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From Fourth International, Vol. 3 No. 6, June 1942, pp. 165–170.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Standard Oil officials “hampered the development of synthetic rubber in the United States and ... engaged in activities helpful to the Axis nations” through their cartel agreement with the Nazi IG Farbenindustrie, but they are, nevertheless, “personally patriotic men,” declared the Truman Senate Investigating Committee May 26 report.
Similarly, Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold, condemning the Standard Oil-Nazi cartel, added that “these arrangements were not entered into with any desire to aid or assist Germany.”
Neither of these claims can be denied. The American monopolies are anxious, desperately so, to win the war. They are the real masters of this country; and they would never have entered this war had they not considered it essential to their interests.
At the same time, however, the system of monopoly capitalism compels the monopolies individually to engage in activities that interfere with the war objectives of American capitalism as a whole.
The consolidation of capital, which at an earlier stage of capitalism served to expand the means of production, now tends inexorably toward opposite ends. As a means of self-preservation, the monopolies must now drive in one general direction: Curtailment and limitation of production, in the international as well as domestic sphere.
The safeguarding and increasing of profits is the sole objective of the monopolies, of course. Monopoly profit-making requires: arbitrary limits to production, restricting the output of goods which might glut the market, the elimination of competition.
Capitalism, in its early progressive stage, created the modern national state within which the productive forces might develop unhampered by feudal restrictions. Today, however, national boundaries have become a noose strangling the productive forces. The capitalists are compelled to reach out beyond the national borders for new markets, sources of raw materials and cheap labor, and especially for new fields for the investment of their surplus capital. Hence the war.
But the law of monopoly rules even on the international plane. The individual monopolies of every country, while instigating wars to win more of the world’s markets and productive resources, at the same time seek to free themselves from competition and to restrict production through internation cartel agreements with the foreign monopolies which their class as a whole aims to subdue by force of arms.
There is not a single monopoly, in any capitalist country, which does not have international cartel agreements, and which is not attempting to continue these agreements despite the war.
Thurman Arnold reported on June 3 that the Department of Justice had “discovered last week” a list of 162 agreements between IG Farbenindustrie, the German chemical trust, and American corporations. In his March 26 report to the Truman Committee on the Standard Oil-Nazi patents-pool conspiracy, Arnold had to admit
“There is no essential difference between what Standard Oil has done in this case and what other companies did in restricting the production of magnesium, aluminum, tungsten carbide, drugs, dyestuffs and a variety of other critical materials vital for the war.”
The same is true of the British, German, Japanese and French monopolies.
An outstanding example is the world aluminum cartel, an agreement by the American, British, German, French and Swiss interests to parcel among themselves the world markets. They pooled their resources, bought up all surpluses and withheld them from the world market, drastically limited world production and fixed the world prices.
The chemical and dyestuffs cartel agreement between du Pont and IG Farben also included the British Imperial Chemical Industries, the Etablissements Kuhlmann of France, and the Mitsui interests of Japan.
Although Standard Oil and the other monopolies now claim that their agreements with the Nazis have been “suspended” for the “duration,” the evidence indicates that the agreements are being maintained, so far as possible, during the war.
The American monopolists are keeping a weather eye fixed on the post-war period. They expect and desire a postwar epoch retaining all the fundamental characteristics of the pre-war capitalist era. They have no perspective other than a return to “normal” capitalist relations, to a post-war world in which German capitalism will continue to rule in Germany, and with which they will have to continue their monopoly agreements, though they hope it will be a defeated Germany – a weaker partner in the cartels.
Moreover, the American capitalists are not too sure about the outcome of the war. They are keeping the way open, in the event of a protracted stalemate or a failure to score a decisive victory, for resuming relations as equals with their German cartel partners.
As Thurman Arnold on June 3 was constrained to admit:
“There is another danger from the existence of these cartels which we have yet to face. It is a danger which will be felt in their influence over the peace that is to come. That danger arises from the fact that these cartels have not been terminated, they have only been suspended during the war. The small group of American business men who are parties to these International rings are not unpatriotic, but they still think of the war as a temporary recess from business-as-usual with a strong Germany. They expect to begin the game all over again after the war.”
So far as the monopoly rulers of America are concerned, even if Hitler must go, his masters, the German capitalists, must remain.
