many of them enjoy a local control of
production and prices which is practically unrestricted. Excepting in
the case of the Standard Oil Trust, and a few less important bodies
which enjoy the control of some local monopoly, such as anthracite coal,
the supremacy of the leading Trust or Syndicate is brought in certain
places into direct conflict with other more or less independent
competing bodies. In other words, the evolution of capital, which tends
ever to the establishment of competition between a smaller number of
larger masses, has nowhere worked out the logical conclusion which means
the condensation of the few large competing bodies into a single mass.
This final step, which presents a completely organized trade with the
element of competition utterly eliminated under the control of a single
body of mere joint-owners of the capital engaged, must be regarded as
the goal, the ideal culmination of the concentrative movement of modern
capital. It is said that more than one-third of the business in the
United States is already controlled by Trusts. But most of them have
only in part succeeded in their effort to escape from competition by
integrating their personal interests into a single homogeneous mass.
Even in cases where they do rule the market untrammelled by the direct
interference of any competitors, they are still deterred from a free use
of their control over prices by the possibility of competition which any
full use of this control might give rise to. For it does not follow that
even where a Trust holds an absolute monopoly of the market of a
locality, that it will be able to maintain that monopoly were it to
raise its prices beyond a certain point. In proportion, however, as
experience yields a greater skill in the management of Trusts, and their
growing strength enables them to more successfully defy outside attempts
at competition, their power to raise prices and increase their rates of
profit would rise accordingly.

Regarding, then, the development of the capitalist system from the first
establishment of the capitalist-employer as a distinct industrial class,
we trace the massing of capital in larger and larger competing forms,
the number of which represents a pyramid growing narrower as it ascends
towards an ideal apex, represented by the absolute unity or identity of
interests of the capital in a given trade. In so far as the interests of
different trades may clash, we might carry on this movement fu