At 23:57 28/05/99 -0400, Doug quoted:
[thread title: Re: NATO shift in bombing strategy]
>Guardian - May 29, 1999
>
>Shift in bombing a warning to Serbs
This article too caught my eye as significant on several points including military developments.
It alone should answer the sectarian objection that LBO-talk should be ignored because it does not close its lists to "right wingers" who may be influenced by the Guardian. The Guardian and the Observer have been an important terrain of struggle since the war broke out.
But I wanted here to highlight the class observation below which seems to me very probably correct.
>Nato's bombing strategy was questioned yesterday by Paul Rogers, professor
>at Bradford university's school of peace studies, in a study on the
>economic geography of the Kosovo war.
>
>"If it is thought that an air war against the Serbian economy will damage
>that economy to the extent that people will very quickly experience severe
>hardship, with its consequent effect on the regime, then that is almost
>certainly wrong," he said.
>
>The strategy was flawed, he said, because it was based on a mistaken
>understanding of the degree of resilience of the Serbian economy. Mr Rogers
>pointed out that Serbia was self-sufficient in food supplies; more than a
>third of the entire adult working population was directly involved in
>agriculture; and, outside Belgrade, Serbia was essentially a rural country
>with only four towns of more than 100,000 people.
Perhaps others ( Barkley??) can clarify whether the rural population are peasants or quasi peasants. But this observation explains a lot about the significance of the war. My recollection was that in Bosnia, the Serbs were mainly rural while the muslims were "middle class" urban.
Much of the character of that war had the raw brutality of a civil war between peasants, who could make their point most effectively by slaughtering a dead pig and leaving it alongside their dead victims in the middle of the road.
If peasants are the main component of the population, it would be consistent with the small bourgeois character of Serbian nationalism, the emphasis on capturing for a Serbian population the land of Kosovo to make up for that lost in the Kraijina, and to revenge a mystical memory of a battle lost in 1389.
It is above all other peasants but this time of Albanian culture who have been forcibly expelled from Kosovo, depopulating the landscape in a way that can make no economic sense expect in the minds of peasants from a rival ethnic group.
This would also explain the narrow economic capitalist perspectives limited to a market of 10 million only, and keen to seize the rich mines of eastern Kosovo, not to extract more surplus from them but to replace the Albanian wage slaves with loyal Serbian wage slaves.
The weakness of the middle class urban Serbians, proud of their European style of life and their internet connections, would explain why the resistance to the fascist tendencies of Milosevic's regime has been weak.
And as this Guardian article strongly implies, attacks on the infrastructure of urban Serbia will hurt only the middle strata. They too are probably only a generation away from the land, and if necessary can go to the countryside, and even live without money, as hundreds of thousands have in Russia, as a result of exploitation by global finance capitalism.
The international implications of these wars have rightly been the main focus of polemic, but in class terms they look like a war by the peasantry on the peasantry, from which the peasantry will be unable to survive in the old way. The peace of finance capital will ensure the remains are swept aside within a generation.
An alternative peace strategy would need to include a complicated economic and political perspective. Ideally this would permit the democratic elements of the peasantry to combine with democratic elements of the middle strata, to restore the economy from the bottom up, and to prevent value haemorrhaging out of the country under IMF free market fundamentalism. If any alternative recovery programme emerged on this lines from within the former Yugoslavia we ought to do what little we can to protect it from harrassment by the IMF.
Chris Burford
London