This perspective of the monopolies is shown by provisions they placed in the cartel agreements as soon as the war broke out in 1939. The American trusts hastened to implement and extend their cartel agreements with the Axis corporations.
The files of the Standard Oil Company have provided a typical example of such a “full marriage,” as Arnold called it, of the US-Nazi monopoly interests.
On October 12, 1939, the Standard official in charge of the negotiations with IG Farben wrote a letter stating:
“They [IG Farben] delivered to me assignments of some 2,000 foreign patents, and we did our best to work out complete plans for a modus vivendi arrangement for working together which would operate through the terms of the war, whether or not the US came in.” (Our emphasis.)
Another example is the cable which a Standard official sent on Sept. 11, 1939 from New York to the company’s agent in Japan. This cable states:
“Also, as we fear United States Government in near future may have grounds for action, unfavorable to American-Japanese trade, we consider timely for us to organize with Japanese partners whose influence would be valuable later towards re-establishment after Interruption in our trade.”
For Standard Oil, the war with the Axis is not an ideological battle to the death. It is merely an unfortunate but necessary “interruption in our trade.”
According to one confidential memorandum in its files, Standard had received an offer from IG Farben, after September 1939, to purchase Standard’s German subsidiary in order to “safeguard Standard Oil of New Jersey’s interest for the duration” – i.e., to prevent its seizure as enemy property. Very likely Standard accepted the offer, since it has attempted to do as much for IG’s interests in American firms.
Likewise the General Electric agreement with Krupp, the German steel and munitions trust, was extended after the start of the war. A special clause was inserted into the agreement fixing the formal date for its termination as 1950.
That cartel agreements were to be operative, as far as possible, during the war itself, is proved by the royalty provisions under which American corporations agreed to put aside a share of the profits from American war production to be paid their German cartel partners afterward.
An example of this practice was revealed at the Senate Patent Committee hearings. An official of Rohm and Haas, a du Pont subsidiary maintaining a monopoly on synthetic glass by cartel agreement with IG Farben, was forced to admit that his company had continued “after Pearl Harbor” to set aside royalties on US military orders for post-war payment to the German interests. These, he belatedly assured the committee – after the facts were out! – are now being held “with the hope and expectation that they will be seized by the Alien Property Custodian.”
The American monopolies have used every conceivable device in carrying out their cartel agreements to restrict production.
A. Restricting the Number of Producers. The primary method is to exclude any independent companies from entering the field or to rigidly limit the number of producers and the quantities they may produce.
This was the device used by the Aluminum Company of America to restrict American production of the vital war metal, magnesium, to one-twentieth of German production. ALCOA’s agreement with IG Farben provided that only one American company, Dow Chemical, could produce magnesium and that it could sell the metal only to companies designated by ALCOA.
General Electric, which controlled the patents on tungsten carbide, the finest and cheapest metal alloy for the use of cutting tools, informed the German Krupp steel trust, at the time of the signing of its cartel agreement, that GE desired to limit American licensees “to a small number, preferably not more than two.” It was actually limited to just one, GE’s own subsidiary, Carboloy, Inc. GE’s agreement even gives Krupp the right to determine what companies GE may license.
Perhaps the most glaring example is tetracene, the best and most easily produced chemical agent for ammunition priming. The tetracene patents are jointly owned by Remington Arms, a du Pont subsidiary, and IG Farben. According to the agreement between the two, Remington could not license the United States and British governments to produce tetracene, nor could Remington or any of its private licensees produce tetracene to be used for war purposes by the American government or “in ammunition sold to the British government.”
B. Dismantling Plants. To curtail production American partners in the monopolies went to the extreme of dismantling costly plants.
Standard’s agreements with IG Farben covered acetylene and acetic acid, best and cheapest raw material base for rayons, plastics, paints, dyes and other important chemical products. Jasco, Inc., a holding company owned jointly by Standard and its Nazi cartel partner, had built an acetylene plant in Baton Rouge. At the behest of IG Farben, the plant had been closed down prior to the outbreak of war between Germany and Britain. Subsequently, Standard agreed to the complete demolition of the plant, through an agreement signed after the outbreak of war on Dec. 1, 1939. The Standard officials sought to cover up their tracks by pre-dating the agreement back to August 31, 1939, the day before war was declared.
