in nature and in society, are arbitrary and shifting and it would consequently be absurd to discuss the exact year or the decade in which imperialism "definitely" became established.
In this matter of defining imperialism it is chiefly with Karl Kautsky, the principal Marxist theoretician of the period of the Second International—that is, of the twenty-five years between 1889 and 1914—that issue must be joined.
Kautsky, in 1915 and even from November, 1914, decisively attacked the fundamental ideas expressed in our definition of imperialism. Kautsky said that imperialism must be considered not as a "phase" or as an economic stage, but as a policy; more precisely as the policy "preferred" by finance-capital; that imperialism cannot be "identified" with "contemporary capitalism"; that if capitalism must be taken to include "all the phenomena of contemporary capitalism"—the trusts, the cartels, protectionism, the hegemony of the financiers, and colonial policy—then the statement that imperialism is necessary to capitalism becomes reduced to "the most stale tautology"; because imperialism then becomes "naturally a vital necessity for capitalism," and so on. We shall most exactly express Kautsky's thought by quoting his definition of imperialism, which is directly opposed to the ideas which we set forth (Kautsky having known for a long time of the arguments used for many years by the German Marxians in defence of these ideas, and having known the ideas to exist as a tendency in Marxism). Kautsky's definition states:
"Imperialism is the product of highly developed industrial capitalism. It is the tendency of every
