At 04:15 PM 5/21/99 -0400, Louis wrote: >One of the things that I didn't have time (or space) to get into in my reply to Solidarity was this question of whether Yugoslavia is socialist or not, and what this has to do with the war. To play it safe, I called it a "mixed economy". Do folks remember when the last time so much firepower was directed toward a government that only had a "mixed economy"? Yes, it was Nicaragua. Not only are there analogies with the Miskitu problem, there is an analogy with the sort of threat that Nicaragua represented. US imperialism can not tolerate national independence, especially of an economic nature. Central America was the model for Eastern Europe. In order to set up a chain of maquiladora zones where multinational corporations can get cheap, well-educated labor to produce commodities for Walmart, it needs to break the resistance of socialist and nationalist political formations. The FSLN was an obstacle, as is Milosevic's JUL party. While we are for the sort of blemish-free socialism that Trotskyists advocate, we are also for national economic development without outside interference. Trotsky defended the Cardenas regime in Mexico, which was regarded with the same sort of contempt we reserve for Milosevic and Saddem-Hussein today.< The FSLN and the JUL may both be obstacles to the impositions of "a chain of maquiladora zones where multinational corporations can get cheap, well-educated labor to produce commodities for Walmart," but my reading is that they are different _kinds_ of obstacles. The push for "national economic development without outside interference" can be like Mussolini's (or Sadam Hussein's) or it might be like Cardenas' (which I see as a paternalistic populism). All of those seem to be different versions of national capitals trying to compete to get a bigger chunk of the world pie rather than trying to oppose Imperialism as a global system. On the other hand, though the FSLN had elements of nationalist capitalism, it also had a socialist side, mobilizing peasants and workers to fight for their own goals. BTW, whether or not Serbia is socialist in the sense of "mobilizing peasants and workers to fight for their own goals" (and I would guess that it isn't doing so) is not especially relevant. That is, even if Milosevic is simply playing the Mussolini game, the attacks should end. The US/NATO is attacking Serbia contrary to any kind of international law, applying the wrong strategy and the wrong tactics, in a dictatorial and ultimatum-based way, and isn't fighting against Milosevic's Mussolini-ite (fascist) side (since the US/NATO favor such policies elsewhere in the world) but against his country's independence. The attack is based on the proposition that "we" (the US/NATO) are better despots than Milosevic. The US/NATO want to be the world Mussolini. BTW2, I don't see my goal as a socialist to promote "state ownership of the means of production" (Barkley's definition of socialism) unless it also involves popular-democratic control of the state. In fact, I would emphasize the latter over the former: state control of the means of production is only a tool by which the workers can control their lives. The goal is for them to control their lives. State control is only a means to that end and not always the best one. (This gets into a long argument, which I'll skip.) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html Bombing DESTROYS human rights. Ground troops make things worse. US/NATO out of Serbia!
