mission, the international Communist Party organises the proletariat into an independent political party, opposed to all the bourgeois parties; leads the workers in all the manifestations of the class struggle; reveals to the exploited the irreconcilable conflict of interests between themselves and the exploiters; and explains to the proletariat the historical significance and the necessary conditions of the imminent social revolution. At the same time, the party reveals to the other sections of the toiling and exploited masses the hopelessness of their condition in capitalist society, and shows them that the social revolution is indispensable in order that they may secure their own deliverance from the yoke of capital. The party of the working class, the Communist Party, summons to its ranks all strata of the toiling and exploited population in so far as they have accepted the proletarian outlook.”[§25]
The process of the concentration and centralisation of capital, destroying free competition, led in the beginning of the twentieth century to the creation of powerful, monopolist, capitalist combines — syndicates, cartels, and trusts — which acquired a decisive significance in economic life; it led also to the amalgamation of banking capital with highly concentrated industrial capital, and to the vigorous export of capital into foreign lands. Trusts comprising whole groups of capitalist Powers began the economic partition of the world which had already been partitioned territorially among the richer countries. This epoch of financial capital, inevitably intensifying the struggle between the capitalist States, is the epoch of imperialism.[§26-28.]
Hence inevitably arise imperialist wars, wars for markets, for spheres for the investment of capital, for raw materials, and for labour power, that is to say, wars for world dominion and for power over small and weak nations. Such was the first great imperialist war of 1914 to 1918.[§29& 30.]
The vast development of world capitalism; the change from a system of free competition to a system in which monopolist capitalism was