year 1918, 92.6 per cent. of the coal mined in the Rhenish-Westphalian region was in the hands of a single syndicate; of all the steel produced within the German empire, nearly half was manufactured by the Steel Syndicate; the Sugar Trust supplied 70 per cent. of the home demand and 80 per cent. of the export demand.
Even in Russia quite a number of branches of industry had already passed completely under the sway of the syndicates. “Produgol” produced 60 per cent. of the Donetz coal; “Prodameta” (metal syndicate) controlled 88 to 98 per cent. of the production; “Krovlya” supplied 60 per cent. of all the iron used for roofing; “Prodwagon” was a syndicate of about 15 concerns building railway carriages; the Copper Syndicate controlled 90 per cent. of the output of copper; the Sugar Syndicate controlled the entire production of sugar; and so on. According to the calculations of a Swiss expert, at the beginning of the twentieth century half the capital of the world was already in the hands of trusts or syndicates.
Syndicates and trusts do not only centralise homogeneous enterprises. With increasing frequency there arise trusts that simultaneously embrace several branches of production. How does this take place?
The various branches of production are connected one with another principally by means of buying and selling. Let us consider the production of iron ore and of coal. Here we have to do with products which serve as raw material for iron foundries and engineering workshops; in their turn these workshops turn out, let us suppose, machines; the machines serve as means of production in a series of other branches; and soon. Now let us imagine that we have an iron foundry. It buys iron ore and coal. Of course the interest of the smelting works is to buy the ore and the coal as cheaply as possible. But what if the ore and the coal are in the hands of another syndicate? There then begins a struggle between the two syndicates,