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themselves. The movement marked a turning point in the history
of the capitalist society. It is an attempt to get rid of the risks inherent
in business by planning and direction. Karl Pribram, in his
study of collective monopolies in Europe for the Brookings Institution,
points out that unlimited free competition was never accepted
in Italy as the basis of the economic order as it was in America.
Monopolies created by agreement were enforceable in the courts. 1
And he agrees with another authority that the cartel was a
revolution against risk, the central driving force in the capitalist
system.
Nothing seems to be more deeply ingrained in the human mind
than the old guild idea that those who produce should be permitted
to set up the laws under which production is carried on. However
bitterly competitors may battle each other for business there is a
common ground upon which they can and will always unite against
the consumer and the rest of society. For years the liberal has fought
the cartel movement—and the American equivalent, trade combinations—as
the sinister fruit of sheer greed. But that attack has made
little headway. The most serious aspect of this movement has nothing
to do with morals. It comes down to a question whether the
functions of distribution and production ought to be planned and
directed and by whom. Singularly a powerful group of so-called
liberals in this country, long the inveterate foes of this idea, has now
become its most vehement advocates. Italian businessmen took the
view that production and distribution ought to be planned and that
they should perform that function. That idea spread among capitalists
and, though freedom of trade along with the Rights of Man
were guaranteed by the old constitution, as Dr. Pribram points out,
this did not prevent eighty-four cartels from operating to limit
freedom of enterprise.
On the side of labor a similar drift was in the making. The General
Confederation of Labor was in fact under the domination of
the Socialist party. Thus the leaders of the labor movement in
Italy adopted the socialist diagnosis of the capitalist system; namely,
that it suffered from a group of basic flaws that made its indefinite
*Cartel Problems, an Analysis of Collective Monopolies in Europe, by Karl Pribram>
Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.
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