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What about the export of capital? More capital is being exported to independent countries, such as the United States of America, than to colonies. What about the seizure of colonies? These have all been seized, and they are all striving to liberate themselves. Kautsky says:—
India may cease to be an English possession, but it will never come in the shape of an undivided empire, under foreign domination. (See the pamphlet quoted above, p. 49.) The striving of any industrial capitalist state to acquire for itself a colonial empire, which would enable it to dispense with drawing raw materials from other countries, would unite against itself all the other capitalist states; in addition, it would be drawn into endless exhausting wars without being brought nearer its aim. Such a policy would be the surest way to bring about the bankruptcy of the whole economic life of a State (pp. 72–73).
Does not this amount to a vulgar appeal to the financiers to renounce imperialism? To frighten capitalists with the bugbear of bankruptcy amounts to advising members of the Stock Exchange not gamble, because "many of them lose all they possess." Capital gains and concentrates in the same measure that bankruptcy overtakes competing capitalists or a competing nation. Therefore, the more pronounced and keen the economic competition i.e., the more others are driven into bankruptcy on the economic field, the stronger the desire of capitalists to drive their national rival into bankruptcy by applying military pressure. The fewer countries there are, like Turkey, to which it is as profitable to export capital as it is to export it to colonies and independent states—these cases where the financier ges a three-fold return in comparison with capital exported to a free and independent civilised country, like the United States of America—the fiercer is the struggle for the subjugation and division of Turkey, China, and so forth. Thus speaks the economic theory concerning the era of finance-capitai and imperialism; and thus speak facts.
But Kautsky turns everything into a banal middle-class "morality ": "Why." he asks, "should they become do excited and go to war to divide Turkey or to seize India?" "They will not be able to enjoy these things for long. Besides, it is better to develop capitalism according to the peaceful method. … Of course, it would be still better to develop capitalism and to expand the market by increasing wages, for such a thing is quite 'thinkable.'" To
