How was Soviet expansionism not imperialistic?

[727Goon]

How do stalinists/authoritarians uphold the expansionism of the Soviet union as anything other than imperialism? Also were there any progressive resistance movements inside occupied satellite states?

[Savage]

With regards to the USSR in Afghanistan you have to take into account the U.S. involvement with the Mujahideen and such, but most anti-Stalinist leftists would tend to see the whole thing as an Imperialist war anyway. The main resistance movement inside an occupied satellite state would be the 1956 revolution in Hungary but there were certainly others that you could look into.

[28350]

There's a difference between expansionism and imperialism. For example, the Soviets in Afghanistan vastly improved conditions.

That's not to say that the Soviet Union stayed on one side of the line, though.

[727Goon]

There's a difference between expansionism and imperialism.

I suppose this is true in theory, but have any modern states actually existed that have been expansionist and not also imperialist?

[smk]

I suppose this is true in theory, but have any modern states actually existed that have been expansionist and not also imperialist?

No. I cant think of any which could be classified as only 'expansionist.' "Expansionism" and "imperialism" are not mutually exclusive, however.There have probably been many instances of states pursuing a mix of imperialist and expansionist policies, but for a state to pursue genuinely, 100% expansionism it would have to be extremely progressive and essentially in line with communist thought. I don't think a state like that has ever existed.

[BIG BROTHER]

How do stalinists/authoritarians uphold the expansionism of the Soviet union as anything other than imperialism? Also were there any progressive resistance movements inside occupied satellite states?

There have been territorial wars and wars of ocupation even before capitalism. The invasion of Afganistan wasn't Imperialist in that sense. Imperialism is a system of capitalism were the national markets are saturated and monopolized by financial capital, thus the bourgoisie are dependent on destroying the means of production of other countries, conquer new markets, etc in order to continue to profit. Thats more or less Imperialism as it relates to war.

Now I oppose the Soviet invasion, I'm just clarifying that I wouldnt consider it Imperialist.

[KC]

I suppose this is true in theory, but have any modern states actually existed that have been expansionist and not also imperialist?

The krux of the issue is what one means when they use the term "imperialism" and "imperialist". Imperialism in the classical Marxist sense is a historical epoch in the development of capitalism characterized by the export of capital due to the "overripeness" of imperialist countries, the domination of finance capital and the development of a financial oligarchy as big bourgeoisie opposed to the former rule of industrial capital, the conclusion of the division of the world and the need to redivide it along other lines due to capitalist competition, etc...

In this system of imperialist capitalism, the imperialists are those countries where the financial oligarchy has become most dominant/pronounced, where conditions have become most "overripe" and which also hold a special position at the top of the world not only economically but politically as well.

Casting aside the gaping holes in this theory, the most obvious and simplest answer to your question is that the Soviet Union wasn't imperialist because it wasn't partaking in imperialist capitalism, at least in the way which would have it defined as imperialist. Territorial expansion was due to a variety of reasons but the export of capital and the rate of profit had nothing to do with it; the reasons for such expansion were primarily political.

That is not to say that there weren't economic reasons behind Soviet expansionism. The economic reasons, though, were not capitalist in nature.

Of course, you'll have someone come in here in a few posts who believes that the USSR was state capitalist and call it imperialist...

[Crimson Commissar]

How do stalinists/authoritarians uphold the expansionism of the Soviet union as anything other than imperialism? Also were there any progressive resistance movements inside occupied satellite states?
They were just trying to spread socialism into surrounding nations. Would you have preferred it if they just handed eastern europe over to it's former capitalist governments? :rolleyes:

[red cat]

I suppose this is true in theory, but have any modern states actually existed that have been expansionist and not also imperialist?

India.

EDIT: Expansionism in the sense that mainland India itself is semi-feudal semi-colonial, while it uses its military power to subdue or annex other countries like Kashmir, the North-eastern states, Nepal etc. for its imperialist masters.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Spart's rationale for supporting the USSR in Afghanistan:



Women’s Emancipation and the Battle for Afghanistan
Afghanistan had been a Soviet client state for decades before the Red Army moved in, but the Stalinists had not disturbed the social order in this deeply backward country. At the same time, most of the tiny stratum that made up the Afghan intelligentsia were educated and trained in the Soviet Union, which they rightly regarded as a source of social progress. In 1973, officers loyal to the left-nationalist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) played a major role in overthrowing the monarchy and participated in the newly installed Daud government. When Daud moved right and tried to crush the PDPA in 1978, mass demonstrations of students and government workers erupted in Kabul. The PDPA military faction outgunned Daud’s forces and he was killed. This was the so-called “April Revolution,” essentially a left-wing military coup with popular support among intellectuals and government workers.

