the Communist movement developed a new long-range strategy of insurgency, not metropolitan but peripheral in its base, not based on the proletariat but appealing to the majority of the world’s population, the peasantry. It was an ideological shift that marked a profound break with the nineteenth century, a wrenching reorientation within Marxist political thought at least as fundamental as anything that happened, for instance, to the tenets of bourgeois liberalism.2 Whereas London and Washington were worrying about what self-determination might mean for the constitution of India or the
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