REDS – Die Roten > Theory | Theorie
From Chris Bambery (ed.), Scotland: Class and Nation, Bookmarks, London 1999, pp.
Copyright © 1999 Bookmarks publications Ltd.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for REDS – Die Roten.
Marxism is, in essence, an internationalist tradition. “Workers of all countries, unite!” the Communist Manifesto declares. For Marx and Engels, the fundamental division in the world was that between classes, not nations. The conflict between capital and labour cut across national borders, uniting workers and bosses in struggle with each other. [1]
It is commonly believed that this internationalism renders Marxism unable to deal with the reality of national divisions. Thus the philosopher G.A. Cohen, the author of an influential interpretation of Marx’s theory of history, writes, “A certain cliché of anti-Marxist thought is probably true, namely that Marx misjudged the significance of religion and nationalism”. [2] Tom Nairn, sometime Marxist turned cheerleader for Scottish nationalism, went even further, declaring, “The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure”. [3] And certainly it is tempting to see the 20th century – with all its horrors of world war, Holocaust, and ethnic cleansing – as representing the triumph of national identity over class.
But when we consider the record of the Marxist tradition, we see that in fact it contains the resources both theoretically to understand and Politically to respond to nationalism. It is true that in the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels express the excessively optimistic belief that the development of capitalism as a global system would sweep away all national differences. Thus they write, “National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto”. [4] (A similar belief is held today, with far less justification, by the boosters of “globalisation”.) But it soon became clear that, far from being opposed to one another, capitalism and national identity go together.
There are two fundamental reasons for this. First of all, the development of capitalism as a mode of production requires the construction of nation states. Economic and social historians have shown how the emergence of industrial capitalism in Britain, for example, depended critically on the formation of a large domestic market for the goods and services produced by the new capitalist entrepreneurs. This “first consumer society” presupposed the political unification of a relatively large economic zone within which people, commodities and money could move fairly freely. At the same time the development of capitalism was fuelled by the military struggle among the European powers. Thus the overseas expansion of the British state in the 17th and 18th centuries won markets and investment opportunities for its capitalists; at the same time massive state expenditure on the main instrument of foreign conquest, the Royal Navy, increased demand for the products of the manufacturing industries. Finally intense inter-state competition encouraged rulers to begin to appeal to their subjects as members of the same national community in struggle with their foreign rivals. Thus British national identity was forged during the long era of wars with France between 1689 and 1815. [5]
There was nothing “natural” about the nations which emerged from this process. Individual identities in pre-capitalist society were either much narrower (to locality and/or kin group) or much broader (to some version of a world religion) than those of the new nations. These existing allegiances had to be broken down or subordinated to that of nationality. The formation of national identity was a process of forcible incorporation and assimilation. As Ernest Gellner persuasively argues, for its effective functioning a modern industrial society with its unified labour market and bureaucratic state requires a single homogeneous culture. [6] Typically this involved the emergence of a single “national” language shared by rulers and ruled. Which language and associated culture assumed this role was usually a result of the historical accident of the language and culture shared by the class which happened to control the state: the other languages and cultures were left to wither away by neglect or formally suppressed. As Eric Hobsbawm vividly it “Dialects, as everyone knows, are just languages without an army and police force”. [7] The state bureaucracy and modern mass education provided powerful engines of cultural homogenisation.
