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From Fourth International, Vol.16 No.3, Summer 1955, p.107.
Transcription & mark-up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Editor:
In a review of my recent book The Permanent Revolution in Science, Paul Abbot says in the spring issue of your magazine, “according to Schanck Marx saw free enterprise and monopoly ‘as the basic trends’ in capitalist society out of whose conflict a third force tends to rise.” He goes on to say “students of Marx are well aware” and then gives a different formulation. Perhaps this student of Marx should read Marx, for the formulation accredited to Schanck was taken from The Poverty of Philosophy by Karl Marx, page 164 and 165, which reads as follows:
“But we all know that competition was engendered by feudal monopoly. Thus primarily competition has been the contrary of monopoly, and not monopoly the contrary oif competition. Therefore modern monopoly is not a simple antithesis; it is, on the contrary the true synthesis”
and
“Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopolv. The monopolists are made by competition, the competitors become monopolists. If the monopolists restrict competition among the workers; and the more the mass of workers grows as against the monopolists of one nation, the more keen becomes the competition between tha monopolists of different nations” etc.
Nor do I see any contradiction between thus statement and the one given regarding the conversion of labor power into a commodity, it is certainly the basic dynamism of the above process. Moreover what impresses me about this original formulation is how the modern chemists and physicists are just catching up to it in their own notions of interpenetration of processes.
Very truly,
Richard L. Schanck
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