Cross posted from the Marxism list, but IMHO quite worthy of the CrashList: En relación a Re: Anti-Milo Legitimacy Crisis, el 31 Mar 01, a las 23:26, citando el NYT, Les Schaffer dijo: > > An arrest of Mr. Milosevic -- and the possibility that he will be > tried for crimes against humanity -- has the potential to redress both > of these failures of imagination, restoring Serbia to its place in the > community of nations while revealing the Serbs to themselves. > This is why it is so important now to support Milosevic and the patriotic forces in Yugoslavia, to stand up against the campaign of lies.It is not _only_ a campaign of lies. _Writing history again is an act of war_, of a war for the minds, and particularly for the minds of the Yugoslav people, in order to establish a new hegemonic principle, with a new balance of murderers and angels that allows imperialist operatives to act without resistence, and if possible with the help of at least a fraction of the local population(1). Not only in Yugoslavia, but as a rule in every semi-colonial country which has attained, at some point in its historic life, a level of development of productive forces that is incompatible with the needs of the core countries, it is essential not only to destroy the material structures of production. It is also essential to crush the _forms of consciousness_ generated by that level of development of productive forces, a level that has become dysfunctional with the requirements of the global system of imperialist domination and plunder. Whole formations are thus _forced back_ in history, not only in the material realm (because this one can be rebuilt in a relatively easy way), but basically in the realm of ideas. This has been the case in Yugoslavia. The NATO trials and the intention to have Serbs "know themselves" (in the way the NYT wants, that is as a people of war criminals) serves precisely this goal. And is directly linked with the issue of the division of Serbia along class lines, something many anti-Milosevic self- appointed "Leftists" have been roaring about without having the slightest idea of what they were speaking on. The main class divide in Serbia today does not pass, in my opinion, between a local bourgeoisie and the mass of the people (still less between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in a country with a very strong peasant constituency). This bourgeoisie is either feeble or non-existent, and will never exist. The wind of history, and particularly NATO intervention, have swept away any dangers that the local managerial elites in the plants might become such(2). What there actually exists, particularly in Belgrade, is a huge mass of petty bourgeois and intellectual workers who expect to benefit from the establishment of "normal" relations with the West and the "reinsertion" of Serbia (not of Yugoslavia, they don't care about Yugoslavia any more) in the imperialist system. They are well educated, they know languages, they are skilled in many professions, and they have already begun to sell their services to foreign contractors, which establishes an objective, de-facto, social differentiation in the Yugoslav society and the starting point for the creation of what would be termed a "vendedor" (seller) rather than "comprador" ("buyer") layer with strong interest in the subjection of Serbia to foreign interests. These layers conform a good deal of the mass constituency of monsters such as "Otpor". They are "tired of war and sanctions", which translated to the language of economic life means "eager to establish profitable relations with the West, even at the price of destroying their own country". That these layers exist and have become an important political force is a matter that the socialists in Yugoslavia and Serbia will have to think about in order to establish a strategy for the new situation, but the fact is that they _do_ exist and that they are heavily supported by the West. It is not only a matter of bribing and wooing (which of course has been outrageously important in defining the Serbian situation), it is also a matter of material and intellectual detachment of these social layers from the very people who have produced them and given them the opportunity to be skilled in activities that now they dream to sell outside their destroyed country. Neither a bourgeosie, nor a proletariat, these fractions of classes are the battlefield of history now. Today, they are wavering in their national loyalty, up to the point that they have already, in a mollecular process, begun to re- write Yugoslav history by themselves (I have recently been explained by one of them that "the League of the Communists came out of the blue, nobody knew them before the British helped them": please note the central point here, that no Serbian or Yugoslav important issue can be explained by the efforts of the Yugoslavs, it can only be understood by the action of a _foreign_ power). The whole effort behind the Milosevic detention and trial process is pointing exactly at this crack within the up to now almost monolithic national awareness of the Serbs. It consists basically in an attempt to establish in Belgrade and elsewhere in Yugoslavia a strong mass of that provides a strong social approval to foreign companies, foreign loans, foreign plunder in short, an approval that must be given gladly and in good will. An approval that must imply the idea that "at last we shall be regenerated". Imperialism, to hold a country in its grip, must