MONOPOLY CAPITALISM IN A DEPENDENT ECONOMY 15 according to Marx, "also an outcome of the action of the immanent laws of capitalist production itself".4 But contrary to the process of concentration, centralisation is independent of economic growth. Centralisation may take place along with growth in the capitalist economies but it is not a function of such growth A failure to grasp this basic point has given rise to much uninformed talk about the absurdity of the existence of monopoly capitalism in a poor capitalist country. In Marx's own words, centralisation "does not mean simple concentration of means of production and command over labour. "It is concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalists by capitalists, transformation of many small into few large capitals. This process differs from the former in this, that it only presupposes a change in the distribution of capital already to hand and functioning; its field of action is therefore not limited by the absolute growth of social wealth, by the absolute limits of accumulation. Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many. This is centralisation proper as distinct from accumulation and concentration.?'5 Engels^ Elaboration Marx wrote in Volume I of Capital: "The laws of this centralisation of capital, or the attraction of capital by capital cannot be developed here."6 In the fourth German edition of Volume I of Capital, Engels made a number of changes in and additions to the text. Among these additions we find an elaboration of Marx's analysis of the process of centralisation of capital along with comments on the consequences of centralisation. The two most powerful factors in centralisation, pointed out by Engels, are Competition and Credit.7 On the contributions of the gradually developing credit system to the process of centralisation of capital, Engels says: "In its first stages the credit system furtively creeps in as the humble assistant of accumulation, drawing into the hands of individuals or associated capitalists, by unseen threads, the resources of many which lie scattered, in larger or smaller amounts, over the surface of society; but it quickly becomes a new and terrible weapon in the competitive struggle and is finally transformed into a gigantic social mechanism for tlie centralisation of capital."8 The economic effects of centralisation, whether achieved through the violent method of annexation or through the smoother method of joint-stock company formation by "fusing together a number of capitals already formed or in the process of being formed" are, according to Engels, to enable the industrial capitalists to extend the scale of their operations. Says Engels: "But accumulation, the gradual increase of capital by reproduction as it passes from the circular to the spiral form (simple reproduction to expanded reproduction—A C) is clearly a very