list society cannot escape its fate.

All this notwithstanding, capitalism proceeds on its course: it can be
no other than it is. By means of the forms that its course dictates, it
throws all the laws of capitalist economics overboard. "Free
competition," the Alpha and Omega of bourgeois society, is to bring the
fittest to the top of the enterprises; but the stock corporation
removes all individuality, and places the crown upon that combination
that has the longest purse and the strongest grip. The syndicates,
Trusts and rings carry the point still further. Whole branches of
industry are monopolized; the individual capitalist becomes but a pliant
link in a chain, held by a capitalist committee. _A handful of
monopolists set themselves up as lords of the world and dictate to it
the price of goods, to the workingmen their wages and conditions of
life._

The whole course of this development brings out how utterly superfluous
the individual capitalist has become, and that production, conducted
upon a national and international scale, is the goal toward which
society steers--with this difference, that, in the end, this organized
production will redound to the benefit, not of a class, but of the
collectivity.

The economic revolution just sketched, and which is driving bourgeois
society with great swiftness to its apogee, becomes more pointed from
year to year. While Europe finds itself pressed more and more in its
foreign markets, and finally on its own territory, by the competition of
the United States, latterly enemies have risen in the East also,
rendering still more critical the plight of Europe, and at the same time
threatening the United States also. This danger proceeds from the
progress of English India toward becoming a great agricultural and
industrial State--a progress that, in the first place, looks to the
meeting of the wants of India's own two hundred million strong
population, and, in the second place, develops into a mortal enemy of
English and German industry in particular. And still another industrial
State is beginning to rise in the East--_Japan_. According to the
"Kreuzzeitung" of February 20, 1895, "during the last ten years, Japan
has imported from Europe the best perfected machinery for setting up
industrial plants, especially in cotton spinning. In 1889, she had only
35,000 spindles; now she has over 380,000. In 1889, Japan imported 31
million pounds of raw cotton; in 1891, she imported 67 million