“Every bank is a Stock Exchange,’ and the bigger the bank, and the more successful the concentration of banking, the truer does this modern aphorism ring.” “While formerly, in the seventies, the Stock Exchange, flushed with the exuberance of youth” (a “subtle” allusion to the Stock Exchange crash of 1873, the company promotion scandals, etc.), “opened the era of the industrialisation of Germany, nowadays the banks and industry are able to ‘manage it alone.’ The domination of our big banks over the Stock Exchange … is nothing else than the expression of the completely organised German industrial state. If the domain of the automatically functioning economic laws is thus restricted, and if the domain of conscious regulation by the banks is considerably enlarged, the national economic responsibility of a few guiding heads is immensely increased”, so writes the German professor Schulze-Gaevernitz, an apologist of German imperialism, who is regarded as an authority by the imperialists of all countries, and who tries to gloss over the mere “detail” that the “conscious regulation” of economic life by the banks consists in the fleecing of the public by a handful of “completely organised” monopolists. The task of a bourgeois professor is not to lay bare the entire mechanism, or to expose all the machinations of the bank monopolists, but rather to present them in a favourable light. _pg.51-52
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It should be noted that German — and not only German — bourgeois scholars, like Riesser, Schulze-Gaevernitz, Liefmann and others, are all apologists of imperialism and of finance capital. Instead of revealing the “mechanics” of the formation of an oligarchy, its methods, the size of its revenues “impeccable and peccable”, its connections with parliaments, etc., etc., they obscure or gloss over them. They evade these “vexed questions” by pompous and vague phrases, appeals to the “sense of responsibility” of bank directors, by praising “the sense of duty” of Prussian officials, giving serious study to the petty details of absolutely ridiculous parliamentary bills for the “supervision” and “regulation” of monopolies, playing spillikins with theories, like, for example, the following “scholarly” definition, arrived at by Professor Liefmann: “Commerce is an occupation having for its object the collection, storage and supply of goods.” (The professor’s bold-face italics.) … From this it would follow that commerce existed in the time of primitive man, who knew nothing about exchange, and that it will exist under socialism! _pg.58-59
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None of the rules of control, the publication of balance-sheets, the drawing up of balance sheets according to a definite form, the public auditing of accounts,etc., the things about which well-intentioned professors and officials — that is, those imbued with the good intention of defending and prettyfying capitalism — discourse to the public, are of any avail; for private property is sacred, and no one can be prohibited from buying, selling, exchanging or hypothecating shares, etc. _pg.60
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On the economic basis referred to above, the political institutions of modern capitalism — press, parliament, associations, congresses, etc. — have created political privileges and sops for the respectful, meek, reformist and patriotic office employees and workers, corresponding to the economic privileges and sops. Lucrative and soft jobs in the government or on the war industries committees, in parliament and on diverse committees, on the editorial staffs of “respectable”, legally published newspapers or on the management councils of no less respectable and “bourgeois law- abiding” trade unions — this is the bait by which the imperialist bourgeoisie attracts and rewards the representatives and supporters of the “bourgeois labour parties”. _pg.133

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