Bear in mind that many countries exist in permanent ongoing crisis, with national tensions now hidden, now flaring up with sometimes bloody results, now hidden again.

Nationalism can cause the sudden fragmentation of seemingly stable states. Think about what happened to the USSR, still a superpower just 20 years ago. Consider too the cases of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Ethiopia. Yet it can also provide a dynamic towards national reunification, as seen in Germany and Yemen, and one day hopefully in Korea.

For socialists to have intelligent things to say about such developments - and even build political organisations that actually have an impact in such situations - we first need an accurate assessment of what the phenomenon represents.

This is all the more so because some of nationalism’s many, many tanks are parked pretty much on our lawn. In much of the developing world, the last two decades have seen nationalism displace various forms of bastardised socialism as the chief organised political challenge to ruling elites.

And in the advanced industrial countries, the issue of national self-determination crops up time and time again. Should socialists support an independent Scotland? An independent Catalonia or Corsica?

Do we particularly care if Wallonia and Flanders call their marriage a day, or if Quebec wants out of Canada? Does Israel have the right to national self-determination? If not, why not? If so, does that imply the right to exercise it on Palestinian territory?

Yet given the range and extent of what is involved, Marxism has usually taken a surprisingly pick ‘n’ mix approach on these matters, often looking no deeper than immediate realpolitik expediency. If a spot of local revolt destabilises the prevailing imperialism, Lenin reasoned, what’s not to like?

On the other hand, a respectable tranche of famous Marxists - most notably Luxemburg - abhorred nationalism as either bourgeois or petit bourgeois, and therefore reactionary in almost all circumstances.

Things are so bad for the left that Stalin - yes, that Stalin - is considered to have produced major insights into this field. His work on the national question - and I confess to not having read it - is held up as the only halfway decent Marxist theoretical work he ever produced.

There seems no small consistency in all this. And of course, this topic is not going to be resolved by a single Boxing Day blog post. I’ll certainly be reading the comments box with interest. But let me offer a few of my own observations.

The first point to make is that nationalism is an ideology. And like all ideologies - most notably religion - it is infinitely protean. It has many variants and therefore one-line definition. There is no one founding theorist or one classical text.

Some of the key concepts are rooted in major Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau and in the French revolution, and can broadly be depicted as progressive. But other ideas in the corpus - more influenced by nineteenth century German romanticism - give it the potential to provide the ideological underpinnings of radical rightist mass mobilisation, in the last analysis in the form of fascism.

Ultimately, insofar as nationalism demands loyalty to the necessarily cross-class construct of ‘the nation’, it cannot form the basis of any viable socialist project. Rosa was right on that score, at least.

And again, there is more than one variant of the concept of national self-determination, which comes in both 1917 Bolshevik and 1918 Woodrow Wilson trims. But the idea is accepted by just about everybody except the nation that oppresses another, and supposedly forms the basis of the current international order.

In general, the left needs to remember that the right of a country to self-determination has nothing to do with whether or not one approves of the regime that will run the show. It is a democratic demand, even if the movement that makes it is itself undemocratic.

But even here, there are problems. If we use distinct languages as a key determinant of which populations can be considered nations, then bear in mind that some 10,000 languages exist. And no-one thinks a world of 10,000 nation-states would be a good idea.

Ultimately we arrive back at taking things on a case-by-case basis. Perhaps there really is no clearer methodology available.

'One would have thought that several decades of experimentation with communism would have convinced most observers that it was a murderous and economically sub-optimal creed. Even its most fervent supporters could scarcely contest the view that it has spectacularly failed to live up to its creators' utopian expectations.

That’s his cue to quote the famous claim – based on the 800-page 1997 French work The Black Book of Communism – that Marxism is responsible for 100m deaths in the twentieth century.

What Thornhill doesn’t mention is that this suspiciously exact death toll is both contestable and widely contested. Clearly the nice round figure has been constructed by a group of rightists as an ideological weapon against the left.

Apply the same methodology to, say, the British empire, fascism or the capitalist system as a whole, and the tally would probably prove greater in all cases.

But ‘your side killed more than our side’ is not the way the contemporary serious Marxist left should tackle this vital issue. There is little point in trading comparative death tolls. There is no doubt that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and others were responsible for tens of millions of murders. Let us simply say so.

The point is, these people do not constitute ‘our side’. The genuine left always led the way in criticising what we knew were exploitative class societies, even during historical conjunctures when it suited various ruling classes to support and even arm these regimes.

