Page:Lenin - The Collapse of the Second International - tr. Sirnis (1919).pdf/34

 is the submission to finance-capital of all sections of the possessing class. It means the division of the world between five or six "Great" Powers, most of which are taking part in the present war. The division of the world by the Great Powers is proof that all their propertied sections are interested, in possessing colonies, spheres of interest, in oppressing other nations; it is proof that they are interested in places which yield more or less profit, and in receiving privileges which arise out of belonging to a "Great" Power and an oppressor nation.

It is no longer possible for capitalism to evolve smoothly, in comparatively peaceful, cultural surroundings, and to go on extending by degrees to fresh countries. A new era has arrived! Finance capital ousts, and will oust, a given country from amongst the Great Powers. It will deprive it of its colonies and spheres of influence (as Germany, which made war on England, threatens to do), and it will deprive the lower middle class of its "Great Power" privileges and its subsidiary income. This is a fact which is being proved by the war brought about through an intensification of the contradictions—an intensification which has been recognised by every one, including Kautsky himself in his pamphlet, "The Path to Power."

And when the present struggle, caused by jealousy among the Powers, has become a fact, Kautsky begins to persuade the capitalists and the lower middle class that war is a dreadful thing and disarmament a good thing. He does this with the same manner and with the same result as that with which a Christian priest, from the pulpit, persuades capitalists that love of man is a command of God, a striving of the soul and the moral law of civilisation. What Kautsky terms economic tendencies towards "ultra-imperialism" really amounts to lower middle-class pleadings that financiers should do no wrong.