11/26/2000, Jozsef Borocz wrote:Please notice that I said nothing about imperialism. Instead, I was careful to use the cumbersome but more precise term "imperial attempt". By imperial attempt I meant the denal of sovereignty and legitimacy to subject states through direct external control after military conquest, in the interest of geopolitical gain.
> 6) The collapse of the Soviet late-Stalinist imperial attempt.I don't see evidence for Soviet imperialism.
Imperialism is an economically exploitive endeavor. Russia has been
attacked from the West every time some power assembled a big enough
army to make the attemp. After Hitler's assault, the Soviets had the
wisdom to insist on a buffer zone - for geopolitical, not imperialist
reasons. It is significant that Eastern European 'satellites', under
the Soviet regime, in many cases had higher standard of livings that did
Mother Russia.
That very well may be significant (what's more, it is also true
in some cases), but unfortunately it is not relevant. Clearly, many earlier
empires had territories that were peripheral with respect to the structure
of imperial rule while doing economically better than other, politically
more significant locales.
Soviet economics, lacking the capitalist system,Here you clearly switch to a meta-discussion on the nature of the Soviet economic system. That was not the original point, but I will reflect on this, trying to explain what I think about it (although I have the nagging feeling that we have had this discussion on WSN before).
The question of the extent of the capitalist or noncapitalist nature
of the Soviet system is a vexing one. Basically, it depends on where you
locate the essence of capitalism.
A: If capitalism is defined as the private appropriation of the surplus labor of others by your fellow citizens, you are right: the Sovet system was, clearly, not capitalist but something else. The Soviet state expropriated the little capitalist class Russia had had and disallowed the formation of a Russian bourgeoisie throughout its existence. The question is, though, "Is this relevant, knowing what we do about the role of the state as an alienated social organization specializing in legitimate violence and the sustained presence of the USSR in the capitalist world economy?" Which take us to points B1 and B2.Hence, it is difficult to have a meaningful conversation about the nature of the Soviet system without first specifying which of the above perspectives you espouse. If we disagree about these, we will disagree about Soviet history.B1: Now, if you define capitalism exclusively from the perspective of labor--i.e., by asking: "Is the fruit of our labor expropriated from us?"--then the answer is yes, and the conclusion is that the vast predominance of state ownership did very little to liberate the Russian working class from its chains of being exploited. (The USSR did many other things to its working class that were very important--education, health, citizenship, national culture--but those other things do not change the fact that the fruit of the worker's labor was expropriated from her/him and it entered into a process of circulation over which s/he had very little control.) Of course this leaves open two additional questions: "Where did surplus labor go, then?" and "How does this Soviet-type capitalism compare to other forms of capitlalism?"
B2: Alternatively, in a strictly global-holistic argument, it could also be claimed that the Soviet system failed to transcend capitalism because of the USSR's sustained presence in the capitalist world economy (which is clearly the case). This answers the first one of the two questions above ("Part of the profits expropriated by the state from the Soviet workers go to global capital through unequal trade between capital and the Soviet state-owned enterprises.") The second question is still not answered hereby though.
had noIn my vocabulary, imperialism is not a "motive" but a pattern of state behavior. If you are saying that the USSR did not participate in the Cold War, that is of course false. If you are saying that the USSR's behavior in central and eastern Europe, the Baltics, central Asia, the far east, and the "third world" was entirely selfless in the sense of just basically handing out resources to states that asked for it, contributing to the betterment of the human condition from Afghanistan through north Yemen, that is also false. There was a complex, political, economic, cultural, geostrategic, etc (in short: imperial) give-and-take and the only way to understand the nature of those deals is by introducing global military strategy as part of the notion of empire (my original formula).
imperialist motive.
If I may re-state my point, I thought the original formulation ignored the Cold War and the entire complication that the state socialist bloc represented in the capitalist world system since at least 1945. This is quite a basic mistake common to much left-oriented rhetoric--in the "west," this has been the case at least since the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. (For some odd reason the Hungarian experience of 1956 was not a cold enough shower for this "western" left rhetoric.)
I actually intervened for analytical reasons: I think it would enrich
a discussion about the possibility of increased political violence, the
widening (or narrowing) of the core-periphery gap, and the future of the
world if we considered the structural conditions that are the legacies
of the Cold War.
József
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