Secondly, while capitalism developed as a world system, as Marx and Engels had predicted, it did so unevenly. This process of what Trotsky called uneven and combined development meant, among other things, that the first capitalist powers, concentrated in Western Europe and North America, could dominate the rest of the world. In the 19th and early 20th centuries this took the form of the formal incorporation of what is now called the Third World (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) into the European colonial empires. But the period since 1945 has seen the continued economic and military domination of Western capitalism (expanded to include Japan), despite decolonisation. The Marxist theory of imperialism explains this state of affairs as a consequence of tendencies inherent within the capitalist mode of production itself. Competition among capitals leads to ever greater concentration and centralisation, resulting in the emergence of vast corporations operating on a global scale and closely interwoven with their nation states. As a result, the economic rivalries between firms tend to take on the form of military and territorial conflicts among states. One consequence is inter-imperialist struggles such as the two world wars and the Cold War; another is a hierarchy of power on a global scale, as the major capitalist states pursue their interests by seeking to impose their will on the smaller powers. [8]
It is against this background that we must see the development over the past two centuries of nationalism as a political ideology. There are, in fact, two kinds of nationalism. The first is the imperialist nationalism of the dominant powers – American, British, French and German. This seeks to bind the working classes in the imperialist countries to their ruling classes, to unite exploiters and exploited against both the workers and bosses of other imperialist countries and the masses in those countries oppressed by imperialism. Secondly, there is the revolutionary nationalism of the oppressed – the ideology that serves to unite a people suffering the domination of an imperialist power in their struggle to break free. The clash between these different nationalisms is one of the great dramas of the 20th century that has unleashed huge struggles in countries as diverse as Ireland, India, Vietnam and Algeria.
Marx already had to confront the effects of one of these conflicts in Victorian Britain. He was forcibly struck by the division between “native” British workers and Irish immigrants in the great industrial cities. The latter were driven by famine, poverty and unemployment in Ireland to do unskilled, low paid labouring jobs in Britain; they were also discriminated against because of their religion and nationality. British workers were encouraged by the ruling class to see their Irish fellow workers not just as an economic threat, liable to undercut their wages and conditions, but as racially “inferior” (the Victorian popular press was full of revolting racial stereotypes of the Irish). Marx believed this division between “native” British and Irish workers to be “the secret of the impotence of the English working class”. [9] He argued that to counter the ruling class’s strategy of divide and rule it was necessary to win the British labour movement to supporting the struggle for Irish self determination. Only by identifying with the nationalism of the oppressed could the hold of the nationalism of the oppressor be broken amongst British workers.
Lenin, benefiting from the experience of building a socialist party in the multi-national Russian Empire and from the debates over the national question within the international socialist movement before and during the First World War, generalised Marx’s approach. He argued that it was the duty of revolutionary socialists to support the right of self determination of oppressed nations. His reasons for taking this position did not appeal to abstract moral principles, but were rather strategic: support for the national self determination of the oppressed was a means of achieving the international unity of the working class. [10] Lenin’s approach involved the following key elements:
(1) Against imperialist nationalism. For Lenin, the “cardinal idea” in his approach to the national question lay in “the distinction between oppressed and oppressor nations”. [11] Following Marx, he believed that the only way workers in the imperialist countries could be won away from national chauvinism was if they were to identify with the struggle of those nations oppressed by their ruling class. Thus he argued that in the Tsarist “prison house of nations” it was essential for workers belonging to the dominant Great Russian nation to support the demands of, for example, the Polish people for national independence. This position did not, as we shall see below, imply an endorsement of Polish nationalism, or indeed of any form of nationalism. Rather Lenin expected that, by coming to see the justice of oppressed nations” claims, Russian workers and their counterparts in other imperialist countries could be won to revolutionary internationalism. Lenin was here challenging an abstract conception of internationalism influential among some Bolsheviks and also to some extent even on the great Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. This equated internationalism with ignoring national differences; often it went along with the mistaken belief that capitalism was abolishing national divisions. Since imperialism was in fact accentuating these conflicts through the domination of the Great Powers over the rest of the world, this abstract internationalism could easily turn into its opposite: pretending national differences didn’t exist could slide into, in effect, colluding with a system that perpetuated national oppression. Given the capitulation of the main parties of the Second International to the imperialist war in August 1914, this was no mere abstract possibility (Luxemburg was, of course, an unflinching opponent of the war). Paradoxically, genuine internationalism required supporting one kind of national struggle – that of oppressed peoples – against another – that of the imperialist powers. Lenin wrote:
In the internationalist education of the workers of the oppressor countries, emphasis must necessarily be laid on their advocating freedom for the oppressed countries and their fighting for it. Without these there can be no internationalism. It is our right and duty to treat every Social Democrat of an oppressor nation who fails to conduct such propaganda as a scoundrel and an imperialist. [12]
