Balkans war and the left
As always, the advent of war has thrown into sharp relief the theoretical and programmatic differences between leftwing groups. The positions they have taken can broadly be divided into four categories.
First, at one extreme, we have those 'socialists' (in reality social-chauvinists and social-imperialists) who, like their counterparts in the Second International in 1914, have come out on the side of their 'own' bourgeoisie in supporting the Nato offensive against Serbia. Secondly, closely linked to them are what we might call the red-brown 'Yugoslav defencists', whose political necrophilia (in its Trotskyite and Stalinist variants) and whose philistine anti-imperialism leads them to defend the Milosevic regime simply on the grounds that it presides over what was once a 'workers' state', a state now under attack by imperialism. Thirdly, there are those socialists who lament the catastrophe of war, but whose theoretical position objectively constitutes a capitulation to bourgeois liberalism (they are social-pacifists). Fourthly, at the other extreme, there are those groups who, to a greater or lesser extent, have adopted a principled, authentically Marxist approach to the war, condemning both the barbarous Milosevic regime and the attempt by imperialism to impose its New World Order on the Balkans, and calling for Kosovar independence.
The position of the Yugoslav defencists, as exemplified by the Marxist Workers' Group (USA), has already been analysed in this paper (April 8 1999). Sad to say, the approach taken by our home-grown variety turns out to be even less coherent, even more despicable, than that of the Trotskyite MWG. Foremost among them we find that dwindling dads' army of unreconstructed 'tankies' that calls itself the New Communist Party. No statement is too absurd, no lie too risible, to repeated in the pages of The New Worker. According to the NCP paper the mass exodus of ethnic Albanians from Kosova is to be explained by the fact that "Both sides are clearing the lines of civilians - Nato wants refugees lifted out of the border areas as soon as possible and Yugoslavia is almost certainly concerned to prevent a potential fifth column of Kosovar separatists remaining in Kosova to assist Nato forces. Nato has itself created the humanitarian disaster that it blames on Milosevic." (The New Worker April 9) The million or so men, women and children who have fled Kosova in fear of their lives are dismissed as "potential fifth columnists" - no mention of the systematic terror, murder, arson and looting carried out by the Serbian army and special forces. It is Nato's bombing alone, according to the NCP, which has led to the greatest mass exodus in Europe since World War II. Hence, its only slogan is "Stop Nato's war". The other issue at the heart of the conflict - namely, the legitimate aspiration of Kosova's majority ethnic Albanian population to independence - is totally ignored. All that matters is the territorial integrity and unity of "Yugoslavia".
The Communist Party of Britain takes a similar red-brown line: "Nato's military intervention on the side of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army will encourage all kinds of nationalism and chauvinism and will fuel other separatist movements throughout the Balkans." It has evidently escaped the attention of the CPB that the Milosevic regime is itself the very embodiment of "nationalism and chauvinism", expressed in terms of mass terror inflicted on the "separatist" Kosovar population. Instead of dealing with the real politics of the Serbian war, its Morning Star regurgitates extracts from the Belgrade daily paper Borba, to the effect that Nato's bombing offensive, by causing damage to the Gracanica convent and "several hundred monuments of Serbian medieval art ... marks the dusk of European civilisation." The destruction of historical monuments is, of course, regrettable, but readers will have been surprised to learn that Serbia was the fountainhead of "European civilisation". Yet more bizarrely, the paper's report of "widespread opposition to Nato aggression" cites protests from the Serbian Association of Composers, the Macedonian Football Association, and the Association of Greek Sports Journalists (Morning Star April 5). No wonder people find it difficult to take the paper - or the CPB - seriously.
In the event of Russia entering the war, we can have few doubts about how the NCP and CPB will react: workers will be called upon to defend 'mother Russia', the 'former workers' state' par excellence, even though the post-Soviet Kremlin is nothing more than a thieves' kitchen.
