Mark Jones had compared Milosevic to Castro on the Marxism list, which prompted this comment from Dennis Grammenos. Mark's reply follows. > Forgive me, it's early in the morning and I just had to double-check to > make sure that I read your message right. > > Solidarity, > Dennis > Then this is your wake up call, Dennis, and anyone else who is unsure to the point of pusillanimity about the issues at. There is no room for hesitation, no space for Pilate-like 'plague on both houses' fastidiousness. There have been several turning-points in the story of Yugoslavia's collapse when Slobodan Milosevic might have gone the way of other post-communist leaders who adapted to social collapse by becoming a new bourgeoisie. It did not happen. Mostly this is because the 1990s are a period of capitalist decline which produced a historical logic which pressed on the peoples and elites of the defeated states with terrible force but which in Yugoslavia served to radicalise and entrench opposition to the West instead of serving to enforce social and political capitulation. But this process was helped by the presence of a leader, Slobodan Milosevic, who never sold his people out whatever the temptations, was never a Balkans Boris Yeltsin, who showed how a small country can successfully defy the diktat of great powers. Decadent, entropic capitalism in the 1990s totally lacks the buoyancy and accumulated reserves which world capitalism enjoyed half a century ago. Its deep crisis is becoming a political crisis even in the European metropole. This is the meaning of the Kosovo- Metohia war. There has been no scope for vast Marshall-Plan type reconstruction programmes for shattered East European economies. Even when the money has been forthcoming, as in the ex-GDR, rebuilt by the FRG at a cost of at least $100bn a year for almost a decade, the results have been mixed at best. As Louis Proyect put it to me in a conversation the other day, the problem in Yugoslavia is that the cake suddenly got much smaller, and people began fighting over the spoils, not co-operating together to increase them. For decades Belgrade had cross-subsidised backward regions like Kosovo-Metohia, transferring wealth from the richer western republics such as Slovenia. The Albanians in K-M were the principal beneficiaries of this redistributive process, which Serbs like all Yugoslav citizens contributed to. When socialism collapsed this equalitarian redistributional politics collapsed with it, and thus the social basis of the Yugoslav state. Today, greedy Slovene and Croat elites who no longer wished to subside the burdensome Albanians of Kosovo, shed crocodile tears on their behalf and applaud Nato raids on what until a few years ago was part of their own homeland. After 1989 all the countries of Central Europe rushed into the embrace of Germany and the EU. Apart from Poland, which after a decade is more or less back where it started, all without exception have lost out. Hungary, the Czechs and Slovaks, Romania, Bulgaria, the Baltic states, all have lower living standards and smaller economies now than they did under socialism. Powerful redistributive forces worked to impoverish the masses while enrich the new political and business elites. They at least have a continuing interest in being part of the European capitalist economic and security system. Incidentally, the spectacular collapse of the fSU tends to disguise just how bad things are in Central Europe. But they are very bad indeed. According to the OECD Czech GDP fell by half a billion dollars between 1990-1998. It's still better than the E European average (the incidence of poverty in Eastern Europe - as defined by a daily income of $4 or less, measured in 1990 PPP$ - increased sevenfold between 1988 and 1994, from 14 million persons to more than 119 million persons (UNDP figures).). But probably they've done better than Hungary (25% fall in industrial production since 1989) Estonia (4.5% average annual DECREASE in GNP, 1983-93) or Poland (European 'tiger' economy Poland achieved a staggering 0.1% increase in PPP GDP, 1983-93, all World Bank figures), or have they? Correct me if I'm wrong, but even the Czechs, who ought to have benefited from being a small, subsidizable satellite of German capitalism, have not done so. Instead they've got the following problems among others: A cumulative external trade deficit 1990-97 of $9bn; increases in rents and the price of electricity, gas and heating, announced on July 1st 1998, which put two-thirds of the Czech population (2m households) on the poverty line. Unemployment has now climbed from zero to 7% (350,000), and is set to worsen further. Interest rates forced through by the Czech Republic's IMF 'managers' may cause indebtdeness and/or failure of 40-60% of Czech enterprises this year. Median wages and pensions are lower than in 1990 - when economic transformation started - and the average tax burden is higher. Average wage is $300 a month, but 62% of workers get wages lower than the average and only 5% get wages higher than $600 per month. As in Russia, privatisation scams fostered by the West created a new category of super-rich. Meanwhile the Czech republic remains the most polluted in central Europe. The IMF/Government has cancelled subsidies for household heating, electricity and gas. Decreases in wages and structural adjustment programmes mean that tens of thousands of public sector workers stand to lose their jobs; hospitals, schools and railways are being closed down; unemployment is mushrooming. A recent poll showed a majority agreed with the proposition that 'things were better under Communism'. As for voucher privatisation, as World Bank chariman Joe Stiglitz put it, ' there are strong incentives not only for private rent seeking on the part of management, but for taking actions which increase the scope for such rent seeking. In the Czech Republic, the bold experiment with voucher privatization seems to have foundered on precisely