Like your dialectic materialism comrade...

Obviously cross that the debate about the causes of the First World War seems to have become stalled for many in about 1960, Seumas Milne boldly brings it back 40 years in today's Guardian. Milne, everyone's favourite Wykehamist Stalinist, writes that the war was:

A savage industrial slaughter perpetrated by a gang of predatory imperial powers, locked in a deadly struggle to capture and carve up territories, markets and resources.

Having shared the advantages of Mr Milne's first rate private education, I recognised this line of argument immediately - it is a straight lift from the preface to Lenin's Imperialism, the highest stage of Capitalism, which states that the Great War was:

A war for the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies and spheres of influence of finance capital, etc.

There's something almost admirable in a world view that crystallised in 1917.