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Strength of American Capitalism      333

all over the world and in the words of one capitalist organ, "for the first time in about two years the financial world of Europe was able once more to breathe freely." (Bond and Quotation Record, Financial Chronicle, December 6, 1929.)

Summary

The foregoing analysis can be stated in summary fashion as follows:
1. The Federal Reserve System, the organ for "organizing" American capitalism, through the whole of the past several years has never been able to control the dangerous credit situation which has constituted one of the chief characteristics of the "exceptional" position of the United States in the world economy. (Of any regulative measures in the sphere of production there can, of course, be no word.) Its efforts to maintain a "normal" functioning of the capitalist economy while discouraging its concomitant (and inherent!) parasitic development only served to make somewhat uneven the rapid acceleration and the step-up to a higher plane of this parasitism. ("Parasitic as used throughout signifies the striving inherent in capitalism to make profits as a greater rate than the current degree of exploitation of the working class permits. This is characteristic of "boom: periods where prices go skyward and profits are "made" hand over fist. The period just concluded was particular in the extent of this profit making and in fact that it occurred not in the sphere of production nor even in the commodity (non-security) markets but on the stock exchanges of imperialist America.) The Federal Reserve System demonstrated the impossibility of preventing the transition of the "normal" functioning of capitalism into its higher self-unequivocal gambling. 

2. The rise of the investment trust to its present importance in finance capital was accelerated by the stock market boom. Its functions in the sphere of finance capital are twofold. It facilitates the absorption of foreign securities which are the reflection of the export of capital and it permits pro rata participation in all of the surplus capital produced by the working class. In the past few years the investment trust was an outstanding means also of participating in profits not exploited from the working class—paper profits. It was a main factor in this sphere of finance capital parasitism. 

3. American "prosperity" was maintained in large part through the consumers' (bourgeois and petty bourgeois) purchasing power generated and made possible by installment sales. In the stock market "paper profits" became a significant factor in permitting