At first sight, it might seem unjust to place the International Bolshevik Tendency (Britain) in the category of Yugoslav defencists. After all, the IBT denounces Milosevic's chauvinism, refuses to "defend the 'territorial integrity' of the existing Serbian state" and condemns ethnic cleansing. But when it comes to Kosova, and particularly the KLA, the IBT comrades get cold feet: "While we offer no political support to the bourgeois-nationalist KLA, we nonetheless side with them militarily. [But] if ... the KLA should become subordinated to, or begin to operate essentially as an auxiliary of, the Nato aggressors, our attitude would change to one of favouring the victory of the Yugoslav army" (Marxist Bulletin April). From the carefully worded conditional clause (no doubt dictated via the internet from New Zealand), we can deduce where the IBT's real political sympathies lie - that is, with the former "deformed workers' state" of Yugoslavia. Hence it is no accident to that the IBT's first slogan is "Defend Yugoslavia!"
Although it argues more cogently than its 'official communist' counterparts, the IBT's heart seems, in the final analysis, to be in Belgrade.
The IBT's document opportunistically seeks to cover all contingencies but predictably ends up in confusion. How can it advocate independence for Kosova (as one slogans states) while at the same time threatening to change its position to one of "favouring the victory of the Yugoslav army"? It seems that in the final analysis plumping for 'the lesser evil' will come out on top over the independent working class position of revolutionary defeatism. And the democratic rights of the Kosovar people will be the first losers. This question, and the related problem of how we should view the KLA, constitutes an acid test of the correct approach to the Serbian war.
Turning to the social chauvinists, our locus classicus has got to be 'comrade' Ken Livingstone's speech in parliament, summarised in the April issue of Socialist Campaign Group News. 'Red Ken' argues that Yugoslavia is "a totally artificial state" (historically, the same could be said for most states) and that its creation in the aftermath of World War I brought together people "who shared no common religion and no common language" (the same could be said of contemporary Scotland, Ireland, and Wales). On this basis, Livingstone implicitly suggests that the Yugoslav state had no right to exist. He has no problems whatsoever in condoning the imperialists' attempt to redivide the Balkans to suit their own designs. Except, of course, he denies that the present war has anything at all to do with "western or Yankee imperialist attempts to establish control of the region".
Livingstone told the Commons: "It is the duty of the nations that have the military power to protect individual communities from systematic genocide by evil regimes. Where the west has the power and uses it wisely, I will support that intervention." Livingstone's speech, no doubt intended to convey the message that he really is 'one of us', must have been music to the ears of prime minister Blair. It is the authentic voice of vile opportunism and class treachery, the epitome of what social chauvinism means in practice. Here is a 'socialist' openly and brazenly backing imperialism in fulfilling its 'duty' to that totally spurious entity known as 'the international community'. Should we be surprised by Livingstone's loathsome, lickspittle approach to the imperialists? Certainly not. He boasted in the same speech that he was, "along with Mrs Thatcher", one of the first MPs to advocate air strikes against Milosevic as long ago as 1989.
Livingstone is not the only 'leftwing' member of the parliamentary Labour Party to support Nato's offensive. Harry Barnes and Harry Cohen, two other members of the Socialist Campaign Group, voice their support in the same issue of Socialist Campaign Group News. The former tells us that "there is no other honourable way in which we can seek to protect the Albanians in Kosova". Note the "we". The latter informs us that military intervention is "a source of great sadness" and that war makes him sick. Not sick enough to stop him supporting the Nato bombing however.
So much for the 'socialists' on Labour's left wing. What about their ostensible opposites in the labour movement, the social-pacifists? Here, sad to say, we encounter the collective voice of the Socialist Workers Party. Take the April 10 issue of Socialist Worker, in which the Serbian war is covered on no fewer than eight pages. On the front page, over the slogan "Stop the bombing", the SWP wails that "War leads to catastrophe". Is that a general statement? The comrades appear to have forgotten that it was World War I that ushered in the Bolshevik Revolution and that a civil war of liberation followed. The paper bemoans the fact that Blair and Clinton have failed to deliver on their promise that the war in Serbia was going to bring an end to the "horror" in Kosova. In the page-two 'Fact file', we are told how the money being spent on bombing could be used to alleviate the problems of starving people across the world. Page three aptly shows us a picture of the bourgeois pacifist Bruce Kent (next to Paul Foot) under the slogan "No war", with further criticism of the fact that "Nato air strikes have failed to produce any positive result whatsoever". Are we to assume that a successful Nato offensive, had it come about, would have been in some way positive?
