Nice analisis but what is your "marxist" position on the war on the bases of this
stuff? Seems to me that some of the organizations that you are trying to work with
SUPPORT Euro-imperialism and the German/ Russian deal to bring in the United Nations
and occupy parts of Yugoslavia.
Warm regards
Bob Malecki
----- Original Message -----
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, June 07, 1999 7:07 AM
Subject: M-TH: Why Kosovan Talks Broke Down!
> Dear Comrades,
>
> So many on the left and so many Marxists give a strong impression of
> being in tatters when it comes to the twists and turns of this Western war
> against the peoples of Yugoslavia. This is because they have not paid enough
> attention to basic principles of investigation using the dialectical and
> historical materialist method.
>
> To understand the Kosovan talks breaking-up Marxists need both the empirical
> facts on the ground, as can best be got in war time, but also we need to be
> operating with a current set of global perspectives of the world economic
> situation and inter-imperialist rivalry - as they are in change themselves.
> If the laws we use do not understand events, confirm them, and to some extent
> predict them - then we must go back to the drawing board starting with the
> facts and from there draw out new or modified laws. Marxists today, because
> of our inadequacies (and WorkersFIGHT is part of this inability of Marxism to
> live up to a quality of analysis that Lenin or Trotsky generally carried out
> in their times), tend to use short-cuts and impose old laws or old formulas
> on new situations - and then find some way to muddle through, forgetting what
> they said yesterday, and tomorrow, conveniently forgetting what they said
> today.
>
> NATO DIVISIONS RESPONSIBLE
> The NATO - Serbian talks broke down because of rivalry within NATO, between
> the continental European imperialists - EU, and the United States - US. No
> one else on the left is talking about this big truth as they are more
> inadequate, it seems, than WF are. Let us examine some facts.
>
> In a WorkersFIGHT newsheet distributed on the London anti-war demonstration
> last Saturday, we argued,
>
> "The deal has all the hall marks of having been agreed between Germany and
> Russia via the Finnish President Maarti Ahtisaari: a deal that was forced
> upon Washington and London, who were kept informed of but not central to the
> negotiations pushed for by the Euroland members. Indeed, the US and UK
> wanted to continue bombing, but had to accept the deal at the expense of
> splitting NATO. Indeed, just as Euroland imperialists a year ago refused to
> join the US/UK massive military build-up in the Gulf, to bomb Iraq to pulp,
> forcing a temporary retreat by the US, so it is today, they have not found it
> to their own imperialist designs for the US and UK to be leading the show in
> 'their own back yard.' "
>
> So, in the early hours of this morning, when the military wings of NATO, led
> by the British (as lap-dogs to the US military) emerged from the 'peace
> talks', Sir Mike Jackson as NATO spokesman used Thatcherite language, "There
> is no alternative ... but to intensify the bombing ." , etc, etc, and the
> Serb military are accused of intransigence, when in reality, it is the US/UK
> leaders of NATO who are against any peace. Later, the Serb military, quite
> correctly, accused NATO of moving the goal-posts.
>
> And so the EU, Finnish, German, Russian peace-plan is quickly snuffed-out,
> intensifying considerably the tensions within NATO, as Euroland countries
> know fully now what is going on. Ironically NATOs Mike Jackson spoke this
> morning of major differences between the Yugoslav politicians and military as
> responsible for the talks failure, when in fact the big divisions are nearer
> home. So we would say, now, as the massacres against the Serb and Kosovan
> people continues, listen carefully to the comments of Germany, Italy, France,
> the EU in general and Russia - as the differences with the US/UK intensify.
>
> It was no surprise to WF that talks broke down. Our newsheet handed out on
> the demo on Saturday had the headline, "Is it Really Peace?"
>
> Yours for Marxism
> Steve Myers - WorkersFIGHT
>
> ps - below I have added two of the articles we put in the WF newsheet handed
> out last Saturday.
>
>
> ANOTHER STEP TO WORLD WAR THREE
> What is the West up to?
>
> During this 72 day onslaught of Western bombing against Yugoslavia's peoples,
> the US & Britain have simultaneously been bombing Iraq every single day! John
> Pilger fumes about the Western media silence on this in theGuardian.
>
> Floodgates of Western rivalry open
> To correctly understand the links in the bombing wars against Iraq and
> Yugoslavia it is necessary to investigate the fierce rivalries, often hidden
> or glossed over in public, between the US, Britain, France, Germany and Italy
> (Russia, Japan and China are quite secondary in all this) and trace these
> rivalries over the last decade. Overleaf, we show how the mass suffering and
> ethnic cleansing of the Iraqi and Yugoslav peoples can be proven to be mainly
> sourced or triggered in power games between these Western countries - that
> have little to do with what is going on internally in Iraq or Yugoslavia.
