That the means of imperialist policy overshadow almost entirely its original ends has tremendous implications.

By elevating the dictum of the market to the role of the sole criterion of rationality and efficiency, economics denies even all "respectability" to the distinction between essential and non-essential consumption, between productive and unproductive labor, between actual and potential surplus.

As Hegel well knew, the ascent of reason has never followed a straight line.

One would think that the record of already existing regulatory agencies is sufficiently eloquent in showing that it is Big Business that does the regulating rather than vice versa .

But when reason and the study of history began revealing the irrationality, the limitations, and the merely transitory nature of the capitalist order, bourgeois ideology as a whole and with it bourgeois economics began abandoning both reason and history.

It has been estimated that even in the absence of net investment, the mere substitution of modern machinery for worn-out equipment in the United States would cause an annual productivity increase of approximately 1.5 percent.

The alarm must be sounded because it is the economic and social system of capitalism and imperialism that prevents the urgently needed full mobilization of the potential economic surplus and the attainment of rates of economic advancement that can be secured with its help.