able of understanding its meaning and importance. Ownership of shares and relations between owners of private property "mingle in a haphazard way." But beneath this interlacing, what constitutes its very base are the changing social relations of production. When a big enterprise becomes gigantic and, working on the basis of exact computation of mass data, systematically organises the supply of primary raw materials, to the extent of two-thirds, or three-fourths of all that is necessary for tens of millions of people: when the transport of these raw materials to the most suitable places of production, sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles away: when a central control directs all the successive stages of work right up to the manufacture of a number of varieties of finished articles: when the distribution of these products is made on a uniform plan among tens and hundreds of millions of consumers (as in the case of the distribution of oil in America and Germany by the American "Standard Oil")—then it becomes evident that we are in the presence of a socialisation of production, and not at all a simple "interlacing"; that private economic relations, and private property relations, constitute an outer covering no longer suitable to its contents, a covering which must of necessity begin to decay if its destruction be postponed by artificial means; a covering which will be able to keep going quite a long time in a state of rottenness (putting things at the worst, if the cure of the opportunist abcess is put off for long), but which nevertheless will inevitably be got rid of.
The enthusiastic admirer of German imperialism, Schulze-Gaevernitz, exclaims:
"If the direction of the German banks rests in
