Date: Fri, 13 Mar 1998 00:19:55 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Balkan conflicts


G'day Hugh,

You write:

>The point no-one (except Bob) even tries to get to grips with, is what
>policies will lead the people and working class of the ex-Yugoslav nations
>to solve the acute political and national crisis they find themselves in.
>
>How to organize, how to intervene, what policies to put forward and what
>slogans to mobilize around.
>
>Now let's  have some Marxist brain-power expended on this for a change!

Some superficial macro-thoughts:

1) As the bold ink with which we've been marking national borders fade,
internal cohesions will fade accordingly.  This is pretty widespread just
now.  Creon's day is done.  But is this merely a return to Antigone's
world?  Of course it can't be.  The gods are come to earth, for now they
must deal more directly with the hubristic mortals.  Capitalism needed the
state as the gods used kings to impose their discipline.  Perhaps one veil
of mystification is being peeled away.  I mean, Antigone would have no
Creon to offend, and if her offense be directly against the gods, then the
gods will have to show their hand that bit more nakedly, eh?

2) The functional integrationists who give 'globalism' its PR angle might
confront more and more self-consciously hubristic 'statelets' every year.
Is this grounds for a new round of 'divide and conquer' strategies by
transnational capital - or grounds for chaos, complexity and uncertainty of
such magnitudes that no global management would be possible and no hegemony
could maintain?

3) We might be well advised to note that even those in Asia who hate their
state leaders manage to hate the IMF too.  Not just because their theory
impoverishes and kills people (so, I dare say, would any domestic
alternative under our global [dis]order), but because they see so clearly
that nobody at the IMF has a fucking clue about the local socio-cultural
ecology.  A universal economic rationalist programme doesn't just fail
because it's got superficial technical categories based on dodgy
sociological assumptions, but because it implicitly envisages one cure for
all places (and generally sees but varying degrees of one problem in all
places).  Islam is, for instance, a very different thing in Java, fitting
its socio-historico-cultural ecology as it must, than it is in Riyadh or
Sarajevo.  So, I believe, must we allow for decisive differentials in this
case - and 'allow for 'em' is just about all we can do, as we don't
understand 'em.

4) The people we're talking about must have had elementary, if
tendentiously distorted, socialism taught to them at school (unless they're
under twenty).  Many have also felt the lash of those distortions.
Socialist slogans may not do much - they've seen it all before - and it
might antagonise many.  Both those who wistfully recall 'great-leader'
socialism and those who want nothing to do with 'socialism' precisely
because the flaws in 'great man' theory have become so evident present
socialist organisers with enormous problems.

5) Support the Cosovoans on their own terms - take our queues from their
own banners.

Cheers,
Rob.





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