Date: 1913
Source: ru:PSS/v23

The English labor press continues its fascinating and instructive campaign of exposés, revealing how syndicates of internationally united capitalists are driving nations toward war.

Take, for example, Nobel’s dynamite trust—or rather, syndicate. Its capital amounts to 30 million rubles. Net profits for the past year totaled 3,300,000 rubles. Eleven percent net profit—quite a return, wouldn’t you agree?

In their annual reports, these noble merchants of human‑destructive materials modestly attribute their success to a brief phrase: “This year, demand for military supplies has surged.”

Of course! The capitalist press and the political figures who serve the capitalists clamor for war, demanding ever more armaments—after all, it is so profitable for industrialists who manufacture military supplies!

But who, then, are these industrialists?

They are capitalists united across all nations—brothers who hold ministerial posts, members of parliament, and the like!

Among the shareholders of the “dynamite” trust—which is, in effect, a shareholder, if not outright owner, of four dynamite factories in Germany—we find the following names:

The German Army: General von Mülburg, Major Baron von Fritsch, and others;

The British Army: General J. Donald, Colonel Neil Findlay, and so on and so forth;

The French Army: Colonel François Lafargue;

Lord Glanconner, brother of Mrs. Asquith, wife of the British Prime Minister; Sir Norre, a minister; Harold Tennant, a member of Parliament; the “German Bank,” the “Hanover Bank,” and many others.

The leaders of national parties in various parliaments—those who cry out about “the strength of the state” and “patriotism” (consider the formulas by which the Cadets, Progressives, and Octobrists shifted gears in the Fourth Duma!{84})—actualize this very same patriotism by arming France against Germany, Germany against England, and so forth. Each of them is a fervent patriot. Each of them cares so deeply—so deeply—for “the strength of the state”—their own state, of course, pitted against the enemy.

And yet they sit, together with these “enemies,” on the boards of directors and in the shareholders’ meetings of the dynamite trust and other trusts (syndicates), reaping millions of rubles in pure profit while driving—each one “his own” people—to war against other peoples.

“Pravda,” No. 133, June 12, 1913

Printed according to the text of the newspaper “Pravda.”