Chapter Forty-Seven ‘Imperialism’ (September 1914) Karl Kautsky

In his book The Socialists and the War, published in 1915 and comprising a collection of statements by major figures of the Second International on imperi- alism and the approaching world war, the American socialist William English Walling offered excerpts from this article by Kautsky and remarked that it

sums up an enormous amount of Socialist dis- cussion which has been going on for years in Europe, and especially in Germany. It has to be noted, however, that Kautsky here renounces the widely prevalent Socialist belief … that capi- talism necessarily means war, or that permanent peace must wait for Socialism. He takes the con- trary view.1

Kautsky wrote the article prior to the outbreak of the First World War and published it immediately after hostilities began. He explained in an editorial note:

The article below was completed several weeks before the outbreak of the War. It was intended for the number [of Die Neue Zeit] that was to have greeted the planned Congress of the

1. Walling (ed.) 1915, p. 18. 754 • Karl Kautsky

International.2 Like so much else, this Congress has been brought to nothing by the events of recent days. Yet, although purely theoretical in nature, the article has not lost its relevance to the practice that it sought to help explain. We publish the article with the omission of passages that related to the Inter- national Congress and the addition of some considerations on the War.3

While Kautsky was not responding directly to Rosa Luxemburg, his arti- cle nevertheless had a clear connection with her Accumulation of Capital. Luxemburg explained imperialism by reference to ‘third parties’ and their role in realising the surplus-value to be accumulated by capitalists; Kautsky pointed to a logically prior relation between agriculture and industry. His theme was that agricultural production tends everywhere to lag behind the growth of capitalist industry. If domestic agriculture could not keep pace with industry, the obvious response was to maintain the necessary ‘propor- tions’ by exporting industrial goods in exchange for agricultural products. From this perspective, imperialism had precisely nothing to do with the prob- lem of realising surplus-value: ‘It consists of the drive of every industrial capitalist nation to conquer and annex an ever-greater agrarian zone, with no regard to what nations live there.’ Imperialism was merely a contingent form of an objectively necessary exchange between agriculture and industry. It had replaced free trade when growing capital-investments in agrarian regions required protection by a state-force, but it could just as easily be supplanted by a cartel-form of joint capitalist supervision over agrarian regions. To Kautsky, the implication was contrary to everything Luxemburg had argued: a stage of ultra-imperialism would be a perfectly sensible extension of the ‘organised capitalism’ Hilferding had already portrayed in domestic capitalist economies. ‘Ultra-imperialism’ would be organised capitalism on a global scale. In Kautsky’s words,

The frantic competition of giant firms, giant banks and billionaires forced the great financial groups, who absorbed the small ones, to come up with the notion of the cartel. In the same way, the world war between the great

2. A reference to the 10th International Socialist Congress, which was scheduled for Vienna in 1914 but failed to meet. The documents of the Congress have been compiled in Haupt (ed.) 1972. 3. [Karl Kautsky,] Editorial Note, Die Neue Zeit, Vol. 32, No. 2, 11 September 1914, p. 908.