In power, the PDPA embarked on a program of reforms: canceling peasant debts, carrying out land redistribution, prohibiting forced marriages and lowering the bride price to a nominal sum. The PDPA’s measures, particularly those aimed at freeing women from feudal tyranny, threatened the mullahs’ stranglehold on social and economic life and immediately provoked a murderous backlash. Even the New York Times (9 February 1980) acknowledged, “It was the Kabul revolutionary government’s granting of new rights to women that pushed Orthodox Moslem men in the Pashtoon villages of eastern Afghanistan into picking up their guns.”

A decree allowing women to divorce was not officially announced because of the Islamic revolt. Most explosively, the PDPA made schooling compulsory for girls and launched literacy programs for women, building 600 schools in just over a year. The tribal insurgents denounced schooling for women as the first step in a “life of shame” and the earliest bloody confrontations were over women’s literacy, as PDPA cadres and women literacy workers were driven from villages and killed.

With social development somewhere between tribalism and feudalism, there was no internal social base for the reforms pursued by the PDPA, much less for proletarian revolution. In 1978, out of a population of some 17 million, only 35,000 worked in manufacturing while the parasitic mullah caste numbered 250,000! The landlords and tribal khans controlled 42 percent of arable land as well as access to water, giving them life and death power over the landless peasants. There was almost no industry, no railroads, few highways, primitive sanitation and wretched health care. Life expectancy was 40 years and infant mortality about 25 percent; half of all children died before age five. Illiteracy was a staggering 90 percent for men and 98 percent for women.

The PDPA could not quell the mujahedin insurgency, which was heavily backed by the U.S., Pakistan and Iran (where the Islamic theocracy under Ayatollah Khomeini had come to power in early 1979). Repeatedly and urgently, the PDPA asked the Soviet government for military aid, including troops. Concerned above all to pursue the chimera of détente with imperialism, the Kremlin temporized. But toward the end of 1979, the Soviet high command watched anxiously as U.S. warships were positioned in the Persian Gulf and reports emerged that Washington might invade Iran. The U.S. was already bankrolling the Afghan mujahedin and trying to foment Islamic counterrevolution in Soviet Central Asia.

In December 1979, fearing the PDPA regime was about to collapse and with Afghan president Hafizullah Amin reportedly making approaches to the U.S., the Soviet Union sent in 100,000 soldiers to combat the Islamic reactionaries. The imperialists seized on the Red Army intervention to launch a renewed Cold War drive. As the CIA undertook its biggest covert operation ever, Afghanistan became the front line of the imperialists’ relentless drive to destroy the Soviet Union. In 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski—national security adviser to the Democratic Carter administration that launched the CIA’s campaign—boasted: “That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap.”

The threat of a CIA-backed Islamic takeover on the USSR’s southern flank posed pointblank unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state. As we wrote at the time:

“A victory for the Islamic-feudalist insurgency in Afghanistan will not only mean a hostile, imperialist-allied state on the USSR’s southern border. It will mean the extermination of the Afghan left and the reimposition of feudal barbarism—the veil, the bride price. Moreover, the Soviet military occupation raises the possibility of a social revolution in this wretchedly backward country, a possibility which did not exist before.”
— Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 29, Summer 1980

The Soviet intervention was unambiguously progressive, underlining the Trotskyist understanding that despite its degeneration under a Stalinist bureaucratic caste, the Soviet Union remained a workers state embodying the historic gains of the October Revolution of 1917, centrally the planned economy and collectivized property. These were enormous gains, not least for women and the historically Muslim peoples of Soviet Central Asia (today Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan), where conditions before the Bolshevik Revolution had been as backward and benighted as in Afghanistan.

A Red Army victory posed the extension of the social gains of the October Revolution to Afghanistan through a prolonged occupation and the country’s integration into the Soviet system. Though undertaken purely for defensive geopolitical reasons, the Soviet military intervention cut against the grain of the nationalist Stalinist dogma of “socialism in one country.” The Red Army troops, many of them recruits from Soviet Central Asia, who fought against the CIA-backed mujahedin genuinely believed they were fulfilling their “internationalist duty.” And so they were! This military intervention in defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state opened up the possibility not only of tremendous gains for the hideously oppressed Afghan peoples but offered the prospect of reanimating the Bolshevik program of proletarian revolutionary internationalism in the Soviet Union. As we stressed at the time, a genuinely internationalist perspective toward Afghanistan required a political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and return the Soviet Union to the road of Lenin and Trotsky.