Page:Imperialism (Lenin).djvu/46

38 concentration of capital and the formation of monopolies.

"The banks are creating in the social structure, the form and precisely nothing but the form, of a general stocktaking and a general re-partition of the means of production." So Marx wrote a half-century ago in Capital. (Vol. III., section 2.)

The figures that we have quoted on the development of banking capital, on the increase in number of the branches of banks, and the increase in number of their open accounts, etc., show us that this "general bookkeeping" is that of the whole capitalist class; and is not only of the capitalists. For the banks collect, even though it may be temporarily, all kinds of financial revenues of small property-holders, of civil servants, and of a small upper stratum of the working class. The "general distribution of the means of production" is what happens from the formal point of view, as a result of the development of modern banks, of which the chief, numbering from three to six in France, and from six to eight in Germany, are handling billions.

But in substance distribution of the means of production is by no means general, or social; it is private, i.e., in conformity with the interests of very big capital, and first and foremost of monopoly capital: in which the masses of the population have barely enough to live on, the development of agriculture is far surpassed by that of industry; and heavy industry levies a tribute on all other branches of production.

The Savings Banks and Post Offices are beginning to compete against the banks in the matter of socialising capitalist economy. These are more