ation of surplus-value, and in its anxiety to create surplus-value it takes the risk of having the value crystallized in itself transformed into such form where the value realized in it may again be called into question and be partly lost. But with all that capital is essentially cowardly, and the least disturbance frightens it and makes it withdraw into its shell. And a disturbance arises each time there is a disproportion of production, which is a common occurrence under our system of private production and competition. This probability, again, is intensified by our credit system, which on the one hand makes capital extremely sensitive to disturbances and increases its natural cowardice, and on the other opens up great vistas of gain by speculation and jobbery through panics and crises.
Such crises, that is crises chargeable to the circulation process of commodities, are of course due to the "anarchy of production," and will disappear with the disappearance of that anarchy, assuming that the latter may disappear while the capitalist system lasts. Assuming therefore that the trusts and industrial combinations can abolish this anarchy and regulate production, the Revisionists are quite right in asserting that no commercial crisis will occur again on that account. Their mistake lies in assuming that the "anarchy of production" is, according to Marx, the only cause of commercial crises. As a matter of fact the cause mentioned by us above is not only not the only, but not even the chief cause of crises according to Marx. This could be determined as a mere matter of logic, that method of determining economic and sociological questions which is so dear to the heart of some Revisionists. For, the "anarchy of production," in its very nature and essence an irregular factor, could not possibly be the cause of regularly recurring crises. But Marx does not leave any room for doubt to what is, in his opinion, the chief cause of crises under capitalism.
This cause is the inherent contradiction of that system which we have already pointed out before, the dual posi-
