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84 gium 17.67 per cent. France came in later with successively 4.8 per cent., 5.8 per cent., and 6.4 per cent. in the first, second and third years, exceeding the 100 per cent. limit, i.e., when the total was 104.8 per cent. of the 1904 total, etc. In 1905, the United States Steel Corporation entered the cartel, then Austria, then Spain. "At this moment," wrote Vogelstein in 1910, "the division of the world is at an end, and the great consumers, in the first place the State railways—since the world is divided up without their interests being considered—must live like the poet in the palace of Jupiter."

Or we may refer also to the International Zinc Syndicate, established in 1909 which divided production exactly between five groups of factories: German, Belgian, French, Spanish and British. Then there is the International Power Trust, of which Liefmann says that it is "a quite modern close alliance between all the German manufacturers of explosives who have divided up the whole world, so to speak, with the English and French manufacturers, organised in a similar manner."

Altogether, Liefmann counted in 1897, more than forty international cartels in which Germany had a share, while in 1910 there were about 100.

Certain bourgeois writers express the opinion that the international cartels, representing one of the most striking forms of the internationalisation of capital afford us the hope of the maintenance of peace under the capitalist system. Theoretically this opinion is absurd, while in practice it is a sophism and a dishonest defence of the worst opportunism. The international cartels show to what point capitalist monopolies have developed,