“Hegel’s formula, “Everything that is is reasonable”, was more than once utilised by such opportunists for their own purpose. Whereas for Marx the “reasonableness of everything existing” was only the expression of a causal relation between the present and the past, a relation the understanding of which is the starting point for the ‘overcoming’ of the “existing”, this “reasonableness” served for the opportunists to justify and perpetuate it. ‘Die Geschichte hat immer Recht’, (history is always right), this is how a “Marxist”, Heinrich Cunow, justifies his “acceptance” of imperialism (1). Every idea of overcoming it, he says, is only an “illusion”; the desire to systematise such ideas is a “worship of illusions” (Illusionenkultus). Of course, nothing is more shallow than such an interpretation of Marxism. An excellent reply to Cunow is contained in Marx’s answer to the bourgeois economist, Burke. “The laws of commerce” (the latter said) “are the laws of nature and therefore the laws of God”, to which Marx replied: “In view of the abominable lack of principle that we see on all hands to-day, and in view of the devout faith in ‘the laws of commerce’, it is our boundless duty again and again to stigmatise the Burkes whose only difference from their successors was that they had talent” (Capital, Vol. I, p. 843).” [Nikolai Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, 1929] [(1) Heinrich Cunow: ‘Parteizusammenbruch? Ein offenes Wort zum inneren Parteistreit’, Berlin, 1915]