Page:Lenin's Speech at the First Session of the Second Congress of the Third International (1920).djvu/10

 a minimum banking income has been from forty to fifty percent. It must be pointed out in this connection that banking officials in defining the income of the bank know how to hide the greatest part of it under various disguises, calling it not straight income, but gifts, bonusses, etc. so that indiscutable economic facts show that a small handful of men have enriched themselves enormously, that the extreme luxury they live in passes all limits, while the poverty of the working classes continually increases.

One must also point out in particular that circumstance which comrade Levy has so clearly demonstrated in his report referred to above: I have in mind the change in the value of money. Money has everywhere lost its value owing to indebtedness, the issue of paper currency, etc. The same bourgeois force, to which I have already referred, namely the declaration of the „Supreme Economic Council“ of March 8th 1920 states, that the lowering of money values, taking the dollar as a unit, equals approximately one third; in France and in Italy two thirds, and in Germany it reaches ninety six percent.

This fact shows that the mechanism of capitalist economy has broken down entirely. Those commercial relationships on which under capitalism the getting of raw material and the sale of finished product depend can be continued no longer; they cannot be continued by way of subjecting a number of countries to any one country owing to the value of money. The very richest country cannot exist, cannot carry on trade because she cannot sell her finished products and cannot get any raw materials.

Thus it is that America the richest country, dominating all others, can neither sell nor buy. The very same Keynes, who had gone through all the intricacies of the Versailles negotiations is compelled to admit that such is the case in spite of all affirmed determinations to defend capitalism, in spite of all his hatred for bolshevism. By the way it appears to me, that no Communist or revolutionary appeal could rival in force of argument those pages of Keynes where he pictures Wilson and Wilsonism in reality. Wilson was the idol of middle class pacifists of the type of Keynes, and a number of heroes of the Second International and even of the „second and a half“ International, who worshipped the „fourteen points“, and have even written „learned books“ on the „roots of Wilson's policy“, hoping that Wilson is going to save the „social world“ to reconcile the exploiters and the