convince at least a sizable portion of the population that it is in their own interest that they are plundered. Short of that, only military occupation works. Since all of the history of Serbia and Yugoslavia, up to the detention of Milosevic, has been a history of struggle and opposition to such a plunder(3), it has to be rewritten, no matter how, so that the social awareness not of the whole of the Serbian people but of those layers that have been benefitted by the opportunities given to them during the pre-1989 years becomes functional to imperialist penetration. The consequences, if they have their own way, are enormous. Politics is not only a matter of "objective forces", but on the contrary, of hegemony established on people's minds. The end result of the imperialist move would be the creation of a Serbian equivalent to the petty bourgeois mass organizations that have been so essential for their domination of Latin America. Storms of "ethical outrage", self-deprecation, and so on, are a basic constituent of the structures of mind of these organizations. The petty bourgeois, unable to express a political project of her or his own (we cannot imagine a whole society made up of doctors, lawyers, engineers or shopkeepers), is thus alienated from the mass of the population and put to work for the benefit of the same power that closes her or him any future. Now, there are consequences to this. Let us assume, for the sake of the argument, that the forces of reaction can get to obtain the ends they are after. Let us also assume we can take Yugoslavia out of the general geopolitical framework that gives sense to the rage of the imperialists here (in the end, poor Yugoslavs are under the curse of living exactly at the crossroads of Europe). Under these assumptions, highly irrealistic as they are (specially the second one) but which put us in the worst of the scenarios, what would happen to these layers that are now booming against the continued resistence of their own people against the West? What will happen is very simple: they will be split. Most of them will discover that the scenario they helped to build does not hold a dignified place for them to carry on a living. Higher education will begin to be out of their reach, health services will become worse and more expensive, their concrete standard of living will fall down. They will radicalize and recognize that they have been fooled. If not the actual people who are now fighting against the national forces in Yugoslavia, their children will. This is an objective necessity of history. That is, even in the case that imperialism "stabilizes" its domination of Yugoslavia -and the destruction of Russia as a world power or menace thereof, their ultimate goal- the new generations of Yugoslav, particularly Serbian, petty bourgeois, will fight back again. Not to speak of the more oppressed layers. But without a confluence with that thick layer of impoverished petty bourgeois, I can't see any way out of imperialist domination in Yugoslavia. I did not imagine these remarks out of the blue. I simply took into account what decades of political struggle in a semicolonial country and the great intellectuals of the Argentinean national revolutionary movement have taught to me. Rebel peoples must be subject to a thorough mental cleansing, that is all the secret. Since the Serbs have a long story of struggle both against their foreign oppressors and their domestic traitors, this will not be an easy task for the imperialists. But it is an essential one. Because unless they want to disappear as a people, the Serbs cannot surrender their minds to the colonizers. As Marx and Engels already noted after the Crimean War, Serbia had become the knot around which a Southern Slav nation could be gathered in the Balkans. This has made the Serbs victim of what stupid analysts would call "megalomania" but which in fact is the intellectual expression of their being, in their own interest, the only glue that may hold all those peoples together against ANY kind of foreign power (as the deceased Jim Blaut simply stated once, "national struggle" is "class struggle across borders"). This is why most of the Serbian population cannot BUT think in terms of what would be stupidly scorned as "Great Serbia", or face death as a people. They did it against both the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, against German imperialism, against Soviet hegemonism, and against the whole powers of Western imperialism coalligated against them. Are they crazy? Not at all, they have a distinct sense of their destiny. This "sense of their destiny" is the subjective expression of an objective fact: that the development of productive forces in Serbia -and elsewhere in the Southern Slav area of the Balkans- has reached such a level that, unless it is crushed under the boot of the plundering Empires, it must advance towards the full constitution of a nation out of the many Slav and non-Slav nationalities This is the concrete meaning of the imprisonment of Milosevic, but this is also the way to which, in my own opinion, the weapons of political thought should point in Serbia today. N O T E S (1) This is not a matter of "pure" ideology, nor a secondary issue. It points directly to the core of the structure of productive relations, since the structures of mind are an integral part of them. Productive forces not only include the spiritual tools that make social production possible in a prominent place. It is almost a tautology -a