MARXISM is a science and laws of science have no national barriers. But like religion and bourgeois philosophy, which despite being universal take root and form only in specific contexts, the theory and practice of Marxism is incomprehensible without its national specificities.

Marxism is a product of capitalism which extended the local customs, feelings, loyalties, as well as economy, language, geographical identity etc. of well-demarcated regions, upto the Nation State. In Europe, Marxism emerged as a movement of the working classes of various nationalities. Marx and Engels, even while giving the call, 'workers the world unite' wrote in terms of German working class, English working class, the French working class and so on.

Lenin was always conscious of the fact that he was addressing primarily the Russian proletariat. And Mao knew that he was speaking to the Chinese peasantry. All these observations required an understanding of socialist movements as emerging from within the contradictions of the half baked or fully formed nations, or conditions as multinational in the case of Russia. They also required a cognisance of movements led by the Communist Party as actually leading the transition of old civilisations into modem nationhood. In such cases, as in China and Vietnam, Marxism served, actually, also as the ideology of nationalism.

Marxist nationalism, thus, is as real as Marxist internationalism. But Marxist nationalism is not bourgeois nationalism. Marxism recognises the positive role of diverse national aspirations led by the bourgeoisie and other class forces at different junctures. But it also strives to bring new classes, chiefly the working classes and the peasantry, in the forefront of the nation and national movements wherever the stage is ripe. At such moments, Marxist movements desist from depicting the people's struggle of a modern phase simply as a carry over of the people's struggle of the past in the linear sense. Mao robbed, from his bourgeois-comprador rivals in China, who were keen on building their own nation state, the much needed historical legitimacy by invoking the 'national' memory of China, its wisdom, politics, culture, and harnessing it to the revolutionary cause.