ABSTRACT
To the extent that political scholarship on Laos reflects a concern for the world system, then that distinction rests with the French political economist, Jean Pierre Barbier, whose thesis "Dix-sept ans d'aide économique au Laos, un pays malade de l'aide etrangère" betrays an intellectual debt to the French-trained Marxist, Samir Amin. Barbier set out to establish the relationship between aid and development in the Kingdom of Laos between 1955 and 1971. In Vietnam, at least, Marxist social science versions of the development of socio-economic formations are rich and variegated. As Phan Huy Le has written in a study of Vietnamese social science approaches to the question, no debate in Vietnam exists to challenge the notion that, in concert with the rest of the world during antiquity, the first socio-economic formation was "primitive-communalism." Suffice is to say that the main feature of communist activity in Laos during the 1930s — the depression years — was its exclusive Vietnamese character.