Let’s take just one example. Don’t forget that Pol Pot was only able to devastate Cambodia because he had the backing of the US imperialism. Washington is an accessory to his crimes.

We have to make it clear that we reject Stalinism – as well as the mistaken anti-democratic position of Lenin and Trotsky - not just in our theoretical literature, but in our political praxis. Hammer and sickle symbolism, and the use of such terms as ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ to describe our concept of expanded democracy are both disastrous political PR.

Thornhill’s article goes on to accept that most contemporary Marxists have made such a differentiation, and even points out that it is wrong to blame Marx for Stalin.

’Yet, it seems, the edges of Karl Marx's lips are beginning to twitch again in Europe as fresh attempts are made to reanimate his ideas …

‘How can it be, as a United Nations report recently estimated, that the richest 2 per cent of the world's adult population own more than 50 per cent of global assets while the poorest 50 per cent own only 1 per cent? How can one understand capital without Das Kapital?

Thornhill is specifically concerned with France, where soi-disant Marxist candidates secured 17% of the vote in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections.

He then selects a number of random quotes from French politicians of left, right and centre, in an effort to illustrate the supposedly pervasive hold of Marxist ideas in that country.

This doesn’t particularly convince me. If Ségolène Royal talks about the need to "frighten the capitalists", that doesn’t mean she is not essentially a Blairite. If Nicolas Sarkozy condemns about "rogue bosses", he is simply following a long-established right-populist tradition in French politics.

All in all, not a particularly heavyweight article. But an interesting pointer to the possibilities of renewing Marxism in the twenty-first century, nonetheless.

The Financial Times recently hailed the return of Marxism. Sadly, I suspect that Britain’s only serious paper was having a bit of a laugh. You would have to go back beyond the birth of the First International 140 years ago to find the Marxist project in worse organisational shape than today.

The historic experience of Stalinism – however much dissident Marxist traditions distance themselves from it – stands utterly discredited, and discredits everything else that describes itself as Marxist by association.

Social democratic parties – ‘mass workers’ parties’, as we used to theorise them – have undergone wholesale conversion to born-again neoliberalism. Most of them are hardly ‘mass’ anymore. And they certainly haven’t got very many workers in them, either.

The far left is more shriveled, splintered and ineffective than it has been in decades. It has not succeeded in developing social roots, let alone mass membership, in one single country on the planet.

At the root of all this is a sustained erosion of class consciousness and even the most basic levels of class organisation worldwide. Socialist ideology, even in its most distorted forms, is no longer hegemonic in movements of the oppressed.

This is perhaps why there was little working class resistance anywhere to the transformation in the class nature of social democratic parties.

Lenin’s proposition that the working class could not spontaneously transcend trade union consciousness was once hotly disputed. These days, the majority of the working class spontaneously getting there in the first place would be cause for celebration.

In as far as a new anti-capitalism can be said to exist at all – and let’s avoid the elementary mistake of conflating anti-globalisation with anti-capitalism, shall we? – it is on an eclectic ideological basis that dismisses socialism as just another species of ‘productivism’.

Even that bastard offspring of nationalism and Stalinism that prevailed in much of the third world has now been displaced by something even worse.

There is a certain anti-imperialist content to political Islam. The trouble is, it is a reactionary anti-imperialist content.

Blinkered to the last, large sections of the left automatically consider all forms of anti-imperialism as implicitly progressive, as somehow on how side, and send their delegates to Cairo to seek an alignment with it.

Just to compound matters, the leadership of the remaining Marxist movement is almost to a man and woman far too stupid, far too backward-looking even to make an assessment of the world today and to seek the pathway to political renewal. As far as they are concerned, the old formulae work just fine.

So is there any hope? I sometime fear there isn’t, and that there is now little to stop capitalism destroying the planet. Marx himself raised the prospect of ‘the mutual ruin of the contending classes’ as one potential endpoint of history, and the odds on that outcome shorten by the year.

There’s just one thing that stops me topping myself. For all the setbacks since the 1970s, global working class still possesses that unique combination of self-interest, capacity and social weight to provide the foundation for a rational, humanist and radical democratic politics.

And maybe - just maybe - enough of the left can somehow sober up in time to realise that if there is hope, it lies with the proles.

Labour peer Lord Desai is well-known as a Marxian economist, and the material on economics is every bit as good as one would expect from this man's pen. In particular, the exposition of the transformation problem, the Böhm-Bawerk critique and the Bortkiewicz solution is exemplary.

