tries, the most important role would be played by the merchant.
But Kautsky's definition is not only false and foreign to Marxism. It serves as a basis for a whole system which breaks away all along the line from Marxian theory and practice, of which we shall speak again later. The verbal debate raised by Kautsky as to whether the modern stage of capitalism should be called "imperialism" or "the finance-capital stage" is of no importance. Call it what you will, it matters little. The important fact is that Kautsky detaches the policy of imperialism from its economics, speaks of annexations as being a policy "preferred" by finance-capital, and opposes to it another bourgeois policy which he alleges to be possible on the same basis of finance-capital. It appears from this that monopolies, in economics, are compatible with methods which are neither monopolistic, nor violent, nor annexationist in politics. It appears from this that the territorial division of the world, which was completed during the period of finance-capital and which determines the peculiarity of the present forms of rivalry between the great capitalist States, is compatible with a non-imperialist policy.
The result is a slurring-over and a concealment of the most profound contradictions of the latest stage of capitalism, instead of an exposure of their depth. The result is bourgeois reformism instead of Marxism.
Kautsky enters into controversy with Cunow, the German apologist of imperialism and annexations whose cynical and crude argument runs as follows: Imperialism is modern capitalism; the development of capitalism is inevitable and progressive;