(2) For oppressed nations against imperialism. Thus far Lenin merely applied generally, and in typically sharp and polemical form, what Marx had argued in the case of Ireland. But he went beyond Marx in recognising the potential for the struggles of oppressed nations to weaken, not merely individual Great Powers, but indeed the entire imperialist system. Thus he was very quick to see how the Irish Republican movement could, particularly during the First World War, undermine British imperialism. He fiercely denounced the sectarianism of those Bolsheviks who dismissed the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin as a mere “putsch” by petty bourgeois nationalists:
To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc. – to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution ... So one army lines up in one place and says, “We are for socialism,” and another, somewhere else, says, “We are for imperialism,” and that will be a social revolution! ... Whoever expects a “pure” social revolution will never live to see it. [13]
Lenin saw that the crisis of imperialism produced by the First World War and its aftermath would involve more than the “pure” conflict between capital and labour. Other social forces – in oppressed nations, all the classes suffering from the effects of imperialist domination – would be driven to rebel against the existing order. Their struggle could combine with that of the working class to weaken and ultimately to destroy the entire system. Thus, in the Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions presented to the Second Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in July 1920 Lenin wrote:
World political developments are of necessity concentrated on a single focus – the struggle of the world bourgeoisie against the Soviet Russian Republic, around which are inevitably grouped on the one hand the Soviet movements of the advanced workers in all countries, and on the other hand all the national liberation movements in the colonies and among the oppressed nationalities, who are learning from bitter experience that their only salvation lies in the Soviet system’s victory over world imperialism. [14]
(3) The limits of nationalism. But, at the same time as he envisaged an alliance between communist workers” movements and national liberation movements, Lenin was careful to emphasise that the two movements had different class bases and therefore should not merge. Thus the Draft Theses stress:
The need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support the bourgeois democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois democratic movements within their own nations. The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward tries but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form. [15]
Behind this call was the Marxist analysis of the national question outlined above. A fundamental gulf separates even the most revolutionary nationalism and revolutionary socialism. They are the ideologies of different classes. Nationalism is a bourgeois ideology not in the sense that all or even most of its adherents are capitalists but rather in the sense that it always articulates the interests of an actual or aspirant capitalist class. Revolutionary nationalism is usually the ideology of an aspirant capitalist class. Imperialist domination tends to impede the development of indigenous capitalism in oppressed countries. The impetus for the nationalist movement is typically provided by middle class intellectuals. More often than not they are, as a social layer, the product of the imperialist order – brought into being by its need for bureaucrats familiar with its language and culture and capable of acting as its intermediaries with the oppressed masses. Caught up in this intermediate position, close enough to the imperialist power to appreciate its power, but still part of the oppressed nation and therefore despised and humiliated by their masters, these intellectuals form the idea of a political movement that can create a new nation state with the power to promote a capitalism under their own control. (Even where an indigenous bourgeoisie did develop under imperial rule and support the national cause – for example, among the industrialists of Bombay and rich Catholic farmers in Southern Ireland – the movement was still led by intellectuals like the barrister Gandhi, the Harrow and Cambridge educated Nehru, the postal clerk Collins, and the schoolteacher Pearse. [16])
Faced with the refusal of the imperial power to make concessions, the nationalist leaders are forced into a strategy of confrontation, based on different combinations of mass action and armed struggle. This requires the construction of a broad national movement seeking to unite all the classes of the oppressed population – workers, peasants, intellectuals and capitalists – against the oppressor. This process in turn involves the ideological construction of a national community where snared identity transcends class divisions: typically this is achieved by the projection into the pre-colonial past of a largely mythological history of a nation whose past glories will be restored and its present suffering redeemed once independence is secured. [17]
But, however great the confrontation with imperialism, and however heroic the sacrifices it involves, every nationalist struggle ends in corn-promise. This reflects the class nature of revolutionary nationalism: since its aim is to carve out a new capitalist state, ultimately it must come to terms with the system of capitalist states and the dominant powers within that system. The compromise may betray some of the basic objectives of the movement; it always denies the more radical hopes generated in the course of the struggle. We can see this historically – for example, when the Irish struggle for independence led to the 1922 treaty that set up the Northern statelet and sparked off civil war within the Republican movement, or in the ambiguous triumph of Indian nationalism in 1947, with Congress inheriting the structure of power created by the Raj and the sub-continent subjected to the agony of partition. But the same pattern is present in more recent movements. Three of the major national liberation struggles of the past generation – South Africa, Palestine and Northern Ireland – have been apparently “concluded” in agreements that to a greater or less extent deny their basic aspirations. There thus comes a point in the history of every nationalist movement where the leadership seeks to restrain the mass movement it had previously mobilised. The tasks of the struggle are replaced by those of “nation building’ – of constructing a new state in which the old revolutionary leadership presides as part of a new capitalist state. The conversion of Robert Mugabe from political leader of the guerrilla war which freed Zimbabwe from minority white rule to the figurehead of a corrupt and increasingly despotic regime at war with its own people is a recent example of this process.
