To what extent did Lenin’s ‘Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism’ (1916) go on to inform his revolutionary praxis?

While World War I was ranging, Lenin was in Switzerland and decided to write this pamphlet in order to make sense of the crisis. By doing so, he conceptualised imperialism to prove that a socialist revolution was imminent. Lenin came to conclude several things. Firstly, imperialism was the stage of decaying capitalism. Moreover, to understand why the proletariat’s condition bettered and why opportunism had risen within the international socialist movement, Lenin theorised the development of an ‘aristocratic labour’. By this, he meant that a part of the working-class had been bought off by the ruling class and did not have the interests of the proletariat at heart anymore. The last main conclusion was the internationalisation of the struggle against capitalism. Indeed, WWI had dragged colonial and semi-colonial peoples’ social structure into capitalism, as well as peasants.            This went on to inform his revolutionary praxis in April 1917, as can be seen in his ‘April Theses’. Because he believed capitalism was at its last stage, he accepted that a bourgeois democracy was not relevant to Russia anymore. This led him to call for a socialist revolution. Now fully opposed to Marxist parties who were in favour of this imperialist world war, he argued that the Russian economical, political and social crises could only be resolved with the Bolshevik party as vanguard of this socialist revolution. Finally, he called for an alliance of the peasantry and the proletariat, as both had now been dragged into the international struggle against capitalism and imperialism. Therefore, Lenin's 'Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism' not only deeply informed his revolutionary praxis in 1917 but also later on, with the creation of the Communist International in 1919 for instance.