ABSTRACT
The good old days of imperialism were over; disorders in the capitalist world were increasing year by year; the pace of economic crises was speeding up from one to the next; the final break-up of the West was assured. Mao Zedong goes on to talk about President Nixon’s call for economic competition with the socialist world and support for India. Mao sets this in the context of the general ‘disintegration’ of imperialism. Between the three -isms of communism, nationalism and imperialism, communism and nationalism are rather closer to each other. Mao on several occasions recalled the circumstances in which he had formulated the theory of the intermediate zone in 1946. Stalin, he said, had believed that the internal contradictions of imperialism would drive it to make war on the Soviet Union. Mao had argued instead that there was no reason for imperialism to fight the Soviet Union before fighting the intermediate zone.
