tioned the transition from yesterday's "peaceful" Capitalism to to-day's Imperialism: the fact that unrestricted competition has been replaced by monopolistic alliances of capitalists and that the entire world has been divided up among them. It is obvious that those facts and factors have a world-wide significance. Unrestricted commerce and world-wide competition were possible and necessary when capital could without much difficulty establish new colonies and seize land in Africa and in other unoccupied parts of the world, and when at the same time the concentration of capital was only in its embryonic stage and there were no monopolistic concerns, powerful enough to dominate one entire branch of any industry.
The appearance and growth of those monopolistic concerns (a process which is still going on in England and in America, and I wonder whether Kautsky would deny that the war has hastened that process?) makes the former competition impossible, tears the ground from under it, and the division of the earth among those large monopolies brings unavoidably in its wake an armed conflict for the division of colonies and spheres of influence.
It is ridiculous to think that the weakening of the protectionist movement in two countries could change this in any way.
Kautsky also mentions a decrease in the export of capital by two countries in the past few years. Those two countries, France and Germany, exported, according to statistics for 1912, some 35 billion marks each and England alone twice as much.[1]
The increase in the export of capital never was and never could be regular under Capitalism. Whether the accumulation of capital has decreased or whether the capacity of the home market has increased owing to an amelioration in the condition of the masses, Kautsky does not try to decide. Such being the case it is impotssible to predict the coming of the new era from the decrease in the export of capital in two countries.
Then Kautsky tells us about "the closer relations which are being established between groups of financiers and capitalists."
This is indeed the only general and positive tendency we have observed not for a few years only, nor for just two nations, but
- ↑ Conf. Bernard Harms: Probleme der Weltwirtschaft, Jena, 1912 Geoge Paish: "Great Britain's Capital Invesments in Colonies," in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Vol LXXV, 1910–1911, p. 167. Lloyd-George in an address delivered at the beginning of 1915, estimates the amount of English capital invested abroad at four billion pounds sterling.
