Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 13:49:31 -0700
From: Michael Pugliese <debsian-AT-pacbell.net>
Subject: AUT: Re: US Deception during Bosnian war (Part One)


   >funny how one can easily disconnect nationalism from economy.

jc helary

  (Sidenote, be sure to click the URL's, esp. for the ethnicizing NATOsevic
piece...Michael Pugliese


http://www.ainfos.ca/99/may/ainfos00083.html
(en) The BALKAN WAR and leftist apologetics for the Milosovic regime
>From Harald Beyer-Arnesen <haraldba-AT-online.no>
Date Tue, 11 May 1999 15:05:43 -0400
http://www.idea.org.uk/cfront/texts/other/kosovo-subjectivities-en.html
(Kosov-AT- - Contradictions and Subjectivities
(Ethnicizing Social Conflicts - The Example of Yugoslavia - With an Updated
Annex). Available online at
<http://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/Internationalismus/jugoslawien/materialie
n_06/>, updated annex at
<http://www.humanrights.de/antikrieg/texte/antii_d.htm>.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Ethnicizing+and+Natosevic+&btnG=Google+Search

http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/apr99/msg02975.html
http://www.webcom.com/wildcat/Yugoslavia.html
http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/guest/radical/ESBOSNIA.HTM
Bosnia and the poison of nationalism
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/Aut_html/Auf1edit.htm
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html/Aufheben/yugo.html
Class Decomposition In The New World Order:

Yugoslavia Unravelled

(1) Introduction

Whilst there have been numerous wars around the globe over the last
forty-eight years, Europe has seen only the mundane brutality of everyday
capitalist social relations. But once again the spectre of war haunts the
proletarians of the continent. The former republics of Yugoslavia have
lurched into a bitter cycle of war, and the images of the suffering provide
a terrifying reminder of the capacity of the working class to carve itself
up along national lines. Are we heading for a major European war? Will the
events of the past couple of years in Yugoslavia be repeated throughout
Eastern Europe? An analysis of the conflict is clearly imperative.

Such an analysis is made more difficult however both by our separation from
the events, leading to a lack of information from 'below', and by the
endless stream of depressing details on the conflict in the media making any
attempt to keep abreast of events into a desensitising test of endurance. So
this article will be limited to an attempt to simplify the conflict by
grasping the material roots of the nationalist tensions.

The first problem lies with deciding where to start. A possible starting
point would be the formation of the first (monarchist) Yugoslavia after WW1,
as the internal migration of Serbs under the Serb-dominated regime (to be
followed by a similar migratory flow after WW2) helped produce the ethnic
mish-mash with which we are now familiar. Another possibility is WW2 and the
genocide perpetrated by the Ustashe which helps explain the fear of
persecution so characteristic of current Serbian nationalist ideology.

Neither of these starting points seem to provide the best means of
unravelling the conflict however, as the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia
did hold together for well over forty years despite its ethnic diversity and
the experiences of WW2. Instead, the focus of the analysis has to be the
1974 Constitution, which appears to be a pivotal moment in the shaping of
Socialist Yugoslavia; so, to begin with, we have to examine the factors
which gave rise to it.

(2) Class Recomposition.

In 1948 the Yugoslav Communist Party (Y.C.P.) was expelled from the
Cominform, in part due to the Y.C.P.'s desire for U.S. financial support. As
if trying to disprove Stalin's accusation that the Y.C.P. was a 'Kulak'
party incapable of making war on the peasantry the Y.C.P. set out on a
programme of forced collectivisation beginning in 1949. Prior to the war 75%
of the regions population were dependent on peasant agriculture and
immediately after the war the Y.C.P. rewarded the peasants, from whom the
partisan army under Tito had drawn most of its support, with land reform;
land previously owned by foreigners, collaborators, the church and large
estates was broken up and distributed amongst the poor peasants as small
plots. Such an organisation of agricultural labour was, however, a brake on
the development of the productive forces so desired by the Y.C.P., a brake
which collectivisation (socialist primitive accumulation) was designed to
remove. This programme came up against significant peasant resistance
however, with extensive riots in 1950 and widespread sabotage of
agricultural production the following year. Given their need for the
political backing of the peasants the Y.C.P. was forced to abandon this
policy of rural expropriation. First the compulsory delivery of agricultural
produce to the state was scrapped and in 1953 collectivisation was
abandoned. Peasants were allowed to leave the collectives, and most of them
did.

