Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/136

 a fine thing, and he accomplishes about as much as the priest who from his pulpit tells capitalists that love of one's neighbor is God's behest, a source of bliss for our soul and the moral law of civilization. What Kautsky calls the economic trend to ultra-Imperialism is a petty bourgeois attempt to tell the financiers they should not do wrong.

The export of capital? But capital is being exported in larger quantities to independent countries like the United States than into colonial lands.

To seize colonies ? But they have almost all been seized and almost all of them are trying now to free themselves. "India may cease to be an English dependency, but she will never submit as an independent empire to the domination of any other nation" (page 49). Every effort made by a commercial capitalist government to create a colonial empire in order to free itself from all dependence from any other power for its supply of raw materials, is bound to unite against that government all the other capitalist governments and to drag it into endless, exhausting wars, which will not bring it any nearer to its goal. Such a policy is the shortest road to economic bankruptcy (pages 72–73).

Isn't this objurgation to the financiers to avoid Imperialism pure philistine piffle? To warn capitalists against bankruptcy is like warning brokers not to gamble in stocks, for "many have in that way lost everything they had." Capital has everything to gain from bankruptcy of competing capitalists and competing nations, for this bankruptcy will cause an even more powerful concentration. And, therefore, the sharper and the more ruthless economic competition, that is, the economic urge toward bankruptcy, grows, the more eager capitalists are to drive their competitors into bankruptcy by means of a war. The fewer countries there are left into which one can export capital profitably, such as colonies and dependent nations, like Turkey (for in such cases the financier makes larger profits than by exporting capital into independent and civilized nations like the United States), the more bitter the fight is for the subjugation and the partition of Turkey, China and other countries.

Thus speak those who are observing this era of financial capital and of Imperialism. Thus speak the facts. But Kautsky injects into the whole thing his bourgeois morality: There is no use getting heated up and fighting over Turkey or India, for this thing wilt not last long and it is so much better to develop capital in a peaceful way.