Lenin grasped very clearly that the class nature of revolutionary nationalism made it essential that the communist parties in colonial and semi-colonial countries should retain their political and organisational independence and build strong working class movements. He did not, however, resolve the problem of how the demands of the nationalist struggle against imperialism – bourgeois democratic demands, since they could, in principle, be met without overthrowing capitalism – related to those of the specifically working class struggle for socialism. After Lenin’s death in 1924, as Joseph Stalin came to dominate the Bolshevik regime, the Comintern adopted what came to be known as a stages strategy. On this view, revolution in the colonies had to go through two stages – first the bourgeois democratic struggle for national independence, and then the working class struggle for socialism. The first stage required a broad alliance of all the classes with an interest in achieving national liberation – “national” capitalists as well as workers, peasants and intellectuals. During this phase the working class should subordinate its distinctive interests to those of the nationalist coalition and avoid pursuing demands and struggles that might alienate the capitalists and the petty bourgeoisie of small property owners.
The Chinese Revolution of 1925-27 was the first of many cases that showed that this strategy led to disastrous consequences. [18] As Trotsky pointed out at the time, the key problem was the “national bourgeoisie”. Because capitalism involves a process of uneven and combined development, capitalists in the less developed countries tend to be weak and dependent on imperialism. This means that they are unlikely to support a consistent struggle against imperialism. They also tend to fear mass mobilisations since they may get out of control and develop into a struggle against all property owners, local as well as foreign.
Thus the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sought to restrain the struggles of workers and peasants for fear of antagonising the “national bourgeoisie”. Even basic land reforms were ruled out since Chinese capitalists were usually closely linked to the landowners. The CCP concentrated on doing what one Comintern official called “coolie work” for the nationalist Guomindang (GMD) by mobilising mass support for its military campaigns. When their usefulness was over, the GMD leader, Jiang Kaishek, seeking to ingratiate himself with foreign and local capital, turned on the Communists and slaughtered thousands of them. The same story was subsequently to be repeated again and again in many parts of the Third World. One of the most striking cases came during the Iraqi Revolution of 1958-59, when the Communist Party supported Qasim’s “progressive” military regime, demobilising an immense mass movement of workers and urban poor and thereby opening the door to a CIA backed coup whose eventual outcome brought the Ba’ath nationalist party and thus eventually Saddam Hussein to power. [19]
The Stalinist stages strategy represented the triumph of nationalism over socialism, and therefore the negation of Lenin’s insistence on working class independence. Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution provided the basis of an alternative strategy based on the experience of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. Uneven and combined development in Tsarist Russia led to the creation at the end of the 19th century of enclaves of advanced industry within a predominantly peasant society. The capitalist class, dependent on the state and foreign capital, shunned any determined struggle to rid Russia of the Tsarist autocracy. The working class based on the new industries, though only a minority of the population, therefore took on the leadership of the entire democratic movement. But the logic of the workers” struggle drove them beyond purely democratic demands to fight for their own class interests. In October 1917 this process culminated in the workers seizing power under the Bolsheviks” leadership and with the acquiescence of the peasant majority.