> In February 1998, WorkersFIGHT paper's front page the headline "Gulf:
> 'Opening Gambit' of WWIII?", warned the following:
> "In time to come, historians could well point to the military build up in the
> Gulf as a tentative, 'opening gambit' in a staggered build-up to World War
> Three. It backfired leading to US/UK isolation, causing a retreat to
> re-organise for a new onslaught in the oil regions of the Middle-East and
> Caspian Sea."
> So, what significance do these western rivalries have now? Indeed,
> the collapse of Stalinism in eastern Europe a decade ago saw the end of the
> cold-war system of relatively 'peaceful co-existence'; and of the 'Communist'
> threat. It unleashed decades of pent-up European imperialist frustration and
> jealousy at the successful global domination of the US and its mighty $
> dollar.
> Suddenly, the decades-long slow progress towards European economic
> and political unity, led by Germany and France - with the US's little lapdog
> the not-so-'Great'Britain continually putting obstacles and objections in
> this development - took on new life. Germany quickly named Berlin as its
> capital once more and, with France, made immediate moves to enlarge the EU,
> first across Scandanavia and then it first layer eastwards to the Czech
> Republic, Hungary and Poland.
> This new geography positions Germany at the centre of a growing
> European super-power. German and French big business (and some British and
> Italian) foresee a new advanced and enormously enlarged capitalist Europe,
> much bigger than the US in land and population sizes. Suddenly the EU
> internal market is twice the size of the US. European politicians are talking
> of forcing-in the Euro in Eastern Europe; about challenging US global
> military dominance; and of ending the enforced tribute that west European
> countries make in terms of economic and political 'pay-back' concessions at
> home and globally to the US.
>
> US needs Europe divided
> The US could not go forward with its global plan of imposing (and
> keeping) itself as the one super-imperialist power without the support of
> Tony Blair's Britain to keep some of the big West European countries in
> check. British support was not enough when, during autumn 1997, they failed
> to get Germany, France, Italy, etc. on board to help bomb Iraq during their
> massive Gulf military build-up. Britain became isolated in Europe and with
> the US had to back down from the bombing then!
> In recent times those sections of British capitalism mostly tied up
> with EU trade are already a majority of British trade and finance, and are
> growing ever-greater and faster. But the political and military system of
> Britain is still tied to the US who must not allow Europe to bloc with Russia
> (and maybe China, India and even Japan later on) in an all-powerful Eurasian
> bloc. WorkersFIGHT in our Spring 1998 paper wrote:
> "All world politics today is conditioned by growing inter-imperialist rivalry
> and the further re-division of the world by three major regional powers:
> particularly by US attempts to stop Europe in the first place, but also Asia,
> merging into unified imperialist rivals."
> The US idea of 'globalisation' is for one unified US-led NATO /
> IMF-World Bank / World Trade Organisation (with a United Nations that is
> subservient or ignored) in a period of deepening global economic crisis -
> carrying out a plan of enforced super-exploitation and pauperisation of the
> majority of the world's working class, the urban poor and small farmers in
> the Majority World, with the EU divided or playing second fiddle to the tune
> of Yankee-Doodle.
> The collapse of the cold-war era also meant adjustments and
> alterations to the dominant system of imperialist rule imposed by the US
> after WW2. With the USSR, and soon China, both vying to support all sorts of
> anti-imperialist liberation movements, direct military colonial rule by the
> west became difficult. Semi-colonial rule, embraced and bought-off large
> sections of petty-bourgeois nationalists to help in the super-exploitation of
> 'their own' people; and brutal 'home-grown' dictatorships backed by the west,
> were the norm. Now the 'communist' threat is supposedly gone, the kid gloves
> are off, and we are in midst of a global re-defining and re-distribution of
> power, sorting out which imperialists get what, and how they get it.
>
> Western Crisis is the Driving Force
> At the end of this century - much of the global population is now literate;
> former Stalinist states have many skilled workers where advanced technology
> can be copied easily; the world is now an internet/web village - it is not
> only the 'Asian tigers' that can advance their economies fast, but almost
> every country.
> This is a capitalist world whose long term economic crisis is based
> upon over-capacity in production of goods, a world whose general fall in the
> rate of profits since the collapse of the gold-standard in the early 1970s,
> means that if many other other countries become 'economically independent',
> become developing, exporting countries; then the US, EU, Japanese crisis will
> worsen. This is a non-starter for the US and also the EU. Karl Marx and
> Frederick Engels with their 'Communist Manifesto'; Lenin with his
> 'Imperialism', read truer today than when written.
