This really goes over what is for this list, surely old ground. Jim seems to ignore the points I amplify in this commentary on the "Foreign Affairs" article that another imperialist feature of the way this war has been run and the way it was started is a determination by western imperialism led by the US globally to control the risk of islamic militancy.
But given that the western powers have been interfering in Yugoslavia, (how could they not?) what stance should progressive people take when ethnic cleansing is being perpetrated by of course fascist methods?
Of course the Leninist policy on the right of nations to self-determination is not a Kantian category. In terms of preserving and building unity between working people a basic ground rule is that national questions should be settled as much as working people can achieve on the basis of democracy and not by coercion. Unless Yugoslavia has the potentiality of becoming a bastion of socialism against the peaceful assimilationist tendencies of western capitalism, (which it does not) there is no progressive role for a little Serbia as a sort of Cuba of the Balkans.
You know the concrete historical arguments about the role of the market which differs for different nations according to whether capitalism is rising or in decline. Expelling Kosovan Albanians from the Trepca mines and replacing them with Serbs proud to have recaptured the mediaeval cradle of their nation, does not give Serbia a historical materialist future.
It is most unusual to find a war waged by imperialists to have any progressive features, but the Leninist rule about the proletariat of the advanced capitalist countries opposing its ruling class in war is also not a Kantian categorical imperative. Lenin's argumentation depends on several features as I have submitted on marxism-thaxis. It depends on a view that an inter-imperialist war is for the division of plunder.
This is not an inter-imperialist war but a war by an unrivalled hegemonic group of imperialist powers drastically contrained by public opinion about the justice of the war in a coalition of 19 countries, not to count the other interested countries.
Furthermore Lenin's argument in the first world war depended on it being a revolutionary period. He points out that the slogan in an imperialist country for the defeat of your government is a revolutionary slogan. It can only have impact in a revolutionary situation. Unfortunately the left has not found an effective basis for opposing the imperialist way this war has been waged. Last Saturday there was a demonstration in New York which CNN said numbered 500. Even if that figure were tripled it shows how weak the anti-war movement is. In London Sunday, the pickets outside Downing Street were less than 30.
A more effective opposition to the imperialist timing, planning and execution of this war, would not shirk from the fact that such a campaign would have the characteristics of a reform, as with other fields of political campaigning - to try to pressure the ruling class to compromise and change its policy somewhat in a more progressive direction.
All war is repellent and barbaric, but if this war is to be modified or stopped it will not be done by ignoring the fact that genocide, by modern definitions of genocide, is being carried out on a subject people in the middle of Europe.
My commentary on the Foreign Affairs article proposed the most moderate and proportionate response to the oppression of the Kosova Albanians: that they should be helped to resist an occupying force of 40,000 plus fascist paramilitaries.
Your intervention to discuss whether self-determination is a Kantian category or not, is an abstract diversion from this concrete question.
And if your concrete solution actually is apartheid, shame on you! How can that be in the interests of working people?
Chris Burford
London