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Special pages :
The US Bank Crisis
| Author(s) | Leon Trotsky |
|---|---|
| Written | 17 March 1933 |
Istanbul, Turkey, March 17 (AP) — Leon Trotsky, exiled Russian revolutionary leader, believes that recent financial developments in the United States will result in ultimate centralization of the banking system and that the United States will soon emerge from the crisis more the master of world capital than ever.
"When America's economic organism weakened under the world crisis, the obsolete character of the banking system was sharply revealed," M. Trotsky said in French today in an interview on Prinkipo Island, his place of exile. "The result undoubtedly will be a grandiose centralization of the banking system, ultimately merely reinforcing United States financial hegemony."
The Russian exile said that since 1917 he frequently had affirmed that world capital would develop "under the increasing hegemony of the United States, especially under the hegemony of the dollar over the British sterling."
"America's excessive and precipitate growth gave the country’s economic structure a mixed character — inheritances from the backwoods state, with the mingling of human strength's greatest conquests. The banking system especially evinces contradiction," he said.
"American capital became a world factor, nevertheless, and it still leans on a scattered system of provincial banks, recalling the epoch of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'"
"France," he said, "with the franc reduced to one-fifth of its value, will more than ever learn the difficulty of preserving its provincial system from the torrents of world economy. I do not wish to intimate that a calm and regular development is assured the United States after surmounting the actual dollar crisis, the second bank crisis, and even the whole present industrial crisis. No. If it is difficult to depend on 20,000 unstable little banks, it is no less difficult to depend on several thousand unstable political and economic organizations of Europe, South America, and Asia.
"The American hegemony's future inevitable growth will signify nothing but this — the penetration of all our planet's contradictions and diseases into American capital foundations.
"It is sufficient to cite two facts. First, Japanese banditry's attack on China, which inaugurates a whole series of Far Eastern wars; second, Hitler's arrival in power, which promises a year's civil war and inevitable international shocks.
"But this perspective is beyond the limits of your question."