In another instance, work on Standard’s government-financed Baton Rouge plant for the production of butadiene, basic element of synthetic butyl rubber, was impeded for several months. According to the testimony of W.S. Parish, president of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, “in September 1941, the rubber corporation (division of the government Reconstruction Finance Corporation) instructed Standard to suspend all work on the government butadiene project for one year.” It was only after Pearl Harbor, Parish claims, that the government rescinded this order.
C. Limiting Production Through Price-Fixing. When independent companies seek licenses to produce commodities protected by American-Nazi patent agreements, they can secure such licenses only by agreeing to sell their products at the high price established by the monopolies.
Although it was manufacturing tungsten carbide at a cost of $6.50 a pound, General Electric, from 1928 until confronted with an anti-trust suit early this year, maintained a price as high at times as $453 a pound, and never lower than $200. According to the testimony before the Truman Committee of L. Gerald Firth, president of the Firth-Sterling Steel Company, a GE tungsten carbide licensee, “a large number of firms never used it because of the price.”
In accordance with its agreement with IG Farben, du Pont has fixed prices so high as to prevent any independent production of vital dyestuffs. Speaking of this conspiracy, Thurman Arnold stated that “it not only resulted in high prices to the American consumer, but has also restriced the full development of the chemical industry which is essential to our war effort.”
D. Prohibitive Royalties. Sometimes the monopoly simply refuses, on one pretext or another, to license any other manufacturer. More often, however, independent producers are discouraged by the exorbitant royalties demanded by the monopoly.
When Goodrich Rubber Company sought the use of Standard’s butyl rubber patents, Standard brushed the request off by demanding prohibitive royalties. A letter written on Jan. 10, 1940 to Goodrich by Frank Howard, vice president of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, states “quite frankly, it was our intention that the license would not be a suitable one under which to operate if the licensee expected to go beyond producing a relatively high-cost specialty product.”
E. Discouraging Plant Expansion. During the past two years of government war preparation the monopolies sought to avoid expansion of productive facilities and the erection of new plants. Only when the government agreed to pay for new plants did the corporations finally agree to expansion.
A principal method for discouraging expansion has been the circulation of false reports that existing facilities and stock-piles of materials are large enough to meet any contemplated needs.
The present acute shortage of aluminum resulted from the deliberate efforts of ALCOA. For two years prior to American entry into the war ALCOA repeatedly assured the government that no new plants were needed. The Office of Production Management accepted these assurances and passed them on to the public:
“For months the Defense Advisory Commission and the OPM had said that talk about a shortage in aluminum was misleading and that it was unpatriotic to talk about the possibility of such a shortage ... The OPM had apparently completely relied on ALCOA as a source of information as to the availability of aluminum and had discouraged anyone else from going into the business of producing aluminum. ALCOA had long followed a policy of maintaining high prices and building new capacity only when certain that it could sell at its fixed prices all that would be produced.” (Truman Committee Report, June 1941.)
When ALCOA did finally permit the erection of new plants – at government expense – it received the lion’s share of the contracts. These new plants will not reach full production until 1943 or thereafter, and will still fail to produce sufficient aluminum for the country’s civilian and military needs. This is a calculated scarcity, enabling ALCOA to maintain its monopoly prices and conform to its cartel obligations.
The catastrophic rubber shortage is also due in great measure to discouragement of synthetic rubber plant expansion by the Rockefeller-du Pout-Mellon interests controlling the synthetic rubber processes. A year and a half before Pearl Harbor, Jesse Jones, head of the RFC and the government’s Defense Plants Corporation, was informed of an impending rubber shortage and was urged to facilitate expansion of synthetic rubber production. Acting undoubtedly at the instigation of Standard and the other monopolies, Jones took the position that sufficient crude rubber stocks were available, even if all imports were cut off, to meet the country’s needs for more than a year of war. A year later, Jones finally agreed to start an “experimental” program for producing 40,000 tons of synthetic rubber. When Singapore was about to fall, Jones informed the Truman Committee that he was making plans for the production of 400,000 tons of synthetic rubber – in 1944. He also told the Truman Committee that “the president had concurred in this (previous) course.”
