The Untold History of the United States, Volume 1 by Oliver Stone

Concentration, gigantism, oligopolies and even monopolies characterized this new stage in the development of capitalism. The big banks thus became partners, major shareholders and even owners of big corporations. They raised the capital needed to make largescale industrial production possible and, when such production yielded megaprofits, looked for opportunities all over the world to invest the rapidly accumulating stocks of “new” capital. In this new constellation of capitalism, the big banks played an increasingly important role. On the one hand, these big firms competed keenly with each other, but they also concluded agreements and collaborated to share raw materials and markets, set prices and agree on other ways to avoid as much as possible the inconveniences and indeed, dangers, of all-out competition in a theoretically “free” marketplace - and of course also to defend their common interests against foreign competitors as well as their own workers and other employees. “Big business” had strutted onto the stage of history. (Earlier, economic crises had typically been caused by underproduction, a situation in which demand exceeded supply.) In most industrially developed countries, namely in Western and Central Europe, but also in the United States, countless small producers fell by the wayside as a consequence of this newfangled economic “depression.” A relatively restricted number of gigantic firms, essentially corporations rather than family-owned enterprises, associations of firms known as “cartels” and, of course, big banks, henceforth dominated the economic landscape. Supply thus overtook demand and that produced the very first crisis of overproduction as early as 1873.

The nineteenth century was the century of the Industrial Revolution, and in each industrializing country, economic productivity increased rapidly. Pauwels, published by James Lorimer, Toronto, 2016) (An excerpt from The Great Class War 1914-1918, by Jacques R. Share on WhatsApp Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Telegram Share on Reddit Share on Email

The Untold History of the United States, Volume 1 by Oliver Stone