So far, so bad. But what about the politics, one might ask? These are tucked away in the 'Comment' column penned by the SWP's international secretary, comrade Alex Callinicos - and pretty dire politics they are. For example, comrade Callinicos maintains that, "Arming the Kosova Liberation Army and backing Kosovan independence would make the situation worse." The problem with the KLA is that "such forces can turn into Frankenstein's monsters ... An Albanian nationalist army, hardened by war and enjoying mass support ... could threaten the integrity of half a dozen states throughout the region." Leaving aside the absurd exaggeration in the last sentence, since when has it been the job of socialists to concern themselves with the "integrity" of bourgeois states? Our concern is for people, not lines on a map. Callinicos's whole article reads like a pacifistic think piece drawn up by the likes of Bruce Kent.
The demand for Kosovar independence, and the right of the majority Albanian population to use arms in the pursuit of this goal are central to the whole issue. That the KLA is composed of petty bourgeois nationalist elements is true, but beside the point. What matters is the justness of the Kosovars' and KLA's political aspirations in the face of Serb state terrorism. On all eight pages of its April 10 coverage, the Socialist Worker bemoans the "catastrophe" brought about by the Serbian war, but does so in the language of pacifism, not in the language of socialism.
The scale of Serb oppression and the absence of a mass socialist movement amongst the working class in Serbia mean than an abstract call for self-determination is now completely insufficient. Support for Kosovar independence and KLA resistance, coupled with implacable opposition to the Nato air war, must underpin the left's attitude. The KLA is entitled to get its weapons wherever it can. Our criticisms of the KLA's positive view of Nato does not contradict our support for its democratic struggle.
In contrast with some of the groups quoted above, Action for Solidarity has a healthier approach. Like the CPGB, the Alliance for Workers' Liberty writers in Action point out that Nato's war aims and the imperialists' strategic plan for the region do not take the rights of the Kosovars as their starting point. Far from it. In the imperialists' eyes, an independent Kosova was viewed as a source of instability in the Balkans. What the imperialists wanted was a 'safe' Kosova, enjoying some measure of notional autonomy, while remaining within the orbit of a 'sanitised' Yugoslav rump state firmly under the western thumb. Correctly, the AWL comrades call for a free and independent Kosova, although this should not in our view be conditional in any way on a "socialist federation of Balkan peoples" (April). Nevertheless, like us, they have no qualms about supporting an armed KLA as the only realistic means whereby the Kosovars can exercise their "right to self-defence from Serb chauvinist ethnic cleansing". Along with us also, they also condemn the position of 'Yugoslav defencists' like the NCP and CPB, whose philistine politics see Serbia as a former (or "moribund", to use the adjective adopted by Workers Power) workers' state, or an oppressed country fighting imperialism. However, the AWL's description of Serbia as "a minor, local imperialist power, of a primitive, ethnic tribalist type" is questionable, to say the least.
The Socialist, in similar vein to Action for Solidarity calls for "an independent socialist Kosova as part of a socialist confederation of Balkan states" (April 9). All very well and good as propaganda. However, our support for those "struggling against all the region's despots and for democratic rights" must not be dependent on their attitude to "socialism".
The fight for democracy, if conducted using revolutionary methods, in alliance with the international workers' movement, can open up the possibility of the working class winning hegemony, thus placing the question of state power on the agenda. It goes without saying that such a trajectory is directly in opposition to imperialist attempts to impose its control.
The only principled working class position is for the defeat of Nato's schemes, an end to its air war, and independence for Kosova.
Michael Malkin
