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Rh seen how furiously the international capitalist groups devote themselves to the task of making it quite impossible for an opponent to compete, by purchasing, for instance, all iron deposits or oil fields, etc. Colonial possession alone gives complete guarantees of success to the monopolies against all the risks of the struggle against competitors, including the possibility of the latter defending themselves by means of a law establishing a State monopoly. The more capitalism develops, the more the need for raw materials arises; the more bitter competition becomes and the more feverishly the hunt for raw materials proceeds throughout the whole world, the more desperate becomes the struggle for the acquisition of colonies.

Schilder writes: "There is a fact which will seem to some people paradoxical, viz., that the increase of urban and industrial population will suffer, sooner or later, much less from a shortage of raw materials for industry than from a shortage of necessities of life. Thus the shortage of wood is making itself felt. The price of wood is rising, like the price of leather, and the price of raw materials necessary for the textile industry. Associations of manufacturers are trying to strike a balance between industry and agriculture on a world scale; note, for instance, the International Federation of Cotton Spinners' Associations in several important industrial countries, and the European Union of Flax Spinners' Associations founded on the same model in 1910."

The bourgeois reformists, of course, attempt to diminish the importance of facts of this kind by saying that it "would be possible" to obtain raw materials on an open market without a "costly and