Thereafter agricultural labour consisted of two sectors; a small
collectivised 'socialist' sector comprising about 5% of the agricultural
workforce and 15% of agricultural land, and a much larger private sector in
which peasant families were able to sell their surplus produce on the open
market with the states role reduced to setting the levels of taxes and some
prices. Yugoslavia had clearly begun to move away from the Stalinist model
of a centrally-planned economy. The Y.C.P. had decided that the accumulation
of alienated labour would have to proceed using the discipline of market
forces with the coercive power of the state decentralised. In 1950 the
'Basic Law on Workers Self Management' was introduced in the industrial
sector to allow workers to participate on a democratic basis in their own
exploitation. Workers Councils were henceforth able to elect Management
Boards which by 1953 were able to engage in foreign trade, set prices in
most cases, and decide for themselves questions concerning product range,
investment, output, supplies and customers. Thus there evolved the partial
separation of the 'political' and 'economic' aspects of the capital
relation; the involvement of the Federal Government in the everyday running
of the economy gradually declined as the social division of labour came to
be increasingly regulated by the market.

Liberalising economic and political reforms occurred in 1960-61, 1963, and
1965 despite concerted opposition from the more centralising elements within
the Y.C.P. The net results of these reforms were twofold although both
represented a decline in the power of the Federal Government in Belgrade. On
the one hand remaining price controls, including that setting a minimum
price for labour-power, were abolished, and control over credit, and thus
control over the real accumulation of capital, was devolved to the banking
system. The rule of money over the conditions of life thereby increased.
Alongside this shift was a political one devolving a certain amount of
political clout to regional authorities although fiscal policy and control
over the repressive functions of the state remained the prerogative of the
Federal bureaucracy in Belgrade.

Within the Y.C.P. there had occurred a certain division between the
conservative autocrats of the bureaucracy and the liberal technocrats of the
productive enterprises and banks, with the relative empowerment of the
latter. And such a reorganisation proved to be very successful. Investment
rates during the 50s and 60s were exceptionally high by international
standards. Rapid accumulation allowed for rising real wages paid for through
rising productivity. A relatively generous social wage was affordable;
healthcare and other services developed to rival those in many West European
countries. Thus the Yugoslav model became the ideal for many left-liberals
in Britain and elsewhere who had a particular fetishism for democracy but no
critique of alienation. But this rapid accumulation had a number of
consequences which would serve to undermine this particular form of
market-based self-management.

i) Accumulation of Grave-Diggers:

In less than two decades much of Yugoslavia had been transformed from a
predominantly agricultural country into an industrial one. And where
industry had previously existed it had grown in size. Between 1953 and 1965
over 1 million peasants had been transformed into wage-labourers. The rulers
had created their own nemesis, potentially at least. The increasingly real
subsumption of labour under capital tended towards the homogenisation of the
working class, and the increasing size of industrial units its unification.
Democratic participation in the Workers Councils served to atomise the
Yugoslav working class, but the increasing socialisation of labour led to
those individuals becoming ever more parts of a collective worker
collectively exploited by ever more hostile dead labour. This transformation
of the productive power of labour was reflected in the minds of the workers
themselves and class antagonism, expressed througha rapid turnover of
labour, absenteeism, work stoppages and strikes, increased accordingly.

