groups of financiers and capitalists, bringing about an increase in armaments and the determination of certain groups to destroy certain other groups, in other words, making another world war unavoidable. Then the prophecy I made in my pamphlet, The Road to Power, would realize itself in terrible fashion, class antagonisms would become more acute and the moral decay of Capitalism would be at hand."
Let us notice that by that artificial expression, Abwirtschaftung, Kautsky simply means the hostility to Capitalism manifested by the "intermediary strata separating the proletariat from the capitalists, that is the professional classes, the small bourgeois and even some small capitalists." … "But the war may have different results. It may strengthen those weak germs of ultra-Imperialism. The lessons it will teach us [save the mark] may hasten developments which were overdue at the time when the war broke out. If things go that far, as far as an agreement among nations, as far as disarmament, as far as the establishment of a lasting peace, then the factors which until the outbreak of the war were the most potent in the decay of capitalism may be eliminated."
This new development, naturally, would bring in its wake, "new and perhaps worse forms of suffering for the proletariat," but "in time," ultra-Imperialism might "usher in an era of new hopes and expectations within the boundaries of capitalism" (page 145).
How does this theory justify social-patriotism?
In the following way, which to a logical mind is rather strange: The German Socialists of the left wing say that Imperialism and the wars it causes are not a fortuitous accident but a necessary result of capitalism which has enthroned financial capital. Therefore the masses must engage in a revolutionary struggle, for the era of relatively peaceful development is at an end.
The Socialist of the right wing simply say: since Imperialism is unavoidable let us all be imperialists.
Kautsky playing the part of a centre party reconciles them all:
"The extreme radicals," he writes in his pamphlet National Power, Imperialist Power and Powers' Combines (Nuremberg, 1915), wish to oppose Socialism to Imperialism which is inevitable, in other words, they want to oppose Imperialism not only by means of the propaganda which for half a century we have conducted against every form of capitalistic domination, but by the immediate establishment of a Socialist system. This seems very radical, but
