Page:Imperialism (Lenin).djvu/150

142 capital operating in Italy was preparing the way for a political alliance between the two countries, and how in the same way struggle was being developed between Britain and Germany over Persia, between all the European capitalist powers over Chinese loans, etc. Behold, here the living reality of peaceful "ultra-imperialist" alliances, indissolubly bound up with ordinary imperialist conflicts!

The covering up of the deepest internal contradictions of imperialism by Kautsky inevitably becomes a camouflage of imperialism; and it does not fail to leave traces in this writer's critique of the political qualities of imperialism. Imperialism is the epoch of finance-capital and of monopolies, which introduce everywhere the tendency to domination, not to freedom. The result is reaction all along the line, whatever the political system, and an extreme intensification of existing antagonisms. Particularly acute becomes the yoke of national oppression and the striving for annexations, i.e., the violation of national independence (for annexation is nothing else but a violation of the right of a nation to dispose of itself). Hilferding justly draws attention to the relation between imperialism and the strengthening of national oppression. "Where-everwherever [sic] there are new countries," he writes, "the capital imported into them intensifies contradictions and antagonisms and excites the growing resistance of the people, who are awakened to national consciousness against the intruders. This resistance can easily become transformed into dangerous measures directed against foreign capital. Former social relations are profoundly revolutionised. The thousand-year-old agrarian isolation of countries situated outside the main current of history is