> This global crisis is the reason why, a decade after the collapse of
> the Stalinist states in Central and East Europe and in Russia, the central
> task of both the US and EU imperialists - and this is where they agree - is
> to quell any mass opposition in these 'developing' countries; is to stabilise
> whilst smothering and/or bombing these regions productive ability back into
> the last century, into semi-colonial or protectorate colonial status or
> worse; is to make the masses of these regions pay most for the deepening
> Western economic crisis.
> But the rivalries between the US and EU are very real, very powerful
> and have been very tragic this decade for all Yugoslavs and Iraqis - see
> 'Western Rivalry in the 1990's' on this page. Imperialist rivlary always
> exhibits its inherently institutionalised racism in the treatment of its
> victims. The reason for moves to ever-increasing European financial,
> economic, political and military unity, is precisely so the Euro-bosses can
> challenge the US effectively in the Western plunder and rape of the rest of
> the globe. The banana and beef trade wars are merely surface phenomena.
> The banana farmers and plantation workers are merely pawns in a
> imperialist chess game in which their livelihoods are irrelevant. While over
> a billion people (1 in 6 residents of Earth) live in extreme poverty and
> another 2 billion live near to it, these imperialist blocs impose racist
> immigration laws to restrict the free movement of non-white labour from the
> economically devastaed Majority World. There will be no right to escape the
> poverty, war and enironmental damage which imperialism has caused in the
> first place.
> All inter-imperialist wars begin with trade wars and genocidal
> skirmishes. The bombing and slaughter of Serbs and Kosovar civilians with
> uranium-tipped weapons shows that their lives are expendable in the drive for
> imperialist profits. The story of wars against Iraq and Yugoslavia are best
> explained by tracing western divisions this last decade. See this page.
> Further, it is not just a question of whether the war will spread elsewhere
> in Yugoslavia, but how it spreads towards the Caspian basin energy resources,
> and that means to Russia! See, The Next Western Wars on this page.
> The only force that can stop the imperialist drive to World War is
> the international working class. The first task is that workers in Britain
> start smashing up the sectarianism that dominates much of the behaviour of
> the left, that we start co-operating and fighting together on a militant
> class basis - and that means each of us in our own organisations forcing this
> to happen. Only an urgent turn to international workers solidarity in
> practice (and not merely words) with Balkan, East European and Russian
> workers, can help bring them and us together - workers of the world unite -
> it is urgent, and there is no alternative! END
>
>
> SOLIDARITY WITH BALKAN WORKERS - DONATE NOW
> The Alfa Romeo workers in Milan organised by the Italian rank and file
> workers coordination committee - the COBAS - have launched a campaign in
> solidarity with the workers of the giant Zastava car factory at Kragujevac in
> Serbia which was bombed by NATO on April 9th despite being 'protected' by a
> human shield of occupying workers - several of whom were killed and hundreds
> injured.
> The 20,000 workers at the factory and the 60,000 who work for
> suppliers are now unemployed. In a statement COBAS says
> "Every thing that exists in Yugoslav territory has now become a military
> target. We will not be told the true number of civilian dead and wounded in
> these 40 days of mad bombing unitl the ultimate massacre. But we already know
> that hundreds of factories, bridges, dwellings, raliroads,
> telecommunications, electrical plants, aqueducts have already been razed to
> the ground. Hundreds of thousands of families are reduced to misery and the
> infrastructure for sustaining every human convenience is in ever more
> jeopardy. Devastated refineries and chemicacal factories leak poisonous waste
> into the soil, air and water, which will spread death across an ever wider
> area. The illegal use of depleted uranium shells will contaminate entire
> generations. There is no possible motivation in the world that could justify
> such a massacre of a population... And meanwhile the stock market rises.."
> A Spartacist League statement says, "The Zastava workers were
> engaged in a hard-fought strike against the Milosevic government just two and
> a half years ago. From the most basic demand of "We want bread!" to "We are
> Zastava! The factory is ours!" , these workers fought the impoverishment that
> capitalist counterrrevolution has brought to this former deformed workers
> state. In their drive to dominate the world for imperialist exploitation, the
> last thing NATO forces will tolerate is a class struggle fight by the workers
> against the capitalist Milosevic regime." (11th May)
> COBAS aims to raise £351,865 (one billion Italian Lire) for the
> Zastava workers. WorkersFIGHT supports COBAS's initative and commends the ICL
> for bringing it to our attention. We urge all comrades to show their
> solidarity by sending cheques, money orders etc payable to 'Cobas Alfa
> Romeo', to:
> Gruppo Consigliare Cobas Alfa Romeo
> Regione Lombardia
> Via Ugo Bassi, 2
> 20159 Milano, Italy
> Send solidarity messages to:
> Fax: (+39) 02 93 92 85 29
> END
>
>
>
>
> --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
>
--- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
