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The socializing function of finance capital facilitates enormously the task of overcoming capitalism. Once finance capital has brought the most importance branches of production under its control, it is enough for society, through its conscious executive organ – the state conquered by the working class – to seize finance capital in order to gain immediate control of these branches of production.

This page presents the results of a simulation conducted by students at ESCP Europe Business School. The aim was to uncover the amount of interlinked debt between Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain, Britain, France, and Germany; and then see what would happen if they attempted to cross cancel obligations. The results were astounding: *The countries can reduce their total debt by 64% through cross cancellation of interlinked debt, taking total debt from 40.47% of GDP to 14.58% *Six countries – Ireland, Italy, Spain, Britain, France and Germany – can write off more than 50% of their outstanding debt *Three countries Ireland, Italy, and Germany – can reduce their obligations such that they owe more than €1bn to only 2 other countries *Ireland can reduce its debt from almost 130% of GDP to under 20% of GDP *France can virtually eliminate its debt – reducing it to just 0.06% of GDP