Almost everyone acknowledges that the present war is an imperialist war, but for the most part they distort this concept, or apply it to one side only, or nonetheless smuggle in the possibility that this war could have a bourgeois-progressive, national-liberatory significance. Imperialism is the highest stage of the development of capitalism, achieved only in the twentieth century. Capitalism has become too cramped within the old national states, without the formation of which it could not have overthrown feudalism. Capitalism has developed concentration to such an extent that entire branches of industry have been seized by syndicates, trusts, and associations of billionaire capitalists, and almost the entire globe has been divided among these "masters of capital," either in the form of colonies or through entangling foreign countries in thousands of threads of financial exploitation. Free trade and competition have been replaced by strivings toward monopoly, toward the seizure of territories for the application of capital, for the export of raw materials, and so forth. From a liberator of nations, which capitalism was in its struggle against feudalism, imperialist capitalism has become the greatest oppressor of nations. Capitalism has transformed from progressive to reactionary; it has developed the productive forces to such an extent that mankind faces either the transition to socialism or years and even decades of armed struggle among the "great" powers for the artificial preservation of capitalism through colonies, monopolies, privileges, and national oppressions of every kind.