I agree with Rob that NATO and the U.S. are the fascist danger in this war. The U.S.
neo-colonial empire is built in part of many fascist governments that are fully
fascist because of their connection to the reactionary sector or military industrial
complex of transnational finance capital. The U.S. military has established or
fostered numerous brutal regimes or terrorist gangs around the world for decades - in
Korea, Indonesia, Dominican Republic, Chile, Panama, Iraq,, just to name a few. One of
its neo-colonial modus operandi is to work through comprador fascisms. The U.S. in the
Balkans is Big Daddy of fascisms about to lay another one on them.
Charles Brown
>>> Rob Schaap <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 04/15/99 12:22PM >>>
G'day Thaxists,
>>> He then magnifies ethnic
>>> cleasing and calls it genocide and fascism. This is to demean real
>>> genocide and fascism, both of which are the product of imperialism,
>>> not tiny isolated and beleaguered states like Yugoslavia.
I agree with Dave here. Where finance capital can not hold sway via the
formal rhetoric of liberal democracy (itself a notion inextricably tied to
that of the sovereign state), it must rearrange and redeploy the political
mechanism so it more directly and nakedly disciplines labour and markets on
finance capital's behalf. That's from when I learned my stock definitions
during my short dalliance with the Resistance mob back in the late
seventies, anyway.
On that account, NATO is acting much more the fascist than is Milosovic,
whom I read more as an opportunist looking to fan some pre-modern cleavages
to replace the identities dissolved by the fall of the wall. I see a
pre-emptive strike at Russia's buffer zone, a warning against the less
tractable Russian elements in times of political economic crisis (remember,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were similar warnings - a couple of hundred thousand
dead was, as Albright has since established as US doctrine, 'a price worth
paying'), and - most importantly - a destruction of a potentially
destabilising rogue state such that it'll need to accept any conditions the
IMF cares to exact if it is to survive. Yugoslavia is being rudely yanked
into the province of international finance capital. By violence, and
without any pretension of democratic process. That's pretty close to
fascism, eh?
And genocide isn't the word. 80 000 ethnic Albanians in Belgrade would
attest to that. This is a civil war marked, as civil wars so often are, by
guerilla tactics and counter-insurgency excesses. There are, no doubt, a
few genocidal racists involved, but they're everywhere. We can not explain
phenomena of this scale with recourse to a few nutters, I think. It is more
in our tradition to assume we're looking at a systemic explanation for why
such irrational obscenities can come about through people acting rationally,
surely?
>>Are you really suggesting that genocide and fascism can not take place
>>within "tiny isolated and beleaguered states"?
I reckon Rwanda was a genocidal situation, and you can't get much more tiny,
isolated and beleaguered than Rwanda. It wasn't fascist though. My
impression is that capitalist relations did not predominate throught Rwanda
(beyond Kigali anyway). On my account (and that of all the Frankfurters),
fascism can emanate only from capitalism-in-crisis.
>>(this might be important for how we interpret the possibility of change in
>>some former parts of the USSR which are now "tiny" and "isolated" ...).
There, I think fascism is a leading contender. Capitalism-in-crisis with
knobs on.
>Yes, I think Dave needs to specify how Bonapartism -- the apparent solution
>of intolerable tensions between the main classes by a "strongman"/military
>regime that seems to float above the classes -- is somehow excluded from
>states by reason of size.
That could be the go in Russia, too. Sad, innit.
Hugh writes:
>Our task is to build a working
>class alternative nationally and internationally to challenge this
>inadequate and certainly murderous leadership so that once
>self-determination is achieved we are able to provide real solutions
>instead of letting these bastards fuck us over.
'Once self-determination is achieved'? The best they can hope for as far as
I can see is the status of minute client state - and even that only
formally, as they'll be constitutionally bound, 'for their protection', to
NATO 'oversight' - like Bosnia is.
>Self-determination, that is the solution of the national question (at least
>as a real possibility, as a political and programmatic goal) is absolutely
>necessary before the majority of Kosovars will be able to see that their
>problems are more than just ethnic and national. And self-determination is
>concrete, we're dealing with real fighters for self-determination, not our
>own wishful dreams of what such fighters should be like. Check out what
>Trotsky had to say about this in relation to the Spanish revolution.
Self-determination for Kosovo is not concrete though. Just mebbe the
Yanks'll be mad enough to arm the KLA to the teeth and promise them the
world, so that they can do the necessary ground-war bit on their own -
they've created many such a rod for their own backs before - but I can't see
it this time.
The NATO plan is built on subjugation of a big lump of strategically
important ground and labour, I reckon. Huge economic stakes, but - and
here's the interesting bit - huge political stakes, too. This is gonna be
sorted by political elites sooner, or by grumbling electorates later - NATO
(and those who've been posing as Social Democrats) might be buried by voters
yet. As I keep saying, we do have some modest relevance under liberal
democracy - we should get together and wield that portion, lest it be
decisive.
>As for the relationship of rump Yugoslavia to the workers state created by
>the Yugoslav revolution, it is clear that the two main forces making that
>revolution possible -- on the one hand, national self-determination at
>republic and regional level within a pan-Yugoslav national state federation
>with far-reaching guarantees for ethnic minorities ("unity") and on the
>other, social justice with workers' power and confiscation of bourgeois
>productive forces ("brotherhood") -- have been utterly perverted by the
>Milosevic regime.
And currently being utterly strangled by NATO ...
Cheers,
Rob.
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