From: "Peter Jovanovic" <peterzoran-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Re: Fwd: More on 'leftist' redbaiting of the anti-war movement
Date: Fri, 07 Feb 2003 14:42:02 +1100


hi all

Scott wrote:
>The point is that imperialism is an economic and
>(secondarily) political system, not a foreign policy.
>We should be wary of equating imperialism with some of
>the most visible symptoms of imperialism - with
>conquest, intervention, sabotague and subterfuge etc -
>in the same way as we should be wary of equating
>capitalism with nasty bosses or the repressive parts
>of the state.

So capitalism and imperialism are separate things and imperialism is worse 
so it's OK to oppose it by alliances with local capitalists (only military 
and never political of course as the two can be kept firmly apart)?

>If imperialism is just a foreign policy, then it is
>contingent rather than necessary - it can be abolished
>and capitalism can continue. This is the hope of the
>dominant strand of the WSF left, and also of the
>Nation writers that the WSWS article condemns.
>But with its Marxist perspective, the WSWS should not
>need to argue that a foreign policy aimed at
>destabilisation existed to argue that imperialism
>destabilised this or that country or region.

So we've got this reified thing, imperialism, which removes all subjectivity 
from in this case the Yugoslav ruling class and proletariat?

Would you care to address the idea that it was the Yugo proles resistance to 
IMF austerity in the late 1980s that led to the ruling class splitting along 
national lines and choosing war as the only way to impose austerity? 
Something that was sadly all too successful.

>One would need to use the
>dialectical method to show the connections between the
>Russian and Yugoslav milieu.

One connection perhaps is that in both of them Communist parties came to 
power in largely peasant countries although in Russia it was as a result of 
workers revolution whereas in Yugoslavia the Communists were installed by 
the invading Red Army. The working class of Serbia at least was considerably 
weakened by the allied bombing of Belgrade (with Tito's approval) at Easter 
1944 which killed 10000 people and then Tito's mass conscription to send 
proles to die needlessly on the Srem front (the region between the Sava and 
Danube rivers east of Belgrade) which was a world war one style trench 
massacre. While Tito himself was unique among national liberation Communist 
leaders in having a working class background the Yugoslav Communist Party 
was largely made up of peasants - hardly a deformed working class party and 
as the two examples above show Tito deliberately slaughtered many Yugoslav 
workers.

cheers
Peter

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