-----Original Message-----
From: Owen Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Tuesday, November 21, 2000 2:44 PM
Subject: [L-I] Serbia a "typical postcommunist state"
>
> Interesting and insightful analysis from a Guardian columnist.
Really? Let's look at it.
> Yugoslavia is gradually coming back in from the cold and restoring
>relations with Britain and the Nato states which bombed it last year.
"Yugoslavia" is, eh? Already in the first sentence I have a problem with
the analysis. Who is this "Yugoslavia" which is doing this? The author
should say "the Kostunica government" is restoring relations. But even then
it would be lousy analysis. The author writes as if the SP-led government
had been sulking on the fringes of Europe, and the Kostunica government is
now making a free choice to come back in where it's warm and join the party.
In fact, of course, Yugoslavia was bombed, strangled, and isolated by the
imperialist powers. Now it is being connected, linked, engulfed, digested
and assimilated by the imperialist powers. These are just different types
of imperialist aggression, based on the fact that before, there was a
government which resisted it, whereas now a pro-imperialist government has
been installed.
So already after the first sentence there are reasons to distrust the
insight of this author.
>But,
>as normality resumes,
("normality" being equated to imperialist assimilation)
>a strange myth still hovers around the popular
>uprising which overthrew Slobodan Milosevic.
> It was "the last of eastern Europe's great anti-communist revolutions",
>according to Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post, a seasoned reporter of
>European communism. "If the Solidarity revolution in Poland was the
>beginning of the end of communism, this was the end of the end of
>communism," writes the academic Timothy Garton Ash.
After the counterrevolution, there is always more honesty on the part of the
counterrevolutionaries. It seems to me that if seasoned and consistent
counterrevolutionaries boast that they have accomplished another
counterrevolution, it's worth listening to them. But this author dismisses
them as being captives of a "strange myth".
But now the article gets even stranger. Just look at this gem of "insight":
> Wait a minute. Wasn't the distinguishing mark of the Stalinist systems
>which collapsed in the late 1980s in eastern Europe the fact that they were
>one-party states? Independent media were banned. Freedoms of assembly and
>speech were tightly constrained. And of course there were no contested
>elections.
> So where's the similarity with Serbia in the year 2000? Didn't Milosevic
>call an election and lose? Wasn't his victorious opponent, Vojislav
>Kostunica, the head of an 18-party coalition? Didn't opposition parties run
>local government in a dozen Serbian cities, backed by scores of independent
>radio stations and newspapers?
The author of this article, whom Owen recommends to us as having such
"insight", has never heard of class analysis. He has never heard of
Marxism. To him, the distinguishing characteristic of socialist governments
is that they are ruthless dictatorships and allow no freedom. In fact, as
the author correctly points out (a stopped clock is right twice a day), the
SP government bore no resemblance to the caricature created for us by the
liars of the imperialist press since 1991. Steele has discovered that
Milosevic was not Hitler. I give him some credit for this, since it is hard
to discover this fact if you read only the bourgeois press. Of course
analysts like Jared Israel and Diana Johnstone have been pointing this out
for years.
But Steele, who has never heard the first word of Marxism, takes the fact
that Milosevic was not Hitler and leaps to the conclusion that Milosevic was
not a socialist, using the following syllogism:
A. All socialist heads of state are dictators like Hitler. (Major premise)
B. Milosevic was not a dictator like Hitler. (Minor premise)
C. Milosevic was not a socialist head of state. (Conclusion)
I grant that this syllogism works if you accept the validity of the major
premise. Which of course I don't.
It doesn't surprise me to see such murky thinking from Steele. But here is
the amazing part: Owen is so convinced of the solid-gold flawlessness of
Steele's argument that he counts on it to "suitably answer" Proyect, Jared
Israel, me, Stainsby, the United Left, and every other socialist in the
world who has recognized the Kostunica coup as a setback for our cause, and
to "demonstrate" that Milosevic was the Yeltsin of Serbia! What is he
thinking? What does he think we are thinking?
