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16, and also for the old manufacturing syndicates."

In England, monopolist factory syndicates, combines and trusts are established most frequently—unlike countries in which protective tariffs facilitate their appearance—when the number of competing enterprises is reduced "to some two dozen or so." "The influence of concentration on the birth of monopolies in big industry here appears to us as clear as crystal."

Fifty years ago, when Marx was writing Capital, free competition appeared to most economists to be a natural law. The official economists tried to kill, by a conspiracy of silence, the works of Marx which showed, by means of a theoretical and historical analysis of capitalism, that free competition gives rise to the concentration of production, which, in turn, at a certain stage of development, leads to monopoly. Nowadays, monopoly has become a fact. The economists are piling up volumes to describe the diverse manifestations of monopoly, and are continuing to declare in chorus that "Marxism is refuted." But facts are obstinate things, as the proverb says, and, whether it suits or not, they must be reckoned with. The facts show that differences between capitalist countries, e.g., in the matter of protection or free trade, only give rise to insignificant variations in the form of monopolies or in the moment of their appearance; and that the birth of monopolies, as the result of the concentration of production, is a general and fundamental law of contemporary capitalist development.

For Europe, the time when the new capitalism was definitely substituted for the old can be