p In the capitalist countries, the great scientific and technological speed-up is matched by growth of the monopolies’ economic power. First of all, research activities as such require time, large and properly staffed laboratories, special equipment, and large capital outlays which are quite beyond the means of small and medium concerns. But new 178

p technical achievements will yield effect only when given a sufficiently high concentration of production.

p Thus, in 1968, the 500 largest American industrial corporations employed 14 million factory and office workers, or 57 per cent of the total labour force of 847,000 enterprises in the extractive and manufacturing industries, power and gas supply, transport and communications. The 500 giants accounted for 50 per cent of total takings. Concentration ol production has reached about the same level in other imperialist countries, too. Most bourgeois economists today no longer talk of free competition or free enterprise, since the fact of concentration of economic power corroborates Lenin’s teaching on monopoly capitalism, whether they like it or not.

p Along with the enormous concentration and centralisation of capital, the structure of the monopolies undergoes a notable change. The monopolies of today differ from the cartels and trusts of the initial period of imperialism. They form complexes of large enterprises, highly integrated not only in financial terms but with respect to production, technology and management as well. Similarly, international monopoly associations are formed today not so much on the basis of cartel agreements as through setting up branches in other countries. In this situation, export of industrial capital to the more advanced capitalist countries acquires particular significance. At the same time, the international cartels increasingly assume a state-monopoly character as agreements between states, acting on behalf of the national monopolies, replace international agreements between private monopolies.

p The late sixties were marked by an unusually intensive process of concentration and centralisation of capital, which spread to all the advanced capitalist countries. There were 1,020 mergers in Japan in 1968 alone. In the United States, mergers and take-overs, increasing every year, rose from 2,125 in 1965 to 6,132 in 1969. In France, in recent years their number has fluctuated between 1,300 and 2,000 a year. A similar wave of mergers and take-overs has swept Britain, West Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and other European capitalist countries. The dominant tendency is for giant monopolies to gobble up their fellows.

p A distinctive feature of such mergers and take-overs is what is known as diversification of production, or penetration of the largest monopolies into utterly unrelated fields of production. It is characteristic of this process that all the larger monopolies engage, either more or less, in weapons production.

p Diversification has given rise to giant monopoly conglomerates. As early as 1968, 398 of the 500 largest US industrial corporations had become conglomerates. Differing from the horizontal and vertical monopoly associations of the type of cartels and trusts, the conglomerate is a piecemeal collection of corporations of any and every variety. Its irrational structure is an expression of the laws of competition and anarchy of production as they operate under modern capitalism.

In Lenin’s lifetime, monopolies controlled mainly heavy industry. Today, thanks to the concentration of production and centralisation of capital, they have seized key positions in both heavy and light branches of the manufacturing industry, and the extractive industries as well. They are invading retail trade and services and penetrating into agriculture, driving out a multitude of small and middle farmers. Thus, the last half-century has amply confirmed Lenin’s theory of imperialism, which proved that the capitalism of free competition must inevitably develop into monopoly capitalism. This transformation has been followed by yet another—the conversion of monopoly into state-monopoly capitalism. As monopoly capitalism has grown into state-monopoly capitalism, the tax burden has become heavier. In addition monopoly prices have turned into state-monopoly prices, since the so-called corporate tax is not a deduction from monopoly profit. The profit tax is included in the monopoly price, and so has to be paid by the consumers. Thus, not only taxes but prices, too, serve the state as a means of redistributing the national income for the benefit of the monopolies in general and those manufacturing arms in particular. To this one must add inflation, which has become chronic and keeps eating away the workers’ hard-won wage increases. Heavier taxation, soaring prices and inflation— these are the most dramatic consequences of the development of monopoly into state-monopoly capitalism.