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 slightest difficulty. Hundreds of millions are invested in insurance by the capitalists and all the work is done by the employees. The fusion would lead to the lowering of the premium for insurance and would give a host of advantages and benefits to all the insured, whose number could be considerably increased without increasing the outlay of forces and resources at all. There is absolutely nothing—except the inertia, routine and cupidity of a handful of people occupying comfortable sinecures—to prevent the realisation of this reform, which would increase, moreover, the country's "capacity for defence" by economising the labour of the population and by opening out the widest possibilities for effective and not merely verbal "regularisation" of economic life.

Capitalism is distinguished from economic systems which have preceded it by the alliance and close interdependence which it has established between its different branches, and without which, it may be said in passing, no progress would be technically possible. Thanks in large part to the domination of the banks over production, contemporary capitalism has carried to its highest point this interdependence of the different branches of the economic system.

The banks and the most important branches of industry and commerce are in indissoluble alliance. The result of this is that on the one hand nationalisation of the banks implies necessarily the monopolisation by the State, and so nationalisation of the syndicates (rings and trusts), both commercial and industrial (sugar, coal, iron, petroleum trusts, &c.): on the other hand that the regularisation of economic life has for a sine qua non condition the simultaneous nationalisation of the banks and trusts.

Let us take for example the sugar trust. Formed under Tsarist rule, it developed into a gigantic capitalist union of magnificently equipped mills and factories; a union which, needless to say, was thoroughly impregnated with a reactionary and bureaucratic spirit, which secured scandalous profits on its capital and reduced workers and employees to a veritable slavery. The government then controlled and regulated production in favour of the capitalist magnates.

In this branch, all that remains to be done is to transform the reactionary bureaucratic organisation into a democratic revolutionary