Bob thinks that the AIUF is not Trotskyist and is utopian. Well
that's a very revealing admission to come from someone who thinks
that the ICL is the best Trotskyist group around in a period of
reaction when imperialism is fuelling national differences as its
chosen means of repartitioning the former post-capitalist bloc.
Yugoslavia is an oppressed country right? It is being occupied by
imperialism right? How do communists defend an oppressed country
against imperialism? Unconditional military defence.
Unconditional means that even if the national bourgeoisie is a
dictatorship attacking the workers, workers bloc militarily with
the dictatorship against imperialism. Why? Because imperialism is the
worst enemy and is responsible for creating the conditions of the
dicatatorship if not installing the dictatorship itself. Trotsky
first made this clear in the war between Ethiopia and Italy when
Ethiopia was ruled by a dictator.
So this military bloc is with an alien class, the national
bourgeoisie, so the working class must maitain its armed
independence from the national bourgeoisie. Why? Because the
national bourgeoisie is a class which has a much closer interest in
supporting imperialism than defending its own working class. The
only reason that it is defending itself from imperialism is to
improve the terms on which it acts as imperialisms agent in
oppressing colonial or semi-colonial workers. Sooner or later it
will turn on those same workers when their power threatens not only
to defeat imperialism but to kick out their local agents.
This was the tragic lesson that came out of the Stalinist bloc of 4
classes in China in the 1920's where the workers subordinated their
military forces to the national bourgeoisie which turned on the
workers and massacred them.
So the AIUF requires the MILITARY independence of the workers
forces in a bloc with the national bourgeoisie. There is no question
of any POLITICAL dependence on the bourgeoisie. That the AIUF
must mean a political bloc with the national bourgeosis is the
classic sectarian line of the ICL which sees Trotsky's AIUF as a form
of popular front, because as sectarians they are frightened that
a militiary bloc with the bourgesoisie might lead to a political
bloc.
This sectarian position applied to Yugoslavia today is to call for
the abstract defence of Yugoslavia without specifying how workers can
do this if they are divided by national differences, and then to
disguise this abstention by calling for a Federation of Socialist
Republics. But before such a federation can be built, first it is
necessary to build multi-ethnic militias and councils. This cannot
be done if the real ethnic oppression unleashed by a history of
imperialist conquest is ignored. This is sectarian because it fails
to answer the immediately perceived cause of oppression with a
practical demonstration of the real cause of oppression. This is why
I said that the sectasriahs are put to shame by the militant ethnic
Albanian nationalist who calls for multiethnic opposition to NATO!
The only way to acheive this is to do it on the ground in the form of
multi-ethnic militias which defend the right of each ethnic group to
defend their rights and prove that NATO and its bourgeois stooges
on all sides are the enemy.
So it is an ongoing necessity to unite workers across ethnic
differences, against all the imperialist re-fuelling of these
divisions behind the regimes of ex-stalinist or fascist warlords and
bourgeois elements. It was necessary during the Bosnia war and
remains necessary in Kovoso and in the future developments as the
Balkans is Balkanised further by the various imperialist powers. The
imperialist counter-revolution has already broken up and partitioned
most of Yugoslavia. The defeat in Bosnia is much worse than that in
Kosovo because it set the precedent for Kosovo. It created a U/German
dominated statelet which maintains the fiction of independence by
having its own mark pegged to the German mark. What is happening in
Kosovo is the final stages of the break-up which will see Kosovo
becoming part of Albania, after a decent UN burial of NATO's
casualties, Montenegro split away, and the ethnic Albanians in
Kosovo, Montnegro and Macedonia fuse into a US protectorate of
Albania.
All of this proves that imperialism is repartitioning the former
post-capitalist Soviet-bloc by refuelling old ethnic divisions so
that it can use the pretext of ethnic cleansing to intervene with its
now tooled up NATO/UNO machine. In the current situation then
communists will need to get their understanding of the national
question as a class question very clear so as to be able to do more
than posture in defence of oppressed countries. One of the things
that Bob and his ICL (if they have not done so) will need to realise,
is that in the next round , Russia as a semi-colony, and China as a
degenerate workers state moving towards restoration, are the next in
the Wests's sights.
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