“Il must be observed that in Great Britain the tendency of imperialism to divide the workers, to encourage opportunism among them and to cause temporary decay in the working class movement, revealed itself much earlier than the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of he twentieth centuries; for two important distinguishing features of imperialism were observed in Great Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century, viz., vast colonial possessions and a monopolist position in the world market. Marx and Engels systematically traced this relation between opportunism in the labour movement and the imperialist features of British capitalism for several decades. For example, on October 7, 1858, Engels write to Marx: “The English proletariat is becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy, and a bourgeois proletariat ‘as well as’ a bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploit the whole world this is, of course, to a certain extent justifiable (Marx-Engels Briefwechsel, Gesamtausgabe, 3. Abt., B. 2, S. 340). Almost a quarter of a century later, in a letter dated August 11, 1881, Engels speaks of “…the worst type of English trade unions which allow themselves to be led by men sold to, or at least, paid by the bourgeoisie” (Ibid, B. 4, S. 511). In a letter to Kautsky, dated September 12, 1882, Engels wrote: “You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy? Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general. There is no workers’ party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-radicals, and the workers merrily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the colonies and the world market…” (Karl Kautsky, Sozialismus and Kolonialpolitik, Berlin, 1907, p. 79; this pamphlet was written by Kautsky in those infinitely distant days when he was still a Marxist). (Engels expressed similar ideas in the press in his preface to the second edition of ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’, which appeared in 1892)” [Eugen Varga Leo Mendelsohn a cura, New Data for V.I. Lenin’s Imperialism. The Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1940]