therefore imperialism is progressive; therefore, we should bow down before it and chant its praises. Something like the caricature which was drawn about 1894-95 by the Russian Narodniki (populists) against the Marxists.
If the Marxists, they used to say to us, consider capitalism in Russia to be inevitable and a progressive move, why don't they open a public-house and begin to encourage capitalism!
Kautsky's "reply" to Cunow is as follows: "Imperialism is not modern capitalism. It is only one of the forms of its policy. This policy we can and should fight against; we can and should fight against imperialism, annexations, etc."
The reply looks good. But it amounts in effect to nothing but a more cunning, more disguised (and, therefore, more dangerous) propaganda of reconciliation. For the "struggle" against the policy of the trusts and banks, unless it strikes at the economic basis of the trusts and banks, reduces itself to nothing but bourgeois reformism and pacifism, to innocent and benevolent expression of pious hopes. To avoid mentioning existing contradictions, to forget the most important of them instead of revealing them in their full depth—this is Kautsky's theory.
"From a purely economic point of view," writes Kautsky, "it is not impossible that capitalism will yet go through a new phase, that of the extension of the policy of the cartels to foreign policy, or of ultra-imperialism."77 That is, of a super-imperialism, of the union of world imperialisms and not of their struggles; a phase when wars shall cease under capitalist rule, a phase of "the exploi-
