Meanwhile, French socialists said they had to defend revolutionary France against Prussian militarism, and so on, across the board. When war was declared in 1914, socialists in the German parliament voted unanimously to fund it, arguing that they had to defend civilization against the despotism of the Russian Tsar. The pamphlet was an intervention in the sharp political debate that had torn apart the international socialist movement at the start of the war, with nearly every socialist party in Europe backing its own government in the conflict. LENIN WROTE Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1916 in the middle of the carnage of the First World War.
