16 SOCIAL SCIENTIST slow method compared with centralisation, which has only to change the quantitative groupings of the component parts of social capital. The world would still be without railways ifit«hadhad to wait until the accumulation of a few individual capitals had got far enough to be adequate for the construction of a railway. Centralisation, on the other hand, accomplished this in the twinkling of an eye by means of joint stock companies:"9 Although he did not develop in Capital the laws of the centralisation of capital, in a classic passage in Volume I Marx did indicate clearly that the central tendency of the process of capitalist development was to bring about centralisation of capital along with teclinical development and socialisation of labour that ultimately unite the workers and organise them against the capitalist system itself. We quote below the passage: ...as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as further expropriation of private proprietors, take a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. The expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalist production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or the expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever extending scale, the cooperative form of labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of soil, the transformation ofinstuments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of world market, and with this, the international character of capitalist regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of capitalist production itself.10 Lenin on Monopoly Capitalism Following the hints left by Marx in the passage quoted above, Lenin developed a full-fledged theory of monopoly capitalism. By the end of the nineteenth century capitalism in the Western countries had definitely entered the monopoly stage. Engels wrote in the fourth German edition of Volume I of Capital, published in 1890: "In a given branch of industry centralisation would reach its extreme limit when all