From: dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz Date: Wed, 19 Feb 1997 22:05:17 +0000 Subject: Re: M-G: The WRP and Workers Aid for Bosnia > > > Hugh wrote: > > PS The Bosnian vs Serbian issue has split a number of parties in the > Trotskyist movement. The question of whether the Serbs represent a > degenerated workers' state that should be defended and the question of the > validity for revolutionary Marxists of the Bosnian claim to national > independence are not simple questions and deserve serious discussion. The > kind of letter whistle-blower treated us to is not the kind of discussion > we need on these issues. I think Dave B's tendency has strong views on this > question -- perhaps he'd like to kick off on the relationship between the > civil wars in Yugoslavia, the national question and internationalism. > OK I'll kick off with our view. Bosnia is an important test case for the left because it can only be understood by applying the dialectical method. Bosnia is a part of the totality of world capitalism in crisis in the 1990's. That crisis is a crisis of falling profits and overproduction of capital. Capitalism can only solve its crisis by restructuring production, canning the welfare state which is a drain on profits, and forcing the former Stalinist states to their knees. Its success in these counter-reforms/revolutions over the last 20 years puts them on top, but not necessarily for long, because they still have to restructure further to restore profits, and the WORKING CLASS EXISTS AND IS FAR FROM DEFEATED. Bosnia is the fallout of the collapsing Yugoslavia. All the component parts of Yugoslavia under their stalinist bureaucrats abandoned the remnants of the planned economy and opted for capitalist restoration. All of them fought to expand their territory at the expense of the others to form capitalist mini-states and offered themselves to the imperialist powers as client states. Germany and the US in particular intervened to arm and train the armies of Croatia and the Muslim state in Bosnia. This was part of the rival imperialisms plans to re-partition the Balkans within the wider re-partioning of Eastern Europe and the former SU, and so recover their profits. In that complex case, while all states have the right to self-determination, none could be supported because they all oppressed one another directly and in varying extents as proxies of imperialist powers. It was therefore correct for revolutionaries to call for revolutionary defeat all round. That is, workers in all states should turn their guns on their new bourgeoisies and join forces to re-unite the former Yugoslavia as a Federation of socialist republics. The support for the multi-ethnic workers militia in Bosnia was correct in the defence of Bosnia from partition by each of the three expansionary states, Croatia, Serbia and the Muslim state under Izetbegovich. By supporting the multi-ethnic militias against ethnic cleansing on all sides, revolutionaries could appeal to workers in the warring states to turn their guns on their bourgeois military bosses. Only in the event of a clear or direct intervention of imperialism would it be correct to defend the right of any of the expansionary states to self-determination and take its side in the war. This happened towards the end of the war when the US started to directly intervene in arming Croatia and the Muslim state, and NATO started to bomb the Bosnian Serbs, at which point it was necessary to defend Serbia from imperialism. Most of the left got hopelessly confused about Bosnia, forgot whatever marxism they knew and followed the bourgeois democrats defending little democracies against nasty Serbian genociders, and getting sucked into the media crap about who was cleansing whom, as if this was not a reactionary war all round until imperialism showed its hand. Balls in your half. Dave. --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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