Two excellent libertarian communist polemics on the ex-Yugoslavia.
Both make the point that there were by the end of the Tito period, exacerbated by the Milosevic leadership, inadequate mechanisms for abjudicating conflicting claims between enterprises and regions for dwindling resources.
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l- 9912/msg00200.html <nettime> Ethnicizing and Natosevic - the war and the left ... nettime> Ethnicizing and Natosevic - the war and the left. To: nettime <nettime-l at Desk.nl>; Subject: <nettime> Ethnicizing and Natosevic ... http://www.amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l- 9912/msg00200.html
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/ ~spoons/aut_html/Aufheben/yugo.html Class Decomposition In The New World Order:
Yugoslavia Unravelled
(1) Introduction
Whilst there have been numerous wars around the globe over the last forty-eight years, Europe has seen only the mundane brutality of everyday capitalist social relations. But once again the spectre of war haunts the proletarians of the continent. The former republics of Yugoslavia have lurched into a bitter cycle of war, and the images of the suffering provide a terrifying reminder of the capacity of the working class to carve itself up along national lines. Are we heading for a major European war? Will the events of the past couple of years in Yugoslavia be repeated throughout Eastern Europe? An analysis of the conflict is clearly imperative.
Such an analysis is made more difficult however both by our separation from the events, leading to a lack of information from 'below', and by the endless stream of depressing details on the conflict in the media making any attempt to keep abreast of events into a desensitising test of endurance. So this article will be limited to an attempt to simplify the conflict by grasping the material roots of the nationalist tensions.
The first problem lies with deciding where to start. A possible starting point would be the formation of the first (monarchist) Yugoslavia after WW1, as the internal migration of Serbs under the Serb-dominated regime (to be followed by a similar migratory flow after WW2) helped produce the ethnic mish-mash with which we are now familiar. Another possibility is WW2 and the genocide perpetrated by the Ustashe which helps explain the fear of persecution so characteristic of current Serbian nationalist ideology.
Neither of these starting points seem to provide the best means of unravelling the conflict however, as the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia did hold together for well over forty years despite its ethnic diversity and the experiences of WW2. Instead, the focus of the analysis has to be the 1974 Constitution, which appears to be a pivotal moment in the shaping of Socialist Yugoslavia; so, to begin with, we have to examine the factors which gave rise to it.
(2) Class Recomposition.
In 1948 the Yugoslav Communist Party (Y.C.P.) was expelled from the Cominform, in part due to the Y.C.P.'s desire for U.S. financial support. As if trying to disprove Stalin's accusation that the Y.C.P. was a 'Kulak' party incapable of making war on the peasantry the Y.C.P. set out on a programme of forced collectivisation beginning in 1949. Prior to the war 75% of the regions population were dependent on peasant agriculture and immediately after the war the Y.C.P. rewarded the peasants, from whom the partisan army under Tito had drawn most of its support, with land reform; land previously owned by foreigners, collaborators, the church and large estates was broken up and distributed amongst the poor peasants as small plots. Such an organisation of agricultural labour was, however, a brake on the development of the productive forces so desired by the Y.C.P., a brake which collectivisation (socialist primitive accumulation) was designed to remove. This programme came up against significant peasant resistance however, with extensive riots in 1950 and widespread sabotage of agricultural production the following year. Given their need for the political backing of the peasants the Y.C.P. was forced to abandon this policy of rural expropriation. First the compulsory delivery of agricultural produce to the state was scrapped and in 1953 collectivisation was abandoned. Peasants were allowed to leave the collectives, and most of them did.
Thereafter agricultural labour consisted of two sectors; a small collectivised 'socialist' sector comprising about 5% of the agricultural workforce and 15% of agricultural land, and a much larger private sector in which peasant families were able to sell their surplus produce on the open market with the states role reduced to setting the levels of taxes and some prices. Yugoslavia had clearly begun to move away from the Stalinist model of a centrally-planned economy. The Y.C.P. had decided that the accumulation of alienated labour would have to proceed using the discipline of market forces with the coercive power of the state decentralised. In 1950 the 'Basic Law on Workers Self Management' was introduced in the industrial sector to allow workers to participate on a democratic basis in their own exploitation. Workers Councils were henceforth able to elect Management Boards which by 1953 were able to engage in foreign trade, set prices in most cases, and decide for themselves questions concerning product range, investment, output, supplies and customers. Thus there evolved the partial separation of the 'political' and 'economic' aspects of the capital relation; the involvement of the Federal Government in the everyday running of the economy gradually declined as the social division of labour came to be increasingly regulated by the market.
Liberalising economic and political reforms occurred in 1960-61, 1963, and 1965 despite concerted opposition from the more centralising elements within the Y.C.P. The net results of these reforms were twofold although both represented a decline in the power of the Federal Government in Belgrade. On the one hand remaining price controls, including that setting a minimum price for labour-power, were abolished, and control over credit, and thus control over the real accumulation of capital, was devolved to the banking system. The rule of money over the conditions of life thereby increased. Alongside this shift was a political one devolving a certain amount of political clout to regional authorities although fiscal policy and control over the repressive functions of the state remained the prerogative of the Federal bureaucracy in Belgrade.
Within the Y.C.P. there had occurred a certain division between the conservative autocrats of the bureaucracy and the liberal technocrats of the productive enterprises and banks, with the relative empowerment of the latter. And such a reorganisation proved to be very successful. Investment rates during the 50s and 60s were exceptionally high by international standards. Rapid accumulation allowed for rising real wages paid for through rising productivity. A relatively generous social wage was affordable; healthcare and other services developed to rival those in many West European countries. Thus the Yugoslav model became the ideal for many left-liberals in Britain and elsewhere who had a particular fetishism for democracy but no critique of alienation. But this rapid accumulation had a number of consequences which would serve to undermine this particular form of market-based self-management.
i) Accumulation of Grave-Diggers: <snip>
Danny Postel, now of the Chronicle of Higher Ed. has a forthcoming anthology on the Serbian q uestion and the US left debate. I expect another demogogic fulmination by Ed Herman in Z when it appears.
http://www.wildcat-www.de/krieg/nato99.htm Materialiensammlung zum Krieg im Kosovo / Ex-Jugoslawien
Beiträge zum Krieg aus dem Wildcat-Zirkular 50/51, Mai/ Juni 1990
http://web.greens.org/s-r/20/20-15.html
>...(One anti-Marxist publication from the UK, Wildcat No. 18, Summer
1996, had some good analysis.)
Heh, well, of coarse, this M-L'ist calls Wildcat, a libertarian communist/anarcho-communist journal, anti-Marxist! Be more accurite to say it uses marxist analysis to critique Leninist loons to draw lessons for working class struggles against bureaucratic collectivist regimes.
http://burn.ucsd.edu/~acf/nowar.html No War But The Class War
CONTENTS
Anarchist Federation Yugoslavia Articles London Group (e-mail from Escape Publications) E-mail message from Scotland E-mail message from Left Disorder Worker Solidarity Movement (Ireland) statement News from Germany- Activity against the war in yugoslavia
Michael Pugliese