Trotsky argued that the same process of permanent revolution was at work in the colonial and semi-colonial countries. In countries like China the working class could lead the oppressed and exploited majority – peasants, unemployed and the like – in a struggle which would combine the demand for national independence with the effort to break the hold of capital. As the example of Russia also showed, however, socialist revolution, especially in an economically backward country, could only succeed if it spread by winning the support of workers in other countries. As a world system, capitalism could only be broken on an international scale. In the absence of global revolution, capital would reassert its power either by directly organising a counter-revolution to destroy the workers” state or through the effects of economic and military pressure in encouraging the emergence of a Stalinist bureaucracy within the isolated socialist regime.
Thus the very processes of uneven and combined development that give rise to revolutionary nationalist struggles against imperialism in the first place also ensure that these struggles can only succeed if they develop into socialist revolutions that triumph on an international scale. The only way in which the grip of the capitalism world system on individual countries can be broken is if that system is itself destroyed. And no national struggle can achieve this – only an international class, the working class, can remove that system and replace it with a world in which different peoples and their cultures can flourish in all their diversity.
The Marxist approach to the national question, mainly developed by Lenin, seems to me the best available. It grasps the revolutionary dynamic of nationalist movements – their capacity to destabilise even the greatest imperialist powers. The Indian and Irish struggles undermined British imperialism; the Vietnamese epic imposed a humiliating defeat on the greatest of all imperialist powers, from which in many ways the US ruling class has yet politically to recover; nationalist rebellions in the Caucasus and the Baltic played a crucial part in the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. At the same time, Marxism highlights the limits of nationalism: the trajectory of even the most heroic nationalist movement is to carve out its own space within the capitalist world system and therefore ultimately to make its peace with that system.
This analysis allows us to avoid the two characteristic errors committed by the left towards nationalism. One is to demonise it; the other is to capitulate to it. The former reaction has been very common since the collapse of the Stalinist states at the end of the 1980s. Many left intellectuals have reacted to the fall of regimes in which they often harboured illusions by portraying a world succumbing to a wave of barbaric and irrational nationalisms. The wars in the former Yugoslavia and on the peripheries of the old Soviet Union encouraged this attitude. What this view missed out was the essential ambiguity of nationalism. The warring Serbian and Croatian nationalisms that ripped Yugoslavia apart in the early 1990s were indeed based on chauvinist mythologies justifying bestial atrocities. But this did not alter the fact that different nationalisms served as the umbrella under which tens of millions of people in the Baltic and Caucasus rose up against an oppressive Stalinist regime in the late 1980s.
The ambiguity of nationalism reflects its class nature. The same ideology that legitimises a struggle against oppression can also be used by a new capitalist class to justify its consolidation of state power by seizing territory from and denying elementary rights to those now stigmatised as aliens. This is why every nationalist movement has to be judged concretely, on the basis of the particular political effects that its actions have in a specific context. When the Vietnamese liberation armed forces rolled up the American client army during their march on Saigon in the spring of 1975 they were completing a great struggle for national liberation. When they invaded Cambodia nearly four years later they were asserting the claim of the Vietnamese state to dominate Indochina by its military might. [20]
The opposite error to demonising nationalism is closely related. It consists in capitulating to a particular nationalism by depicting it as inherently progressive. This was common on the Western left in the 1960s and 1970s, when Third World national liberation movements were celebrated as being in the vanguard of socialism. Thus many student radicals went beyond solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle against US imperialism to uncritical support for the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party. But when Vietnam went to war with two other “socialist” countries, Cambodia and China, in 1978-79 the result was enormous confusion and disillusionment. Exactly the same error is made – of giving what Lenin called “communist coloration” to bourgeois nationalist movements – but with far less excuse by those socialists who today regard the Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties as leading a struggle against imperialism.