The incidence of wildcat strikes increased notably following the
liberalising reforms of 1965, and whilst they tended to remain an amalgam of
localised affairs, for reasons which will soon become apparent, they
nonetheless constituted a significant threat to the status quo. A second
front was opened up in the spring of 1968 by radical students who appeared
on the streets of Belgrade with a coherent theoretical critique of alienated
labour and of representative organisational forms. Of particular importance
is the fact that the student movement was aware of the impossibility of
abolishing the alienation of students without abolishing capitalist
alienation in general, and thus sought through its slogans and in its
programme to achieve that which had not yet happened; the unification of the
whole of the Yugoslav working class in a movement for its own abolition.

ii) Accentuation of Regional Disparities;

The republics which together formed Socialist Yugoslavia after WW2 displayed
massive social, cultural and economic differences. Slovenia and Croatia were
the more developed regions (M.D.R.s) of the country due to their
incorporation into the Austro-Hungarian empire, their close ties with German
and Italian capital, and their relative lack of infrastructural damage
during the war. Agriculture was still significant in the M.D.R.s, even if
much less so than in the L.D.R.s. But land was much more fertile than in the
southern regions and farms tended to belong to the collectivised 'socialist'
sector which was much more capital intensive than the private sector of the
independent peasants. Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo
(an Autonomous Province within the Serbian republic), being more rural areas
in which private sector peasant agriculture was much more significant, made
up the less developed regions (L.D.R.s). Serbia (with its other Autonomous
Province of Vojvodina) had undergone an average degree of development and
thus constituted the middle ground. The difference in levels of consumption
between the workers of the M.D.R.s and those of the L.D.R.s was notable.
Indicators such as share in the total social product, infant mortality
rates, literacy rates, inhabitants per hospital bed and others are testimony
to how much a higher rate of exploitation in the M.D.R.s enabled workers
there a higher standard of living.

The Y.C.P. were fearful that these disparities would exacerbate nationalist
tensions to a degree that would undermine the stability required for capital
accumulation. An active regional development policy was therefore pursued
immediately after the war in order that development in the L.D.R.s might be
speeded up. Whilst this could be done relatively easily during the central
planning period, when the main source of of investment funds was the Federal
Budget, the shift towards a market economy undermined this policy. Up until
1963 investment was controlled by a General Investment Fund, and although a
certain amount of money-capital was earmarked for investment in the L.D.R.s
on preferential terms the bulk of the resources was allocated on the basis
of the profitability of the enterprises wishing to receive funding. Then,
when responsibility for credit and investment passed into the hands of the
banking system, profitability became the sole criterion for decisions
concerning the allocation of credit.

This relaxation of control over the workings of the law of value served to
exacerbate the regional disparities. Enterprises in the L.D.R.s tended to be
much less competitive and thus found it harder to obtain the capital
required to raise the productivity of labour, thus they became even less
competitive. Unable to obtain credit through the banking system the L.D.R.s
resorted to obtaining the few resources available through the 'Federal Fund
for Crediting Economic Development of Less Developed Regions'. With
investments in the L.D.R.s then being made on the basis of political
considerations these resources were often wasted on hopelessly uncompetitive
'prestige projects', thus further undermining profitability in the L.D.R.s.
As for agriculture in the L.D.R.s, productivity was falling further behind
that of the M.D.R.s socialised sector, and the Y.C.P. tried to narrow the
gap by passing a law in 1967 enabling peasants to buy agricultural machinery
such as tractors. But with the relatively small scale of plots such a move
was futile. And on top of this, when the tourism industry began to expand
rapidly Croatia was to prove the main benificiary.

Given such a regional division of labour, with manufacturing concentrated in
the M.D.R.s, tourism concentrated in Croatia, and mining, energy production
and peasant agriculture dominating the L.D.R.s, it is obvious that objective
conditions did not favour a unified offensive by the Yugoslav working class
as a whole. And it also becomes clear as to why the tensions within the
party between the liberals and the conservatives took on a regional bias
which was at times prone to expressing itself in nationalist terms.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Spoon Collective" <spoons-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
To: "Michael Pugliese" <debsian-AT-pacbell.net>
Sent: Monday, June 25, 2001 12:33 PM
Subject: Re: US Deception during Bosnian war


> Michael,
>
> This message was too long to forward. If you want to break it down and
> send it again, feel free.
>
> -shawn
>
> the spoon collective
> http://lists.village.virginia.edu/spoons/
>
>



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