Soviet military spending enabled Third World revolutions while strangling Soviet society
Evidence
It is now strictly impossible to calculate, for instance, the degree and variety of distortions that crept into every aspect of Soviet society and economy owing to the single, glaring fact that the country undertook for forty years an altogether unsustainable competition for parity with NATO’s war machine, which served the contradictory function of extending the scope for autonomy for progressive states and movements around the globe (the survival of the revolutionary regime in Cuba and the ability of Vietnam to sustain itself through the revolutionary war are really unthinkable without the fact of that military balance) while also becoming a structural imperative for the reproduction of the techno-bureaucratic state within the Soviet Union. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 618
Categorization
- XREF: Relates to the ‘imperial contradiction’ arguments in classical Marxist theories of imperialism — the Soviet military balance as a two-edged sword that both extended global space for anti-colonial movements and hardened domestic bureaucracy. — connects to: US wartime capitalism was run on Soviet-style central planning; Anti-colonial revolutions depended on Soviet material and diplomatic support — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 149; Comecon socialisms entered a double crisis in the 1960s hidden by Third World revolutions — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 119