For, in the first place, such combinations are expressly and chiefly designed to produce a larger quantity of surplus profits, thus stimulating conflict by offering a larger object of attack to labour.In the second place, such combinations, if at all complete, may prove more clearly than in any other way the superiority of organised capital over organised labour in the determination of wages and conditions of labour.Finally, private ownership of natural resources, producing for its owners economic rent, remains an unsolved antagonism.Though the extent to which the 'surplus', which monopolistic, protected or otherwise well-placed businesses obtain, as open or concealed 'rent', is not capable of exact estimate, many, if not most, profitable businesses derive some of their surplus from the possession or control of natural resources.Such natural resources are to all intents and purposes capital, so far as relates to issues of conflict between capital and labour.
The amount and possibly the proportion of surplus (taking the whole industrial world into consideration) which is plain or disguised rent, is probably upon the increase.Even in Great Britain, though aggregate rents do not keep pace with profits and other incomes derived from business capital, they probably form an increasing proportion of that income which, according to our definition, ranks as 'unproductive surplus.' Though these rents, like other 'unproductive surplus,' could be advantageously diverted into wages on the one hand, public revenue upon the other, they are kept on the side of capital by the full force of combination.
Thus the labour in any trade may be confronted by a larger body of wealth which it would like to secure for higher wages, while at the same time it finds itself less able to achieve this object.
§3.Equally sharp may be the antagonism of interests set up between such a combine and the general body of consumers, by means of the control of prices which the former possesses.For the large surplus, which we see to be an object of desire to the workers in a combination or trust, represents to the Consumer an excess of prices.So it comes to pass that the consumer, unable to combine in his economic capacity, as the workers do in their trade unions, combines as citizen and calls upon the government to safeguard him against monopolies.His first instinctive demand is, that such combinations shall be declared illegal bodies, acting in restraint of trade, and broken up.But nothing proves more plainly the inherent strength of the cohesive unifying tendencies than the completeness of the failure to achieve this object.When business men desire to combine, it is impossible to force them to compete.The alternatives are, either to leave the consuming public to the tender mercies of a monopoly, which, from mere considerations of profit, may not be able to raise its prices beyond a certain limit, or else to impose legal regulations, or, finally, to buy out the business, transferring it from a private into a public monopoly.
Wherever the modern State is driven to confront this problem, it is compelled, in proportion as public opinion is articulate and politically organised, to fasten an increasing measure of public control upon such powerful combinations, and to take over into the sphere of State enterprises those which cannot effectively be controlled.In such ways does modern society seek to heal the new discords generated by the very processes employed by the several businesses and trades in their search after an internal harmony.
But the largest forms of capitalistic enterprise will tend more and more to transcend the limits of any single state, not only in their composition but in the powers they exercise upon subsidiary industries, and upon the general body of consumers throughout the industrial world.1 The privately organised apparatus of economic machinery, which constitutes the fabric of this economic world-state, has been described as a striking example of the expansion of industrial solidarity and harmony.But here again the possibilities, nay, certainties, of new discord between capital and labour, producer and consumer, cannot be ignored.Hence the great social problems of the future will to a less and less extent lie within the political competence of single states or be soluble by the separate action of the governments of those states.The vast currents of international capital and labour cannot flow without great disturbances of order and of economic interests often affecting several nations.The safe, successful, profitable, pursuit of large foreign enterprises by the capital and labour of persons belonging to many nationalities, will more and more involve common political action.