But decidedly shakey on political sociology and the Marxist theory of the state, two of my little pet academic areas. I may venture a review once I have finished the volume. Incidentally, marxist.com - the website of the Grantites - offers a detailed critique in eight full-length articles here.

Anyway, at one point Desai makes the following aside: 'Marxism was also weak in its appeal to American and British socialists. There were followers of Marx in these countries, but Marxism was never a philosophy for a political party of any substantial size.'

That's a straightforward statement of fact, of course. But after reading it, it occured to me that it also applies to all English-speaking countries of which I am aware. There has never been a substantial Marxist current in Canada, Australia or New Zealand, either.

Any opinions as to why this should be? Is there something specific about Anglo-Saxon political culture that makes it impervious to dialectical materialism? I'm genuinely asking. Comments, please.

Obviously one of the tricks of the blogging trade is to pretend that you’ve got a worked out opinion on everything that makes the headlines. But the truth is, I have no expertise whatsoever in animal diseases, and accordingly, not a clue as to the correct Marxist line on foot and mouth outbreaks.

Orthodoxy on the left seems to be that the problem could easily be solved by vaccination, and all that is stopping it happening is that New Labour lacks the balls to stand up to the National Farmers’ Union, which is against the idea because it will scupper exports of British meat.

Among those making just such a case are Johann Hari, the Socialist Party, and leftwing Labour MP Ian Gibson, a biologist by training.

Opponents of vaccination raise the following points against the practice:

It takes four days to work, and even then may not be completely effective. Vaccinated animals can still carry the virus and pass it on, without showing any symptoms.

Nor would it prevent future outbreaks:

There are several strains of foot-and-mouth, and vaccines work against only one strain of the virus. Anyway, animals need booster shots every six months or so.

Additionally, it’s worth adding that the current outbreak seems more or less under control despite the resolutely softly-softly tactics.

The comment box is open for any comrades able to provide theoretical clarity on this one.

If you went on any of the big anti-war demos, you’ll have seen the stickers featuring the star of David and the swastika. That’s justified, because Zionism equals Hitler’s national socialism. Obviously.

On the other hands, several currently popular liberal-left authors make the case that radical Islamism can properly be described as ‘islamofascism’.

The idea is theoretically rooted in the cold war theory of totalitarianism. According to Hannah Arendt, fascism and communism were basically different manifestations of the same phenomena.

Then again, if you’ve read much political history, you probably know that Communist International under Stalinism in the 1930s advanced the proposition that social democracy and fascism were ‘not antipodes but twins’.

In the 1980s, sections of the British left branded Thatcherism as ‘creeping fascism’. Today, there are US websites making the same point about the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, cheap-shot populist shock jocks and newspaper columnist drone on about ‘feminazis’ and ‘health and safety fascists’.

Allow me to sum up here. We can therefore deduce that Zionism = Islamism = democratic socialism = rightwing conservatism = Stalinism = feminism. That’s because all of them = fascism.

And we all know there is only one possible response to fascism, don’t we? Extirpate it. Eradicate it, annihilate it, uproot it. Destroy it before it destroys you.

I mean, you’ve got to watch those bloody union health and safety reps, you know. They start by demanding that management keep the fire escapes clear of boxes, and before you know it, they’re establishing a chain of death camps all the way across Poland.

Most of those advancing ‘= fascism’ arguments do so by means of advancing their own hand-built checklist of what fascism is, and then point out that the object of their opprobrium shares all those characteristics. QED.

Their process of reasoning runs like this: a table has four legs; a dog has four legs; therefore a dog is a table.

This is pretty poor reasoning, despite usually coming from the guys that got into the expensive schools. Analysis of sui generis brands of political thought by lazy analogy does not advance our understanding of them, but rather detracts substantially from it.

And what is the point, anyway? I have no difficulty whatsoever in opposing Israeli brutality to Palestinians, mass murder by flying airliners into skyscrapers, imperialist oil grabs in the Middle East, or oppressive governments anywhere in the world.

But it’s democratic socialism that took me to those positions. Not cod political sociology.

On page 230, Henwood makes this observation:

One of the reasons for the sorry state of Marxian theories of finance ... is the shadow cast by Rudolf Hilferding and his 'Finance Capital'. The book contains something obsolete, misleading, or wrong on almost every page, from minor offenses to major ...

But history has not turned out Hilferding's way ...

My first thought on reading this passage was 'damn right!' Financial capital and industrial capital remain very much separate categories. They simply have not fused with each other in any meaningful sense. Goldman Sachs remains Goldman Sachs, while General Motors remains General Motors.

