Six weeks after the outbreak of World War I, as Europe’s great empires sent millions to their deaths, Karl Kautsky published an essay predicting something almost impossible to believe. In an article for Die Neue Zeit called “Der Imperialismus,” better known under the English title “Ultra-Imperialism,” Kautsky argued that the leading powers were, despite all evidence to the contrary, moving toward not endless conflict but peaceful cooperation. 

The claim quickly came to seem absurd. As the trenches filled with corpses and the war consumed an entire generation, Kautsky’s essay looked less like a penetrating analysis than a spectacular misreading of history. Today most young socialists encounter “Ultra-Imperialism” only as the foil for Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism — a naive theory that mistook the realities of global capitalism and furnished an intellectual rationale for Kautsky’s increasingly centrist politics.

But before tossing Kautsky’s “Ultra-Imperialism” into the dustbin of history, it’s worth looking at what he actually had to say.