The distinctive feature of the Marxist approach to the national question, as elaborated chiefly by Lenin, is that it is concerned primarily with the specific political impact of a given nationalist movement. Michael Löwy puts it very well:
From the methodological point of view, Lenin’s principal superiority over his contemporaries was his capacity to “put politics in command”, that is, his obstinate, inflexible, constant, and unflinching tendency to grasp the political aspect of every problem and every contradiction ... On the national question, while most other Marxist writers saw only the economic, cultural or “psychological” dimension of the problem, Lenin stated clearly that the question of self determination “belongs wholly and exclusively to the sphere of political democracy”, that is, to the realm of the right of political secession and the establishment of an independent nation state... His aim was democracy and the international unity of the proletariat, which both require the recognition of the right of nations to self determination. What is more, precisely because it concentrates on the political aspect, his theory of self determination makes absolutely no concession to nationalism. [21]
Thus from a Marxist point of view the significance of a national struggle lies in the social conflicts it expresses and, in particular, the political consequences it has. Where the latter include the weakening of imperialism and strengthening of the international unity of the working class, socialists should support its struggle; where they do not, socialists should not support it. Of course, this is a general approach which must be applied with care to particular circumstances – for example, to the different national questions within the borders of the United Kingdom, in the North of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales: other essays in this collection address the specific question of Scottish nationalism. But it should now be clear that the national question is not the rock on which Marxism founders. On the contrary, the Marxist tradition can both explain the nature of national conflicts and offer a strategy for dealing with them.
1. This essay is based on a talk given at Socialism in Scotland, Glasgow, 20 November 1998. A much fuller Marxist analysis of the national question will be found in C. Harman, The Return of the National Question, in International Socialism 56 ( 1992), reprinted in A. Callinicos et al., Marxism and the New Imperialism (London 1994).
2. G.A. Cohen, Reconsidering Historical Materialism, in A. Callinicos (ed.), Marxist Theory (Oxford 1989), p.162.
3. T. Nairn, The Modern Janus, New Left Review 94 (1975), p.3.
4. K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol.VI (London 1976), p.503.
5. See especially M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol.1 (Cambridge 1986), pp.483-485; J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power (London 1989); and L. Colley, Britons (London 1994).
6. E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford 1983).
7. E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire (London 1987), p.156. For an interesting account of these processes at work in the formation of the modern British state, see M. Hechter, Internal Colonialism (London 1975).
8. See A. Callinicos, Marxism and Imperialism Today, in A. Callinicos et al., Marxism and the New Imperialism, op cit.
9. K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow 1965), pp.236-237.
10. There are good discussions of the debates in the Second International and of Lenin’s solution in C Harman, op. cit., pp.202-222; and in M. Löwy, Marxists and the National Question, in M. Löwy, On Changing the World (New Jersey 1993). There is an anthology of the main contributions to the debates in G. Haupt et al., Les Marxistes et la Question Nationale (Paris 1974).
11. Lenin, Collected Works, vol.XXXI (Moscow 1964), p.240.
12. Ibid., vol.XXII, p.346. Until the Russian Revolution, Marxists generally called themselves “Social Democrats”.
13. Ibid., vol.XXII, pp.355-356.
14. Ibid., vol.XXXI, p.146.
15. Ibid., pp.149-150.
16. Some of the social and ideological tensions involved are brought out in a recent study of a leading Irish Republican of the era of the Black and Tans, and Civil Wars: R. English, Ernie O’Malley: IRA Intellectual (Oxford 1998). Unfortunately much interesting material is marred by English’s leaden prose style and his adhesion to a particularly crass version of the anti-Republican “revisionist” ideology now apparently dominant in Irish historiography.
17. See E.J. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge 1983).
18. H. Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (Stanford 1961).
19. H. Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton 1978).
20. See G. Evans and K. Rowley, Red Brotherhood at War (London 1984), for an account of how national interests predominated in relations between the Indochinese Communist Parties after the Vietnam War.
21. M. Löwy, op. cit., pp.71-72.
Last updated on 7.3.2007