these issues.' Meaning in English, the greedy sods were told it was OK to rip off the state and use pivatisation as a screen, so that's just what they did, leaving WB and IMF types to sob crocodile tears but not to actually do anything to stop the rot until their own fingers got burnt, as eg Soros''s did in the August 1998 GKO melt down. And the Czechs were just as unholy as the Russians, as even Stiglitz acknowledges. The Czech republic's annual chronic trade deficits will condition all its future options. The integration of the 'Near European East' - that is to say, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia, will be a painful process. For a long time to come, the balance of trade and the balance on current account will be negative, a powerful force in the motivation of economic and political nationalism against the West. The USSR fell when it ran out of oil. Believe it or not, the same fundamental equations still apply to Central European states. The 'extractive economy' is a term used to describe a situation, when exorbitant energy consumption is used to produce a shrinking or stagnating, or at least not very rapidly growing amount of welfare. Czecho, Hungary, Poland and even the ex-GDR play precisely such an 'extractive role' in the emerging cycle of the world economy. East Europe, unable to reap the benefits of technical progress and being forced to export what there is, is thrown back to the old patterns of the extractive economy. No major advances in the energy/income balance are in sight. We witness a heavy or even increased reliance of the export sector on the extractive branches of the economy, and the inability to change the price mechanism, partially because losses in the terms of trade and the 'scissors' of lagging (legal) exports and rising imports dictate that the urban and rural poor cannot pay higher energy bills. The disequilibria involved here are mind-boggling. In 1961 it took the US economy 180kg of oil-equivalent to produce $100 of GNP. By 1991 the energy requirement for $100 GNP had fallen to only 36kg oil-equivalent. In Japan the figues are 145 kg (1961) and 13 kg (1991). In the core EU the energy-input per $100/GNP fell from 165 to 19 in the same period. But in 1991 Poland still required 155kg of oil-equivalent to produce $100 of GNP. Since 1991 energy consumption and industrial production have fallen sharply. So have living standards. The disparity in living standards between the ex-communist states of central Europe and the core-EU is if anything growing larger. Hazlett's pseudo-optimism (he can't really believe what he is saying) is not just anti-Russian, it is a hoax. The nature of the hoax is this: Hazlett and his ilk pretend that the systemic inefficiency of the communist-mismanaged, high-energy-using east, will be replaced by western efficiency. But the truth is that when the rustbelt is closed out, NOTHING will take its place. The dirty word which describes the process is deflation, the most savage in the history of capitalism. The Czechs like the Balts are victims as are the Russians. No-one is telling the truth, of course. The CIA factbook acknowledges the chronic trade deficits of Central Europe, which will cripple those economies -- but says for example of Poland that altho: "trade and current account balances officially are in deficit ... in fact both have comfortable surpluses because of large, unrecorded sales to cross-border visitors.' Yeah, sure, cross-border visitors. Unrecorded sales. According to some estimates the Italian Mafia launders $100000 *per hour* in Poland (Polityka, 16, 1998). Of course, these states weren't communist in anything but name; by 1989 they were already integrated as dependent formations within the world economy. But tearing away the 'thin and squalid veil' of 'real socialism' away has not added to the sum total of happiness. Yugoslavia faced the same problems but the differentia specifica of its history (the facts of Titoism, its ethnic mix, history of Balkan wars etc) produced the well-known qualitatively different intensity of collapse. The result is that the Serbs in particular -- the core nationality of the Yugoslav state -- have been losers on too large a scale for Serbia to be integrated into the system except by force, as is now happening. This is the underlying logic of events. This is the reality which Milosevic and the Serbian leadership inherited and only with the passage of time came to fully understand. They could have gone belly-up and formed the kind of craven, quisling government of national suicide which Yeltsin has given Russia. But they did not. Therefore, as Louis Proyect rightly says, the Kosovo war is morally equivalent to the Battle of Stalingrad. This is the point at which the working classes and their social allies in the defeated and destroyed socialist world, said "Enough! This far and no further!". For this they are entitled ot receive every kind of imaginable and unimaginable punishment. Like the American Indians, they can expect to receive the most ferocious, genocidal onslaught and it will not end when the war does. Embargoes and blockades will continue to throttle devastated Yugoslavia just as it has Iraq. Nevertheless, a people determined to fight, to defend themselves and their motherland, can never be defeated and the Serbs will not be defeated. And the same merciless logic of events will continue to push Yugoslavia and its leadership in the direction it has already set out on. We talk about a strategic alliance of India, China and Russia, based on their self-interest and on opposition to US imperialism. Such an alliance cannot ultimately be about defending and extending capitalism, but about destroying it. That a small state like Yugoslavia and a small nation like the Serbs, should play a role in catalysing such a process is a great thing and one to reflect on, celebrate and wish well. Long Live Yugoslavia! Mark Jones Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