Likewise to prevent expansion Standard Oil falsely denied that its butyl rubber process, which it had made available to IG Farben, was the best and cheapest synthetic rubber available. It turned aside government investigators with the excuse that butyl rubber was “still in the experimental stage,” and anyway was “too costly.” Jesse Jones testified before the Truman Committee that “Standard had not encouraged any of us in the belief that butyl rubber was a success.” In 1939, an official of the Navy’s Bureau of Construction and Repair tried to get “first hand information on the compounding” of butyl, but was prevented, a letter sent by a Standard employe to the corporation officials boasted:
“You will recall,” says the letter in part, “that I took up this question with you before his arrival. As agreed upon I took Mr. Werkethin [the Navy official] over to see the K plant when it appeared that I could not very well steer his interest away from the process. However, I am quite certain that he left with no picture of the operation ...” (Our emphasis.)
Four months after Pearl Harbor, and after Standard had already agreed, because of a government suit, to release its butyl patents, Parish and Howard, heads of Standard Oil of New Jersey, still sought to mislead the government as to the true value of butyl rubber. They argued that it was still in the “experimental” stage, even though the committee had before it Standard’s own documentary evidence to show that butyl is superior in many respects to natural rubber. The Standard officials also claimed that butyl was “too costly” to produce, although documents taken from Standard’s files showed that it cost only 6.6 cents a pound as compared to the 21 cents a pound being charged by the British and Dutch interests for crude rubber.
In addition to curtailing production, the German capitalists exacted other payments which their American partners were willing to meet.
A. Giving the Nazis Industrial Processes. The first important price was granting the Nazi interests the patents on exclusive and invaluable industrial processes.
To IG Farben, Standard Oil gave the secret of butyl rubber manufacture, its superior acetylene process and its method for producing high-octane aviation and synthetic gasoline. For the gasoline processes, the Nazis have special reason to be grateful. They have kept the Luftwaffe in the air for two and a half years and enabled Hitler to keep his gigantic motorized army in motion.
The tungsten carbide formula perfected by General Electric has helped German industry to speed up certain tooling and metal cutting processes by as much as five hundred per cent.
B. Direct Material Aid. The American monopolies supplied German industry with the necessary capital for expansion. American capital investment in Germany was $5,000,000,000 in 1933. By 1939, it had increased another $3,000,000,000.
Among the leading American corporations owning or holding large interests in German corporations are Standard Oil, General Motors, Ford Motor Co., Anaconda Copper, General Electric, International Telephone and Telegraph, US Rubber, International Business Machines, International Harvester, E.I. duPont de Nemours.
Standard Oil designed and directly supervised the construction of Germany’s synthetic gasoline and high-octane aviation gas plants.
When Nazi and Italian fascist airlines, prior to American entry in the war, could not secure fuel in South America, Standard’s Brazilian subsidiary supplied the necessary petrol, in defiance of objections from the American State Department. The Standard officials claimed they had contracts which, as a matter of “business honor,” they had to fulfill. A.A. Berle, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State testified on April 3 that: “Their (Standard officials) position was they would keep the contract they had already made, irrespective of the interests of the United States.” On the same day, William La Varre, chief of the American republics office of the Department of Commerce, denied that any contracts existed, calling the claim a “subterfuge.”
C. Military Information. Information of military value relating American and British production was regularly provided to the Nazis.
Through supplying Krupp with a complete list of the sources and amounts of royalties paid by its tungsten carbide licensees, General Electric’s Carboloy Company kept the Nazis informed on the number and location of plants producing tungsten carbide and the exact quantities of this vital war metal being produced in this country.
DuPont “gave a German company access to military information through Remington Arms royalty payments (on all tetracene produced in America) to the German company.” (AP dispatch, April 17)
Under the agreement between ALCOA and IG Farben, the Nazis were able to learn through royalty payments what companies in America were producing or using magnesium and how much.
After the outbreak of war between Germany and Britain, Standard Oil made an agreement with the British oil interests, pooling patents for the important hydrogenation and polymerization processes in the production of synthetic gasoline. In order to get this agreement, Standard had executed a fake dissolution of its arrangement with IG Farben. But as late as March 18,1940, as documents from Standard’s files revealed, Standard was secretly passing on to IG Farben all the confidential data and technical information it was securing from the British and other American oil firms in the Anglo-American pool.
