----- Original Message ----- From: "John Lacny" <jplst15+ at pitt.edu> To: <marxist at yahoogroups.com> Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2001 11:26 PM Subject: Re: [marxist] NATO war and pipeline
my636847 at asianhistory.myweb.nl writes:
> It's all about the transportation of massive oil
> resources from the Caspian Sea through the Balkans,
> and maintaining U.S. hegemony in the region.
I disagree; this analysis slips into economic determinism. Too often people confuse a "Marxist" approach with the attempt to find proximate economic causes for the actions of the state or of imperialist powers.
The problem is that the state in a capitalist society NEEDS to be "relatively autonomous" from purely "economic" considerations if it is to fulfill the role it needs to fulfill -- that is, acting as guarantor of capitalist exploitation in general. The state is not bound by the kind of precise cost-benefit analysis by which a corporation is bound; if such a cost-effective guarantor for capitalist exploitation could be found, what would be the need for the state in the first place? Christian Parenti, in his book *Lockdown America*, does an excellent job of taking apart "left-wing" economic determinist analyses of state repression: the US system isn't building prisons for narrow profit reasons (prison labor is not terribly profitable to use, and private prisons are a small part of the prison-industrial complex and far less profitable than other industries -- like the military especially -- that are lavished with state largesse in any case); rather, state repression is a way to contain the immense contradictions of the system AS A WHOLE by imprisoning the "surplus population."
Imperialism operates on similar principles. Yes, on occasion an imperialist state will act directly on behalf of the direct economic interests of a specific corporation based in that country, or perhaps on behalf of an industry based in that country. These instances are extremely rare, however, and in some cases an imperialist state may even come into conflict with one of its own corporations in a certain peripheral country! (There was an example of this, I believe in Honduras, where there was a series of military coups or even a civil war between competing factions, one of which was backed by the US-based United Fruit Company and one of which was backed by the US government. Someone who has more of the facts directly at his/her fingertips can probably give the specifics -- help!) Somewhat more commonly, the imperialist state may act to protect the direct economic interests of its capitalist class as a whole, in a country which offers particularly lucrative sources of labor, natural resources, etc. But quite often, the imperialist state may act in ways that seem quite inexplicable from a purely "economic" point of view, pouring immense resources into fighting a war or propping up a regime or fixing an election in a country that is inconsequential from a purely economic point of view.
But especially since the onset of the Cold War, when the United States has taken on the role of the leading imperialist power and the guarantor of the imperialist system AS A WHOLE, the POLITICAL importance of even some of the tiniest and most marginal countries has become critical. Some used to conjecture that the US was in Vietnam in order to maintain control over rubber, oil, or some other resource which must be there or secretly buried there. But it didn't really matter what resources Vietnam had: the point was that it had the potential to set an EXAMPLE that the US could not let other countries follow if the imperialist system as a whole were to survive.
That's why they poured immense amounts of blood and treasure into the war there, much more than any US corporations were likely to make in profits there at some point in the future. When things really did get too costly, they merely decided to cut their losses (especially because they already HAD made something of a negative example of Vietnam: with 2-3 million dead, its infrastructure smashed and its agriculture on the point of ecological catastrophe, what country would have wanted to be the second, third, or one of the many Vietnams?).
Those who tried to explain the US bombing of Serbia as an attempt to grab up the Trepca mines in Kosovo were kidding themselves. The analysis put forth here, that it had something to do with Caspian Sea oil, is only marginally closer to the truth, and it certainly had nothing to do with the possibility that there might be a pipeline going through the Balkans. Certainly the Caspian Sea oil is the richest possible resource that US capital would want to corner in its attempts to grab up as much of Eastern Europe and Central Asia as possible, but it's not necessarily what's paramount in the minds of US policy planners. What they're concerned about is the "credibility" of their system in general, and in this case above all maintaining NATO -- and more importantly, NATO as a closely-controlled instrument of US objectives, free from unduly independent maneuvering on the part of the Western Europeans -- was what was at the top of their agenda. The piece that was just forwarded also mentions this, but almost as an afterthought, when it really should be at the center of the analysis.
As for Serbia, and the statement in the article that the mass graves were never found and that the killings were about what you'd expect in a counterinsurgency war, I'm inclined to agree, and I think that the ghoulish stories that are circulating about factories being turned into makeshift crematoriums (e.g., the kind of stories repeated by Christopher Hitchens in one of his recent columns in The Nation) are not very credible. Whether or not they're true shouldn't necessarily affect our analysis of US motives. All honest people know that the Serbs were carrying out a racist counterinsurgency war (unfortunately there are a few people, almost always the kind who look for simplistic economic-determinist analyses, who deny this fact and attribute to the neo-Chetniks some kind of heroic motives). But a hundred years ago, the Boers in southern Africa were a bunch of racist revanchists as well, and that didn't make the actions of the British any less cynical -- or any less morally objectionable, either.
John Lacny
"[C]apital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." --Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 31
Community email addresses:
Post message: marxist at yahoogroups.com
Subscribe: marxist-subscribe at yahoogroups.com
Unsubscribe: marxist-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com
List owner: jplst15+ at pitt.edu
Shortcut URL to this page:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marxist
Also take our one-question survey at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marxist/polls
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/