So much of the communist movements following out of the post-WW era were explicitly anti-communist struggles for national sovereignty. The Cuban Revolution, the Vietnamese Revolution, the South African revolt against the Dutch/English Apartheid Government, Tito’s unification of the Yugoslavian states in opposition to the German Nazis, revolutions across Latin America from Nicaragua to Venezuela to Bolivia, failed revolutions in Japan and Indonesia and the Philippines, Native American organized revolts and African American civil rights protests in the United States… All built on the philosophical principles laid down by the 19th century communist historians, economists, and philosophers.
What regularly gets described as Soviet/CCP imperialism - particularly during the 60s and 70s - was Russian/Chinese support of nativist uprisings against European/Imperial Japanese occupying governments. Even then, the Trotskyist global revolutionaries were largely excised from the Russian Revolutionary Government in the 1930s, with Stalin embracing “Communism in One Country”. Mao was far more invested in reconstituting mainland China than spreading revolutionary fervor over the border to India (which was having its own revolution under Gandhi) or Korea or the Indochina peninsula.
The surviving Communist states of the post-Cold War era are now in a struggle simply to secure their own borders against encroachment by the American military and intelligence services. Somehow, that now qualifies as “imperialism” in the eyes of western liberals. What’s more, any amount of foreign trade or travel seems to be defined as “imperialism” by conservatives.
So much of the communist movements following out of the post-WW era were explicitly anti-communist struggles for national sovereignty. The Cuban Revolution, the Vietnamese Revolution, the South African revolt against the Dutch/English Apartheid Government, Tito’s unification of the Yugoslavian states in opposition to the German Nazis, revolutions across Latin America from Nicaragua to Venezuela to Bolivia, failed revolutions in Japan and Indonesia and the Philippines, Native American organized revolts and African American civil rights protests in the United States… All built on the philosophical principles laid down by the 19th century communist historians, economists, and philosophers.
What regularly gets described as Soviet/CCP imperialism - particularly during the 60s and 70s - was Russian/Chinese support of nativist uprisings against European/Imperial Japanese occupying governments. Even then, the Trotskyist global revolutionaries were largely excised from the Russian Revolutionary Government in the 1930s, with Stalin embracing “Communism in One Country”. Mao was far more invested in reconstituting mainland China than spreading revolutionary fervor over the border to India (which was having its own revolution under Gandhi) or Korea or the Indochina peninsula.
The surviving Communist states of the post-Cold War era are now in a struggle simply to secure their own borders against encroachment by the American military and intelligence services. Somehow, that now qualifies as “imperialism” in the eyes of western liberals. What’s more, any amount of foreign trade or travel seems to be defined as “imperialism” by conservatives.