of “joint-stock capital.”
When joint-stock companies first came into existence, certain bourgeois theorists, and in addition certain socialist advocates of class collaboration, began to assure the world that a new era was beginning. Capitalism, they declared, was not destined to result in the dominion of a small group of capitalists. Far from this; out of his savings every worker would be able to buy shares, and in this way every worker would become a capitalist. Capital, they said, was to an increasing extent being “democratised”; in course of time, the difference between the capitalists and the workers would disappear without any revolution.
Of course this was utter nonsense. Things worked out very differently. The great capitalists simply made use of the lesser capitalists for their own purposes. The centralisation of capital went on more rapidly than ever, now that competition had taken the form of a struggle between huge shareholding concerns.
It is easy to understand how the great capitalist shareholders have been able to make the small