, the government would take it over. This proposal, be says, “is new." Far from being new, it was an idea well known to the early Fabians and was ancient even then. It was Gladstone, then a Tory, who in 1844 was responsible for the first Act of Parliament giving the Government power to take over the railways. Manufacturers and traders who were being bled by the monopolistic railways had got Gladstone to pass the Act so that he could use it as a threat against the Companies unless they reduced their charges. (Nowadays traders are more likely to think that the nationalisation remedy is worse than the disease).

In the exercise of the powers given by the Act an enormous amount of work has been done examining complaints, ordering the termination of offending monopolistic or restrictive agreements, but with what result? The Economist (16/4/60) examined the results of all this activity. Since the purpose of the restrictive practices by manufacturers and traders is to force up prices to get more profit the simple test of the effect of the Act is to see to what extent it has succeeded in bringing prices down. The Economist had this to say:

  Mr. T. B. Heath of Manchester University has recently produced some extremely interesting analyses of its effects. Mr. Heath has concluded that the effect of the Act on the general level of prices has so far been very small. To date, the visible effect of the Act on retail prices has been almost nil.

What happens is that as soon as the law makes some practice illegal the lawyers get to work to discover ways of getting round it. One new and perfectly legal device is for manufacturers to agree not to fix prices (which would be illegal), but to make what are called “open price" agreements under which they set up a control agency to exchange information about the prices each manufacturer is charging, about the terms and conditions of sale, costs, the state of demand and level of output. The use they make of the information can be guessed.

Another result of the activities under the Monopolies Act has been to stimulate mergers by rival firms; if it is illegal for rivals to agree on price maintenance it is quite legal for them to merge.

Mr. Hutber, in the pamphlet referred to above, admits that after an earlier phase of anxiety among businessmen, the position at the time he was writing, was: “everything apparently going on very much as before, so that instead of gratified economists and dismayed businessmen, it is the businessmen who are gratified and the economists dismayed."

It is claimed by some critics of the Monopolies Acts in Britain that things are different in America; and indeed the battle there has been going on longer and more ruthlessly. In April of this year the American electrical manufacturing industry was convicted for breaches of the anti-trust laws. Seven directors were sent to prison and fines of two million dollars were imposed. But those who started waging war against the Standard Oil Trust in the eighteen eighties were not promising that after eighty years the battle would be going on.

In USA, as in Britain in Gladstone's day, the fight is in internal capitalist one, between the trust formers and their trade victims. The Financial Times (31/10/61), reports from New York:

  A large number of government agencies, private utilities and Municipal authorities, all of which have been among the industry’s biggest customers, have been preparing to claim damages from their suppliers on the grounds that the price-fixing conspiracies kept prices too high. If all the claims were upheld by the courts, the manufacturers might be obliged to pay out as much as a hundred million dollars in damages.

In the meantime, as Marxists have always held, the progress of Capitalism has involved the inevitable trend towards concentration into bigger and more costly enterprises. As Sir Hugh Beaver, former President of the Federation of British Industries wrote two years ago:

  There is a natural tendency to extol the virtues of the small man, and many seem to deplore the growth of big business, but it cannot be forgotten . . .  that we live in a world where all units are increasing in size and importance.

(Financial Times Annual Review, 1959.)

It was possible in the early nineteen twenties for J. R. Clynes, a trade union Labour M.P., who was later Minister in a Labour Government and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, to write that “ it was better to have a large number of small Capitalists than a small number of large ones.” It would be almost unthinkable for a trade union Labour M.P. to make such a declaration today. (Ironically Clynes made the statement in the preface to a pamphlet, The Failure of Karl Marx, which purported to prove that Marx was wrong in his anticipation about the trend of Capitalism).

Nowadays the Unions and the Labour Party have fully accepted Capitalist big business, but are troubled by the dilemma of both wanting business to be big and powerful for competition with foreign rivals and of wanting to curb its power at home. The possibility of a Socialist world in which you do not have to curb market seeking, profit making industries because you have production solely for use, is still beyond their grasp.

Edgar Hardcastle

50 Years Ago: Trust Busting in America (1961)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many worthy people have fondly cherished the notion that Roosevelt and his fellow Republicans meant “doing for" the trusts. Our Liberal advertisement sheets have praised him for his "great fight" and accepted him as the enemy of monopoly. But, true to capitalist methods, when something more than mere words and rhetoric is required, he turns round and defends the trusts and ridicules the idea of destroying them. In the current issue of the Outlook, Mr. Roosevelt says:

  "The big business has come to stay and it is futile to expect to return to the old days of laissez-faire. The government must see this and refrain from keeping American industries on tenterhooks and permitting foreign rivals to reap an advantage.”

In the course of his article he denounces the government for interfering with the Steel Trust and calls President Taft's policy a “chaotic" one.

So much for capitalist politicians. When they seek office they tell their poor followers that trusts can be smashed by anti-trust laws. But in the calm of other days the truth so often driven home by Socialists emerges—that combination and concentration of capital is an inevitable result of economic laws. That is the tribute of Theodore Roosevelt to Karl Marx. 

[From the Socialist Standard, December 1911.]