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24 competing enterprises not amalgamated with the monopolies. Millions are spent in order to sell all products for a certain time below their cost price (the price of benzine was thus lowered from 40 to 22 marks);

(7) Suppression of credits.

(8) Boycott.

We are now dealing no longer with competition between small and big industry, or between technically developed and backward enterprises. We see here the monopolies throttling those which do not submit to their yoke, to their dictation. The following is the way in which this process is reflected in the intelligence of a bourgeois economist:

"Even in the purely economic sphere," writes Kestner, "a certain displacement is being produced from commercial activity in the old sense of the word towards organisation and speculation. The greatest success no longer goes to the merchant whose technical and commercial experience enables him to best estimate the needs of the buyer, and to discover, to some extent, latent demand, but it goes to the speculative genius (?!) who knows how to estimate in advance or even only to sense the development of organisation and the possibilities of a linking-up between individual enterprises and the banks."

Let us translate into ordinary human language. This means that the development of capitalism has arrived at such a stage that, although the production of goods continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, it has in reality fallen away, and the big profits go to the "genius" of financial manœuvres. Behind these