Most of the information about how American corporations gave military information to the Nazis is buried in the Department of Justice files. It is too explosive to make public. But here are two examples, which the New York newspaper PM unearthed:
“In one American company Arnold’s investigators have found a patent license for making steam turbine engines, used by the Navy, with an agreement by the American company to furnish the German licensor with ‘duplicates of all correspondence with the United States Navy as well as drawings worked out by the former.’
“In another case, the German trust was permitted to veto the appointment of the man in charge of military production for the American company.” (PM, April 5.)
D. Withholding Military Information from US. An important form of indirect aid has been given the Nazis by the refusal of American corporations to give information of military value to the American government. Not a single great American corporation has willingly released its patents for war production.
Standard Oil and ALCOA, months after Pearl Harbor, forced the government to initiate anti-trust suits to secure release of the butyl rubber and magnesium patents. General Electric has been able to secure an indefinite postponement of a threatened government prosecution aimed at releasing its tungsten carbide patents.
Even where the patents have finally been released, as in the Standard and ALCOA cases, the companies have been able to retain the vital “know-how,” the developed industrial techniques. Without this “know-how” which the companies have refused to release, the patents are of little value, since most of them are purposely incomplete and obscure.
American companies “failed” to give the government information about the patents they gave the German interests, or to keep the government informed of patents secured from Germany.
The following letter, sent by Standard Oil’s Howard to his superior Parish, demonstrates the reluctance of the monopolies to cooperate with the government when this is against their cartel interests. In part, the letter states:
“Any program by which the Army Air Corps can obtain their objective of a one or two year start over the rest of the world In this vital matter [high grade aviation gasoline] bristles with difficulties and sacrifices from, our standpoint ...
“To meet the very proper desires of the air corps as expressed to us, we shall have to violate our agreements and perhaps forfeit the confidence of our associates, both American and foreign ...” (Our emphasis.)
That letter was written in 1935. To date, Standard has not forfeited the confidence of its principal foreign associate – IG Farben.
The findings of the Department of Justice and of two Senate investigating committees have disclosed the above outlined consequences of the American-Nazi cartel agreements.
Yet the government has proved impotent to cancel these agreements or force Standard Oil, ALCOA, du Pont, General Electric and the other monopolies to discontinue honoring the terms of these agreements.
For more than a year the facts about the American-Nazi patent-pools were in the files of the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice, but the government was reluctant to make them public through anti-trust prosecutions.
Only after the fall of Singapore and the Dutch East Indies and three months after Pearl Harbor, did the Department of Justice initiate suits against Standard Oil, ALCOA, General Electric, du Pont, and a few other monopolies to secure release of the American-Nazi patents.
But these suits collapsed under the pressure of the corporations. Standard Oil threatened to stall the suit through years of lengthy litigation. To save face, the government was compelled to give Standard a so-called consent decree on Standard’s own terms. Standard agreed not to contest the case and to pay total fines of $50,000, if the government agreed to drop all charges. Standard further agreed to formally release its butyl rubber patents, with the understanding that the government was to have no power of supervision over the company’s future cartel agreements or its laboratories. The government in return obtained only the privilege of investing its funds in butyl rubber plants to be controlled by Standard. Other companies can use Standard’s patents provided they agree to pay a “reasonable royalty” on all production after the war. Standard is permitted, however, to charge its butyl rubber licensees royalties during the war for providing them with the “know-how,” the technical explanation which is needed to give the purposely obscure patents any value.
The only other case which has thus far come to trial is that of ALCOA. This case also was settled by a consent decree, which Thurman Arnold admitted was “even worse” than Standard’s.
Before the pending government suits against General Electric, du Pont and the other monopolies could come to trial, the Roosevelt administration took steps to halt further prosecutions “for the duration.” On March 20, Attorney General Biddle, Secretary of War Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Knox and Assistant Attorney General Arnold sent a joint letter to Roosevelt, informing him that “some of the pending court investigations, suits and prosecutions under the Anti-Trust statutes by the Department of Justice, if continued, will interfere with the production of war materials ... In those cases we believe that continuing such prosecutions will be contrary to the national interest and security.” Roosevelt pointedly made this letter and his reply public on March 28, the day after Arnold exposed the facts about the Standard-IG Farben conspiracy to the Truman Committee. Roosevelt’s reply said, “I approve the procedure outlined in your memorandum to me ...”
