Nevertheless the failure of that attempt and of similar attempts in other fields does not alter the fact that capitalist concerns are more and more trying to eliminate competition by one means or another, and that failure on a too limited basis will not prevent further, more widespread, attempts later on.

The Times in 1941 and 1942 published articles surveying the development of capitalist industry in recent years. Below are extracts from the articles and from the editorial comment :–

“The early philosophers of capitalism wrote of it as a highly competitive system. The labourer could not be exploited because employers were fighting each other for his services. The entrepreneur was the servant, not the master of the consumer. He could not charge exorbitant prices, or make excessive profits ; he must always strive to introduce new inventions ; his inefficiency was penalised with loss. How different is this picture from the world we know to-day. Already before the war the iron and steel industry, transport, textiles, shipbuilding, and all our staple trades were riddled with price agreements, quotas, or restrictions of one kind or another ; in all the consumer had been dethroned.” (The Times, 18 September, 1942).

“The typical British industry to-day is privately owned but centrally controlled. It is not often realised to what an extent combination, in its carious forms such as price-fixing arrangements, market-sharing agreements, rings, cartels, trusts, pools, combines, and plain monopolies, has spread over British industry. The trade in which prices are determined by competition and in which the newcomer can enter on terms of approximate equality is now a distinct rarity. It would be an easy task to show how, in a wide range of industries, prices in the British market have been kept above the world level. There have been several public demonstrations of the art of excluding the newcomer and of hamstringing the firm that is ill-advised enough to try to increase its technical efficiency and thereby its competitive power. The great bulk of British industry is divided into industrial fiefs fully as much as if every industry had been nationalised by the State. Furthermore the tendency has been immensely strengthened by the war. In some industries a controller chosen from the trade itself has been given legal powers. In others, the Government has, in effect, made the trade association responsible, first for organising the export trade, and now for devising a scheme of concentration.” (The Times, 29 November, 1941).

The comment of The Times’ editor on this was as follows :–

“The abandonment of laissez-faire as a basis of industrial policy has been brought about not by the triumph of any contrary doctrine, but by the natural trend of modern industry towards monopoly. Individualism in economic life has been driven to the wall not by the State collectivism of nineteenth century socialist theory, but by the practical collectivism of the corporation, the trust, and the cartel. ‘Private enterprise’ is a misnomer when applied to the vast industrial and commercial organisations which are the characteristic and dominating feature of the modern economic system . . .” (The Times, 6 December, 1941).