Wait, here is some more analysis from Steele:
> By 1987, when he seized the leadership of the Socialist Party of Serbia,
>Milosevic was already more of an opportunist than a communist. He became a
>nationalist and co-opted the Greater Serbian agenda of the country's second
>world war monarchists and anti-communists.
(This "Greater Serbian agenda" is an imperialist lie, of course, as has been
demonstrated repeatedly.)
> Economically the system Milosevic created was a hybrid, similar to the
>flawed privatisations well-known elsewhere. Cronies of the political
>leadership ran state companies or held lucrative posts in businesses whose
>exact ownership was obscure.
Let's see if we can tease out the underlying syllogism here as well, shall
we?
A. No socialist country has a leader who is nationalist, allows industry to
be privatized, or appoints associates to run state companies. (Major
premise) (Yes, I know he said 'cronies'. 'Cronies' is just a word meaning
'associates of someone you don't like.')
B. Milosevic was a nationalist, allowed some industries to be privatized,
and appointed associates to run state companies. (Minor premise)
C. Therefore Yugoslavia under Milosevic was not socialist, and Milosevic was
Yugoslavia's Yeltsin. (But Yeltsin didn't appoint associates to run state
companies. He had the state companies sold by fraudulent means and in fact
given to his associates as his private property.)
In the earlier syllogism, socialist leaders were supposed to be dictators.
Now they are required to be "socialistically pure" dictators. I don't know
what socialist countries anywhere really have ever qualified by this
standard. Does Owen really find this kind of analysis convincing? I don't.
Here's some more "insight":
> In Serbia, the main issue which prompted the uprising was betrayal. After
>13 years Milosevic had broken all his promises. His claim to defend Serbs
>throughout the former Yugoslavia had ended with more than a million Serbs
as
>refugees from Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. His defiance of the world led to
>sanctions and a ruined economy, from which only the big-time smugglers and
>their friends in the regime grew rich.
I'm sorry, but this is too muddled to make even a bad syllogism out of. We
are told that Milosevic defied the (imperialist) world. (This doesn't sound
like being the Yeltsin of Yugoslavia.) The author alludes to the fact that
imperialism, in response, imposed sanctions, ruined Yugoslavia's economy,
and ethnically cleansed Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, driving a million
Serbian refugees back into Serbia. All right, but where is the 'betrayal'??
If you lose a war to the imperialist colossus, does this mean you are a
betrayer? Does this mean that you have "broken your promises"? Is this not
an obvious case of "blaming the victim"? Clearly it is a foolish thing to
defy the imperialist world, in Steele's view. And perhaps in Owen's.
It is, however, quite true that the anti-communist Serbian nationalist
parties have indeed attempted to blame Milosevic for Yugoslavia's defeats,
and for "losing Kosovo" in particular. Milosevic is supposed to have not
done enough to resist the NATO occupation. This is interesting enough to
think about for a minute. On one level, it shows what unprincipled liars
the imperialists are. They claimed that Milosevic was the Hitler of Serbian
ultra-nationalism. In fact, on the scale of nationalism, the program of the
SPS had nothing to compare with the nationalist program of Draskovic, for
example, who really WAS for a "greater Serbia". Imperialism has no trouble
making an agreement with the forces who agitated against Milosevic for being
"soft on Albanians." This tells you that the NATO war wasn't really about
defending Albanians, if you hadn't figured that out already.
But on a second level, it tells you what the struggle was really about.
Because Kostunica of course is a nationalist himself, a lifelong
anti-communist, as he boasts. So how do Serbian nationalists make a deal
with the countries that attempted to destroy Serbia? Here is the basis of
the deal: the imperialists tell them, "We can be friends. We don't really
object to your nationalist goals. We object only to your socialized
property. Let us loot your socialized property, and we will leave you free
to achieve your nationalist goals." Of course the imperialists are quite
likely to be lying about what the nationalists will be free to achieve after
Yugoslavia is assimilated into imperialist Europe; but people who are forced
to the wall will often believe what they want to believe. Except of course
Steele and Owen believe there was no socialized property.
Speaking for myself, I must reluctantly conclude that Steele's article
demonstrates nothing, and shows no insight that we Marxists are bound to
respect.
Lou Paulsen
Chicago
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