On the Company Swindle in England

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London, November 4.—We here are now in the full swing of prosperity and thriving business—we, i.e., official England, the big capitalists. There is a surplus of capital on the market and it is looking everywhere for a profitable home; bogus companies, set up for the happiness of mankind and the enrichment of the entrepreneurs, are shooting up out of the ground like mushrooms. Mines, asphalt quarries, horse-drawn tramways for big cities, and iron works seem to be the most favoured at the moment. Mines are being offered for sale on the Volga and in New Mexico; people are buying asphalt quarries in Savoy, the Jura and Hanover; Lisbon and Buenos Aires are to have horse-drawn tramways, and so on. The sole aim of all these joint-stock companies is, of course, briefly to raise the value of the stock so the entrepreneurs can rid themselves of their share at a profit; what then becomes of the stockholders does not bother them: “After us the deluge!” In three or four years, five-sixths of these companies will have gone the way of all flesh and, with them, the money of the ensnared stockholders. As always, it will be mainly small people who put their savings into these “most reliable and profitable” enterprises and always, when the swindle has forced the stock up to its peak on the market—and it serves them right. The stock exchange swindle is one of the most effective ways of transferring the ostensibly, and in part probably genuinely, selfearned assets of the small people into the pockets of the big capitalists, so even the most stupid can see that, in the social order of today, there can be no such thing as capital “earned by one’s own labour”; that all existing capital is nothing other than the fruit of other people’s work taken without payment. And if the practice of swindling people out of their money by setting up bogus companies has, of late, got really into its stride in Germany and Austria, if princes and Jews, imperial chancellors and petty clerics are in joint pursuit of the savings of the small people, we can only welcome this.

This deluge of capital on the money market reflects, however, only the way big industry is blossoming. In almost all branches of production work is going ahead at a brisker pace than it has for many a year. This is the picture in England’s two main industries, where iron and cotton are the raw materials.

At last, the Lancashire spinners again have enough cotton to be able to extend their mills on a massive scale; and they will not let the opportunity slip. In the small town of Oldham alone there are fifteen new mills under construction, with an average of fifty thousand spindles each—a total of 750,000 spindles, almost as many as there are (excluding Alsace) in the whole of the Customs Union! A corresponding number of weaving-looms is being provided, and the picture is the same in the other Lancashire towns. The machine factories have work for months ahead, in some cases a year, and can demand any price, if only they can deliver. In short, things again look as they did in 1844, after the Chinese market was opened up, when the manufacturers’ only fear was that they might not be able to satisfy the huge demand. As they said at the time, they had to make clothes for 300 million people! Then came the reverses of 1845 and 1847, when it suddenly turned out that the 300 million Chinese had, so far, been making their own clothing, thank you very much, and huge surpluses of English-made goods accumulated on all markets, with no one to buy them, while the manufacturers and speculators went bankrupt in their hundreds. That is what will happen again this time; these people never learn anything, and even if they do, they are forced by the intrinsic law of capitalist production constantly to repeat the old, familiar cycle of boom, overproduction and crisis, and to repeat it on an ever-increasing scale until, finally, the proletariat rises and liberates society from enduring this absurd cycle.

In the Volksstaat, one Herr Schwitzguébel demands, on behalf of some federal committee in Romance Switzerland of which I have no knowledge, that I explain what I published in the Volksstaat concerning Herr Elpidin. I have had no dealings whatsoever with Herr Schwitzguébel and cannot be answerable in this matter to just any third party who chooses to take issue with me. If, however, Herr Elpidin himself should contact the editor’s office on this matter, I shall place myself at his disposal and, in that event, shall ask the editor of the Volksstaat to inform Herr Elpidin of my address, so he may contact me directly.