tautology that took many millenia to discover but a tautology nevertheless- that every material, objective, basis of production _generates_ the main structures of mind that are required for such a basis to work and expand all its determinations. But these structures of mind have an autonomy of their own, and thus it is also true that in the realm of concrete social formations the battle for the mind is IN ITSELF a battle for the development of productive forces, namely for the possibility that productive forces keep developing up to the point where they need to be revolutionized. This is particularly important in places such as Yugoslavia, that is among social formations which are under attack from other formations, formations that are bent upon systematically destroying, hindering or deforming the development of productive forces within the one under attack. (2) Yes, partly constituted by former "Communists", don't batter that drum dear anti-Stalinists, I agree with you, let's stick to the matter In the best of the scenarios, these people will act as local lieutenants of a victorious imperialist order imposed on Yugoslavia by fire and murder, because independent economic development, the precondition not only for socialism but also and basically for _capitalist_ development in the full sense of the word, is precisely what the NATO thugs (the concrete expression of the core bourgeoisies in the Balkans) are decided to destroy in Yugoslavia. (3) Not without notorious setbacks. The myth of the Serbians as a country that have always been in the same political position as regards imperialist and hegemonist pressure is just that, a myth. Not only now, but even in the past, there have always existed classes within Serbia that fostered a colonial project. It is important to take this into account when analyzing class war in Serbia today, which is just a new chapter of the old national war of the Yugoslav peoples. Probably the most obvious example was that of the kingdom of Milan Obrenovic, but in the debates between Titoists and Stalinists in the aftermath of World War II we can see these contradictions appear and give sense to concrete struggle. As to Milan Obrenovic [data come from Baumont, Maurice. _L'essor industriel et l'impérialisme colonial (1878-1904)_. Paris, P.U.F., 1965], this arch-sepoy King was so fond of Austrian rule that he clung to Austria even after the semi- feudal Empire "stabilized" Bosnia (Treaty of Berlin). This military operation mobilized more than 150,000 men on the field, made the Hungarian politician Louis Kossuth predict that above these regions "a bird, prophet of death" was hovering and Count Shuvalov, less poetically, state in 1822 that "This is where shall break the spark that will put the powderkeg ablaze". While everybody realized that the Austrian advance on Bosnia was a direct blow to the Serbs, King Milan merrily blackmailed both subjects and neighbours to carry on a vaudevilesque and pompous life and stuck to the Austrian crown with all his strength. He was considered a "third rank monarch" all over Europe. During his reign, Serbia was the very expression of Ruritania. Unless we are fools, we cannot imagine that this king had no support from concrete layers of the Serbian society, particularly the most affluent ones and the traders who made a living on commerce across the Danube. In a way very characteristic of Serbian sepoys, he obtained power from foreign support, and this power was of course limited. Austria accepted him to become "King of Serbia", not "King of the Serbs" (that is, the king of a statelet not of a nation in the making). He openly became an agent of Vienna and Budapest: and waged a semi-comic, semi-tragic family war with his wife, who was pro- Russian: "he would even have accepted an annexion", remarks my source. Under Milan, Belgrade (separated from Austria-Hungary only by the Sava and the Danube) "is at the mercy of Austrian bombings. Hungarian customs overlord the economic life of this peasant democracy and the export of pork -which constitutes its main source of income. This export trade can be immediately stopped by the slightest pretext of epizootic. Milan has taken advantage of this dependency; he has had the radical leaders, hard-fought enemies of Hungary (against which they appeal to the Serbian 'external mission'), deported. One of them, Pashitsh, is condemned to death after an upheaval in 1883 [...] He will not return to Serbia until after Milan's abdication" He was also a pretext for Serbian self-deprecation: "A cultivated spirit, an agreeable talker, Milan is despised universally as a "third rank sovereign" who plunders his subjects or neighbours in order to pay for his travelling and his pleasures; this "roi d'opérette" [king of vaudevil, NG] is considered "more Levantine than Serb", a "roistaquouére" who is just interested in a merry living " And so on. This is the history that the West wants to be rewritten. I would almost predict that if they win today, within some months or years we shall see historians showing that King Milan was in fact one of the most enlightened royal heads to ever rule on Serbia, a sensible man who never attempted to follow the crazy ideas of his subjects and thus avoided war by way of cunning manoeuvering, in the best interest of Serbia. Aren't Kostunica and Djindjic the new Milan Obrenovics of our day? ------- End of forwarded message ------- N‚stor Miguel Gorojovsky [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international