rivalry of several great powers striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory, not so much for their own advantage as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony—this is an essential feature of imperialism (e.g., Belgium is chiefly necessary to Germany as a base for operations against England; England needs Bagdad as a base for operations against Germany, etc.).
Kautsky refers more especially—and many times—to English writers who, he alleges, have established the purely political meaning of the word "imperialism" in Kautsky's sense. Let us refer to Hobson's book, Imperialism, which appeared in 1902.
"The new Imperialism differs from the old, first in substituting for the ambition of a single growing empire the theory and the practice of competing empires, each motived by similar lusts of political aggrandisement and commercial gain; secondly, in the dominance of financial or investing over mercantile interests."76
We thus see that Kautsky is absolutely wrong in referring to English writers (unless he means to quote the most vulgar English imperialist writers, or the direct apologists for imperialism). We see that Kautsky, while pretending to defend Marxism, is really taking a step to the rear as compared with the liberal Hobson, who justly takes account of two "historical concrete" peculiarities of modern imperialism: (1) the competition between several imperialisms and (2) the supremacy of the financier over the merchant.
Yet if it were chiefly a question of the annexation of agricultural countries by industrial coun-
