Written on 3 May 1882.

["Der Sozialdemokrat", No. 21, 18 May 1882]

The fabulous speed with which the concentration of capital is proceeding in the United States of America is shown by a statistical survey recently published in English newspapers. According to it, the richest of the rich is Mr Vanderbilt in New York. This railway, land, factory-chimney, etc. baron is estimated to possess close to 300 million dollars (1 dollar = 4 marks 25 pfennigs) in fortune—‘value’, as the American says. He owns 65 million dollars in United States bonds (loans), 50 million in shares of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, as well as 50 million in shares of other railway companies, besides colossal landed property, both in New York and in the interior of the country. Mr Vanderbilt, the papers add admiringly, could buy up several Rothschilds and would still remain the richest man in the world.

And this colossal fortune the Vanderbilt family has scraped together in about 30 years! The case, writes the Whitehall Review, stands unparalleled in history. We believe it too.

After Vanderbilt, the list of moneybags continues:

Jay Gould, equally notorious railway swindler—100 million dollars;
Mackay, the silver mine owner, instigator of the agitation for ‘contractual double standard’—50 million;
Crocker—50 million;
John Rockefeller, petroleum knight—but no petroleur—40 million;
C. P. Huntington—20 million;
D. O. Mills—20 million;
Senator Fair—30 million;
Ex-Governor Stanford—40 million;
Russel Sage—15 million;
J. R. Keene—15 million;
S. J. Tilden—15 million;
E. D. Morgan—10 million;
Samuel Sloan—10 million;
Garrison—10 million;
Cyrus W. Field—10 million;
Hugh J. Jewett—5 million;
Sidney Dillon—5 million;
David Dows—5 million;
J. D. Navarro—5 million;
John W. Garrett—5 million;
W. B. Astor—5 million.

So far the list, which is, however, by no means exhaustive. The number of American money magnates is far larger. And this fabulous accumulation of wealth is being increased day by day by the enormous immigration into America. For, directly and indirectly, it benefits the capital magnates above all. Directly, in that it is the cause of a rapid rise in land prices; indirectly, in that the majority of the immigrants depress the standard of living of the American workers. Even now, in the countless strike reports communicated by our American brother organs, we find an ever larger percentage of strikes to resist wage reductions, and most of the strikes aimed at wage increases are basically nothing else either, for they are provoked either by the enormous rise in prices or by the absence of the wage increases normally customary in the spring.

In this way, the stream of emigrants which Europe now annually sends to America only helps to drive the capitalist economy, with all its consequences, to extremes, so that sooner or later a colossal crash over there is inevitable. Then the stream of emigrants will come to a halt, or perhaps even turn back, i.e., the moment will have come when the European, and especially the German, worker is faced with the alternative: death by starvation or revolution! But once the alternative stands thus, then farewell to you, lucky dogs of the holy Prussian-German Empire!

And the moment is closer than most dream. Already it is hard for the immigrants over there to find work; the harbingers of the approaching business crisis are showing themselves ever more clearly; a pretext, however trivial, at the decisive moment is enough, and—the crash is here!

Therefore, much as we, in common with the New Yorker Volkszeitung, deplore emigration from Germany; much as we are convinced that it will, in the first place, bring with it a substantial deterioration in the situation of the American workers; and much as we, moreover, wish with it that the German workers would concentrate all their attention exclusively on improving their situation in Germany—we cannot share its pessimism. We simply must reckon with the circumstances, and—since these, thanks to the short-sightedness and greed of our opponents, are excluding more and more any development in a really reformist sense—we must then seek our task in preparing minds, in defiance of all faint hearts, for the revolutionary course of events.

For the conflict: gigantic concentration of capital on the one hand and growing mass misery on the other, there is only one solution: the social revolution!