The bank-centred German model Hilferding (pictured) discussed in his 1910 book has not only not become generalised, but is itself being eroded by US/British-style neoliberalism.

My second thought was that Hilferding's notion of finance capital has been central to Marxist thinking ever since, not least underpinning Bukharin and Lenin's work on imperialism, Cliff's conceptualisation of the USSR has state capitalist.and Kidron's permanent arms economy theory

If Hilferding was wrong, than all of these writers start from seriously mistaken premises and their conclusions surely fall. How many modern neoliberal states can be analytically reduced to state capitalist trusts?

Surely the scriptures cannot be wrong. Or can they? Can anybody offer theoretical clarification on this one?

All of a sudden, the war was no longer about punishing Saddam for the al Qa'eda links it later turned out he simply didn't have. No, the public was reassured, this was a project to crush the Republic of Fear.

Yet I'd stake money that neither Bush nor Blair had even heard of Kanaan Makiya before his book became a useful rationale for their war, unless a hapless Downing Street researcher accidentally stumbled upon the name while undertaking the internet trawl that resulted in the dodgy dossier.

It's an inconvenient fact for the pro-war left, but at least George Galloway did have some sort of track record of once campaigning against the Iraqi dictatorship he was later to brown-nose. There's no evidence whatsoever of Blair ever having displayed solidarity with Saddam's Iraqi victims throughout the years the west was arming the Ba'athist repressive state apparatus.

But the failure of Washington's foreign policy - even by its own lights - poses the question of why the state of democracy in the Middle East is quite so parlous, even when compared to other countries at a similar stage of economic development.

There are partial exceptions to the rule, I suppose. Both Israel and Turkey lay claims to being democratic polities. But many non-European Jews and Arab citizens in Israel, not to mention the entire Kurdish population of Turkey, would surely beg to differ.

There are quasi-democratic institutions in Iran. But control rests with a layer of conservative clerics, which control the right to stand for election and much else.

But none of the above are Arab countries. In the Arab world, democracy is essentially a write-off.

It is true that many Islamist are intrinsically hostile to democracy per se, arguing that the Qu'ran is their constitution. But that cannot be the whole explanation; opinion polls indicate that there is support for notions of political democracy, especially among the younger and more educated layers.

The chief roadblock seems to be the prevelance of what international relations theorists refer to as 'rentier states', supporting themselves through oil rents extracted from the rest of the planet. Because they do not need to extract taxation, they become independent of society, and thus have little need for legitimation.

Their extensive economic resources essentially enable them to co-opt the indigenous bourgeoisie, rewarding it economically through projects conceived and funded by the state. These bourgeoisies, then, have no interest in carrying through bourgeois revolutions.

In short, there are certainly analytical parallels with what certain a Russian Marxist - a writer some leading neoconservatives are reputedly familiar with, of course - said about his own country over 100 years ago.

But it is doubtful that the current class and ideological dynamics in the Middle East facilitate the sort of social transformation Leon Trotsky predicted.

Yet as the Iraq debacle fully underlines, in the twenty-first century at any rate, bourgeois revolutions do not come courtesy of the US and British armed forces, either. There is no M1 Abrams road to liberal democracy.

Nobody wants to imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. But right now, it is difficult to see just what could topple the Arab dictatorships.

I write about this because I am currently around halfway through an original copy of 'Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung', which I found in a local charity shop.

In a nice period touch, the opening page is inscribed 'Brenda Watson, Aug. 28th '68'. I have an odd mental picture of this woman as some street fightin' hippy chick, now presumably drawing an old age pension. Here's to you, anyway, comrade.

Forty years ago, it has to be said, my political consciousness was not particularly well advanced. In all truth, my concerns centred more on Lego, Action Man and footie than the state of the struggle.

But even now I have read a book or two on political theory, I cannot see why Mao was regarded as a Marxist thinker of any profundity. I mean, take this quote from p.147: 'Be united, alert, earnest and lively.' Yeah, sound advice in as far as it goes. But is it of much more practical use to a revolutionary than 'be young, be foolish, be happy'?

Perhaps I am missing something. I am aware that Slavoj Žižek - the self-styled 'orthodox Lacanian Stalinist' philosopher inordinately influential among many young comrades, including some who consider themselves Trots - has written an introduction to another of Mao's works, 'On Contradiction'. Can somebody fill me in on what - if anything - I am missing, please?