ABSTRACT
Marxist writers, following Lenin's lead in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Cajr italism (1917), described the First World War as the imperialist war, which would provoke the revolution of the proletariat and bring the capitalist era to an end. Rosa Luxemburg believed that so long as the European powers could resolve the contradictions of capitalism by expansion into the rest of the world, the system could endure, but once the world was completely divided, the crash must corne. Later writers, however, have concluded that Lenin was using the word 'imperialism' in a very special sense to mean the monopoly stage of capitalism, which was not synonymous with its common usage to describe the partition of the rest ofthe world among the European powers (and the United States).
