>>> Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> 10/08/99 12:29PM >>>
Charles Brown wrote:
> I specifically said they are trying to get at the surplus
> value of the Yugoslavian workers.
I believe Kelley has (appropriately) indicated some impatience with this thread and I tend to agree. On the part of *both* participants there is an unseemly haste to bring the most abstract levels of theory to bear on a particular situation. A discussion of the Yugoslav War in terms of *either* booty *or* surplus value seems not so much reductive as merely irrelevant. The extraction of surplus value shapes the whole of capitalist culture and politics, but that does not mean that one need look for the direct manifestation of that drive in any particular capitalist action (whether of states or of capitalist enterprises).
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Charles: In debates with non-Marxists , as occurred in this case, you are arguing with people who claim there is no economic motive for the war. Thus, the looking for direct manifestations of that drive.
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Carrol: In the case of Yugoslavia it would seem almost self-evident that the motive was not economic in any direct sense. I copy below a post I had drafted earlier on this thread but had not sent at the time.
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Charles: Evidently , in this case it is necessary to argue with you that there is economic motive . "Direct" or "indirect" is perhaps the trivial aspect that doesn't need to be discussed.
The notion of "self-evidence" here seems theological.
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> you tried to locate economic motives in the reductive
> sense of booty (ie., territorial grabs for resources), as did others who
> haven't to my knowledge called themselves marxists. within that framework,
> things like the creation of a pool of cheapened labour (ie., surplus value
> and class struggle) seemed to disappear as an 'economic motive',
In the case of Yugoslavia I would suspect that complex and non-reductive economic motives are in the given case as mechanical and irrelevant as mere plunder. One would also doubt that class struggle *within* Yugoslavia was of much relevance (direct or indirect) to the NATO theorists. At least I would regard the burden of proof to be on those who claimed an economic motive.
What was at stake was not the wealth (or labor) of either Yugoslavians *or* first world workers who might be replaced by runaway plants in Yugoslavia. What was at stake was the right and capacity of the United States to enforce the "New World Order" Bush had proclaimed.
This lust to find a direct connection between the highest levels of theory and political practice seems to me to be the primary source of all dogmatism. Both "sides" in the debate seem equally religious in their attempts to satisfy this lust.
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Charles: You are starting to find religion and Gods and Goddesses all over the place, speaking of a lust for the highest levels of theoretical critique.
If the Yugoslavian war is worth analyzing at all, it is worth specifying how it expresses fundamental elements of imperialism and capitalism, because the imperialist line is that this is not imperialism but humantarian intervention.. In other words, the exact tasks of Maxists in this case ,contra your argument here, was to show why this war was not different, not post-capitalist, to bring in Marxist fundamentals.
CB