The subsequent developments in the government’s projected suit against General Electric’s Carboloy, Inc., illustrate how this policy is now being carried out.
This suit was originally scheduled to begin last October. It was postponed to February 1942, again postponed to March, then postponed again to April. In the third week of April, Federal Judge Philip Forman of Trenton, N.J., was about to open the trial, when he received a telegram from Undersecretary of War Patterson and Under-Secretary of the Navy Forrestal. The telegram asked Judge Forman to postpone the case once more, because “we desire time to study the question of whether trial at this time of US vs. General Electric Co. and others would interfere with war production.” Judge Forman agreed, indefinitely postponing the case.
Whether it will finally go to trial is up to the War and Navy Departments, which have an “inter-departmental” agreement with the Attorney General permitting them to halt any antitrust prosecution which they deem an “interference with war production,” unless the President orders such prosecution on the direct appeal of the Attorney General.
To cap this process, Attorney General Biddle on May 27 urged prompt passage of legislation exempting concerns from prosecution under the anti-trust laws when they are complying with specific requests from the War Production Board in furtherance of the war effort.
“Already,” said the Associated Press, “business men are receiving formal assurance that they will not be prosecuted for anti-trust violations directly ordered as part of the war drive. The Attorney General issues certificates under a plan worked out by President Roosevelt.”
This is nothing less than unconditional surrender to the monopolies.
To interfere in any effective fashion with the monopolies’ cartel arrangements, with their control of patents and production, would mean to squeeze the very heart of monopoly capitalism. This government, whose sole function is to safeguard the interests of the capitalist class, cannot and will not take measures which would inevitably tend to undermine private property “rights” in the means of production.
In war-time particularly, the government is often constrained to establish certain rules and regulations which, if carried out, may step on the toes of this or that group of capitalists. This is done in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole.
But, as the present situation reveals, this government will not curb the cartel system and its practices because this means to impose on the basic interests of all the monopolies. Since the cartel agreements, even those with the Nazi capitalists, are an inevitable and necessary part of the capitalist process in its present stage – monopoly – the government cannot and will not prevent them, just as it will not attack the monopoly system.
The government dares not even seriously expose the cartel practices. For this might serve to discredit the capitalist ruling class in the eyes of the masses. The government seeks to preserve the prestige of the monopolists for that prestige is essential to their continued domination of the economic and political life of the nation.
If the capitalist government cannot resolve this contradiction, still less can the assorted liberals, reformist labor leaders and the Stalinists, who are anxious above all else to maintain “national unity” with the owning class.
The liberal, trade union and Social-Democratic papers have been wailing woefully at the US-Nazi cartel conspiracies. The “solutions” they offer are beneath contempt.
A typical liberal newspaper, PM, which has published more on these conspiracies than any other daily, seriously called on the small stockholders of Standard Oil to take steps to oust the trust officials responsible for the agreements with IG Farben. The editors of PM must be aware of the absurdity of this proposal. The majority of small stockholders with a few shares of common stock, have no more say about the operations of a giant corporation than any ordinary depositor has in the operations of a bank. They cannot hope to carry through a long, costly legal fight against the tremendous wealth of the leading corporation share-holders.
The trade union leaders and Social-Democrats would “solve” the problem by appealing to the administration to give the labor leaders a few more government posts. Naturally, they do not question the “right” of the private owners to control industry, nor do they dare to challenge the monopolies’ domination of the government and its war production and procurement agencies.
As for the Stalinist leaders, their press has systematically suppressed the facts about the US-Nazi cartel conspiracies. From March through May, during the height of the exposures, the Daily Worker and Sunday Worker carried exactly five tiny items, in obscure positions, on the conspiracies. This policy was “explained” in an editorial in the Daily Worker, April 24, assuring its readers that the “large American corporations and their leading personnel” are patriotic, and that they are “part of the camp of national unity.” The same editorial attacks those publications which are exposing the monopolies as “naive ‘trustbusters’” whose attitude “can be dangerous” and who are imitating the “demagogy of Hitler.”
Neither the monopolies nor their cartel agreements can be eliminated within the framework of the capitalist system. They are bred by the system. They will disappear only with the end of that system. The first effective step to mobilize the workers for that purpose is the transition slogan of the Socialist Workers Party:
For the expropriation of the war industries and their operation under workers’ control!
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