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PARTISAN REVIEW
the free-trade system was for a time dominant and thus the "pro–
gressive" one does not make it the capitalistic system
per se.
It
could have been replaced at any time in any country by a protec–
tive system, and the change would have been not in the capitalist
nature of the nation but only in its competitive methods.
The more rapidly capital accumulates, the more it becomes
concentrated. Until the world war the more highly developed
capitalist nations were also the more centralized. The "richer" a
country was in an economic sense, however, the less urgent was its
need to rule politically. In America, for instance, the powerful
capitalists could ignore the government to the point where the
later seemed at times to be in strict opposition to the needs of Big
Busines!. In poor countries like Japan, the concentration of
wealth was from the beginning identical with the concentration of
political power. In Germany, too,
"the government displayed all the initiative in the capitalist
development that in the Western world rested almost exclu–
sively with private capitalists."'
But the Western world did not shrink from state interference in
the economy whenever it seemed profitable. Napoleon III, for
instance, in his policies regarding free-trade and protectionism
"turned to the right and then to the left and one could never tell
where he was going."'
The high capital concentration already reached in the more
"successful" nations account! for the forced concentration of
wealth and power in the more backward countries.
3
In this forced
centralization we see the real international character of capitalist
production which forces its weakest units to reach and overtake the
richer nations. When at an earlier stage the backward nations
opposed the monopolistic position of the
laissez faire
nations with
monopolistic actions by way of state interferences and thus escaped
economic exploitation by simply refusing to let the "market
dictate" to them, they countered an effective competitive method
with a still more effective one. When today the highly industrial-
'Gustav Stolper,
German Economy
1870-194{); p. 10.
<'fheophile Gautier; quoted by S. B. Clou&h in
France: A History of Nlllional
Economics 1789-1939;
p.
182.
<'fhe Bolshevik slogan, "to reach and overtake Western capitalism," for example,
was dictated by necessity in order to escape foreign exploitation and to · foster a
national development that made full use of national reaourcea and labor in the intereat
of a native rulin& class.
