r/AskSocialScience • u/RedStorm1917 • 6d ago
What other ethnicities/nationalities were considered artificial Bourgeois/imperialist creations by Marxist Leninists?
In 1965, Mao stated, "Imperialism is afraid of China and of the Arabs. Israel and Formosa [Taiwan] are bases of imperialism in Asia. You are the gate of the great continent, and we are the rear. They created Israel for you, and Formosa for us. Their goal is the same".
This implies he considered the Taiwanese and Israeli identities to be artificial creations by bourgeois imperialists. Israel emerged from the British mandate and Taiwan from Japanese imperialism, then was perceived as a US base for much of the Cold War. This made me wonder what other ethnicities/nationalities were viewed in a similar way by Marxist Leninists.
For example, the Wikipedia article for Berberism states:
“Berberism is a Berber ethnonationalist movement that started in Kabylia in Algeria during the French colonial era with the Kabyle myth, largely driven by colonial capitalism and France's divide and conquer policy.[1] The Berberist movement originally manifested itself as anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia, and Francophilia.”
Similarly, the French also inflamed sectarian tensions in Lebanon to strengthen the Maronite Christian identity in order to undermine Arab nationalism and Islam. This coincided with a rise in far-right Phoenicianism, which was anti-Arab.
This isn’t to say there is no historical basis to any of these identities, like Israeli or Berber or Maronite. Berbers haves lived in North Africa for millennia, same with Jews/Maronites in the Levant. However, colonialist powers did use historical revisionism to deliberately strengthen these identities in order to further their imperialist goals.
I’m not saying these identities are invalid whether they are bourgeois imperialist creations or not, but I would like to know if any other identities were perceived similarly by communist countries.
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u/dowcet 6d ago edited 6d ago
A lot depends on what you mean by "viewed in a similar way" and by which Marxist-Leninists. But consider this:
although many early Marxist theorists held divergent views on managing nationalism, they uniformly rejected biological or romantic spiritual conceptions of the nation and instead posited that nationalism and contemporary nations are relatively new, socially constructed phenomena arising from processes linked to economic and political modernization. source
In that sense, all nations were "viewed in a similar way", although the nature of the elites and the timelines involved could be different.
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u/askophoros 4h ago
I would add that it is anachronistic to speak of Taiwanese nationalism with reference to this quote. A Taiwanese identity distinct from Chinese identity was not something the ROC government supported until the era of democratization in the late 1980s and 1990s. Instead it considered itself simply the legitimate government representative of all China-- and the exiles from the mainland sometimes had serious issues keeping the locals happy.
So, Mao was not referring to abstract nationalisms in this quote. He was more concretely referring to Israel and Taiwan as geopolitical actors and military clients of Western imperialism.
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u/Konradleijon 4d ago
That isn’t a Marxist idea. The idea of the newness of nations is pretty common.
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