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PARTISAN REVIEW
trusts' would establish
national
monopolies, but not that the world
market itself might be destroyed. Thus he deduced that, just as
the effect of the establishment
within a single industry
of a stable,
non-market economy by private monopolies was merely to increase
the contradictions and anarchy of the
national economy as a whole,
so these
national
State monopolies would merely aggravate the
chaos of the
world
market. His calculation, however, went astray
for the same basic reason as his predictions as to the nature of the
'State capitalist trust' went astray: because when monopoly reached
national
proportions, the decisive factor in the economy changed
from the capitalist market to the State bureaucracy-that is, politi–
cal controls arose which displaced capitalist market laws as the
primary determinants of economy, both national and world.
Nazi trade methods on the world market have had the effect
of destroying that market itself (instead of merely gaining for one
nation a larger share at the expense of other nations). As we have
seen, the Nazi bureaucracy in 1936 decided to cut German economy
loose from the world market. Autarky flew in the face of the
international division of labor. The international price structure
also lost most of its meaning as far as Germany was concerned,
since the State, controlling foreign trade completely, was able to
use Germany's buying and selling on the world market as a politi–
cal weapon; the Nazis preferred to pay more for Bulgarian wheat
than they would have had to pay for, say, Canadian wheat, since it
was politically desirable to draw Bulgaria closer to Germany.
Finally, the whole complex apparatus of the capitalist world mar–
ket-internationally determined prices, settlement of unfavorable
trade balances in gold, three- or four-cornered trade-was short–
circuited by the introduction by the Nazis of State barter deals.
These non-capitalist trading methods were evolved precisely
because the disintegration of the world market-expressed in rising
tariff walls, ever-increasing concentration of the world's gold in
the United States, drastic cuts in imports by all nations-made it
impossible for Germany, financially weakest of all major nations,
to get via the world market the raw materials she needed. Is there
any reason to believe that after this
~ar
the world market will be
in a better state? How can it be reconstructed so long as 80% of
the world's gold supply is held by the United States? In point of
fact, the evolution is all the other way: Nazi trade methods have
forced other nations to adopt them, as in the proposed Inter-Ameri-
