p The problem of the international and the national is an exceptionally important one both in ideological battles and in political practice. This is due above all to the fact that because of the objectively sharpening struggle between the two class camps in the present epoch there is an ever growing and vital need for the international unity and cohesion of the communist and working-class movement and of the socialist community. One of the main purposes of international imperialism is to undermine this unity. Never before has such pressing importance attached to Lenin’s conclusion that “what the bourgeoisie of all countries, and all manner of petty-bourgeois parties—i.e., ’compromising’ parties which permit alliance with the bourgeoisie against the workers— try most of all to accomplish is to disunite the workers of different nationalities, to evoke distrust, and to disrupt a close international alliance and international brotherhood of the workers. Whenever the bourgeoisie succeeds in this the cause of the workers is lost.”  [238•1 

p It is also important to analyse the relation between the international and the national from the class, scientific angle because the present epoch is marked by a great world-wide upswing in the national liberation movement, which has confirmed Lenin’s prediction concerning the ways of the world socialist revolution, which has in fact become not only “a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians in each country against their bourgeoisie” but “a struggle of all the imperialist-oppressed colonies and countries, of all dependent countries, against international imperialism”,  [238•2  a struggle which has become one of the mightiest streams of the great international world-wide revolutionary process.

The development of this process—involvement in it of more and more social groups and trends, the gradual making of a new, multinational communist socio-economic formation and international relations of a new type, which are 239 characteristic of a socialist community, and finally the ever more subtle speculation by the ideological opponents of socialism on the difficulties which are quite natural and in fact inevitable for such a grand undertaking as the revolutionary transformation of the world—all this has set before the communist vanguard of mankind the task of defending and establishing the great principles of proletarian internationalism and also developing them by generalising the experience of the world-wide revolutionary struggle.