Why do Catherine Samary and the LCR hate Yugoslavia ?
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/feb2004/balk-f09.shtml
------------------------------------------------------------------
WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : The Balkans
Correspondence on the failure of nationalism in Yugoslavia
9 February 2004
-------
Regarding your article, “Milosevic trial sets precedent: US granted
right to censor evidence”
[http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/dec2003/cens-d31.shtml%5d (31 December
2003):
I would be very grateful to Paul Mitchell if he could list the human
rights abuses by Serbia that the USA exploited as a pretext for yet
another proxy war. I was born in 1949 and all my life the USA has been
at war. Do you [portray] Izetbegovic to be a perfect democrat, as does
Catherine Samary, an expert-ignorant and journalist-actionaire of le
monde-diplomatique?
What I cannot figure out is why do the Trotskyists hate Yugoslavia? We
stood against Stalin, didn’t we? All alone! And still all alone
Milosevic stands against American nazi imperialism!
Best regards
OD
------
The United States government and its allies in NATO claimed they bombed
Yugoslavia in 1999 to prevent human right abuses. Politicians and
officials exaggerated figures of Serbian atrocities against ethnic
Albanians and compared the Kosovo civil war to the Nazi Holocaust.
US Defence Secretary William Cohen told CBS News in May 1999 that
100,000 men were missing, and “may have been murdered” and David
Scheffer, US war crimes envoy claimed that more than 225,000 ethnic
Albanian men were missing.
No sooner had the war finished then these lies began to unravel. A
press spokesman at The Hague war crimes tribunal, Paul Risley, told
reporters, “The final number of bodies uncovered will be less than
10,000 and probably more accurately determined as between two and three
thousand.”
There are many articles on the World Socialist Web Site about the lies
put out by Western governments to justify their intervention in
Yugoslavia. You will not find one that suggests “Trotskyists hate
Yugoslavia,” as your email claims. The Marxist movement does not
analyse phenomenon in moralistic terms like hatred. It has always
addressed the terrible legacy of capitalism and Stalinism
scientifically and historically in order to provide the peoples of
Yugoslavia and the Balkans with a perspective to overcome it.
Yugoslavia broke with Stalin in 1948, but its leadership never broke
with the nationalist perspective of Stalinism.
Despite the conflicts between Tito and Stalin, the Communist Party of
Yugoslavia (CPY) still upheld the anti-Marxist and
anti-internationalist perspective of national socialism that
constituted Stalin’s theory of building “socialism in one country.”
This theory was in direct opposition to the perspective of a Socialist
Federation of the Balkans that was formulated by Marxists in the
nineteenth century and developed by Leon Trotsky.
Svetozar Markovic, the founder of the Serbian socialist movement,
developed the concept of a socialist federation of the Balkans in the
1870s. The first congress of Balkan Social Democratic parties in 1910
called for a Balkan federation “to free ourselves from particularism
and narrowness; to abolish frontiers that divide peoples who are in
part identical in language and culture, in part economically bound
together; finally to sweep away forms of foreign domination both direct
and indirect that deprive the people of their right to determine their
destiny for themselves.”
In his theory of Permanent Revolution, Trotsky insisted that in
countries with a belated bourgeois development only the working class
could bring about democracy and national emancipation. Trotsky
elaborated this perspective for the Balkans saying, “The only way out
of the national and state chaos and bloody confusion of Balkan life is
a union of all the peoples of the peninsula in a single economic and
political entity, on the basis of national autonomy of the constituent
parts. Only within the framework of a single Balkan state can the Serbs
of Macedonia, the Sandjak, Serbia and Montenegro be united in a single
national-cultural community, enjoying at the same time the advantages
of a Balkan common market. Only the united Balkan peoples can give a
real rebuff to the shameless pretensions of Tsarism and European
imperialism.”
Stalin and his faction attacked this perspective by claiming that
nationalism in the Balkans was inherently revolutionary because it
rested upon the peasantry. They shifted the CPY from its earlier
proletarian internationalist position towards one that encouraged
national and ethnic separatist movements and in the process deposed the
entire CPY leadership in 1928.
Tito rose to power in the CPY and came to lead the resistance to Nazi
occupation. However, he came into conflict with the proposals to
install a popular front government in Yugoslavia as part of the
redivision of the world agreed between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin
in 1944. With the CPY-led partisans enjoying mass support, the
bourgeois representatives resigned, and in November 1945 the Federal
People’s Republic of Yugoslavia was proclaimed.
Tito started negotiations on a Balkan Federation with Bulgaria and
supported a revolutionary uprising in Greece, but this perspective was
soon abandoned under pressure from Moscow in favour of pan-Yugoslav
nationalism. The prospect that backward Yugoslavia could pursue a
self-contained socialist development in a divided Balkan region was
impossible from the start, as the Trotskyist movement recognised. It
posed the question, “The alternatives facing Yugoslavia, let alone the
Tito regime, are to capitulate either to Washington or to the
Kremlin—or to strike out on an independent road. This road can be only
that of an Independent Workers and Peasant Socialist Yugoslavia, as the
first step towards a Socialist Federation of the Balkan Nations. It can
be achieved only through an appeal to and unity with the international
working class.”
This question and the analysis made by the Trotskyist movement can be
found in The Heritage We Defend—A Contribution to the History of the
Fourth International by David North.
Faced with growing economic problems and increasing threats from
Moscow, the Tito leadership at first tried to accommodate itself to
imperialism, and later to manoeuvre between the two superpowers. In
1950 Tito’s government supported US imperialism in the Korean War and
also supported Moscow’s suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.
When Tito died the bureaucracy increasingly turned to free market
policies with Slobodan Milosevic, a protégé of the West, setting up the
Milosevic Commission in 1987 to justify the introduction of IMF
“structural adjustment” programmes. The austerity measures sparked off
strikes and other mass protests by the Yugoslav working class. Seeking
to divert the class struggle, ex-Stalinist bureaucrats such as
Milosevic, Tudjman in Croatia and Izetbegovic in Bosnia promoted
nationalist sentiments, while seeking support from Western governments.
Despite his elevation to guarantor of the Dayton Accords that ended the
Bosnian conflict, Milosevic came into conflict with the US. Washington
had concluded that the dissolution of Yugoslavia could not proceed
whilst the Serbian ruling elite strove to preserve a unitary state in
which it played the dominant role.
This brings us to your criticism of Katharine Samary, a supporter and
election candidate for the French Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire
(LCR, Revolutionary Communist League). The origins of the LCR lie in a
split in the Fourth International in 1953, a few years after Tito split
with Stalin. Michel Pablo was a leader of the Fourth International in
the late 1940s and early 1950s who, under the difficult circumstances
facing the Marxist movement at the time, developed the theory that
Trotskyism could never win the leadership of the working class and
could only act as advisers and “left” critics of the existing social
democratic, Stalinist and petty bourgeois nationalist organisations.
The dissolution of the Trotskyist movement was prevented by the
intervention of James P. Cannon and the American Socialist Workers
Party and the publication of the “Open Letter” opposing Pablo in
November 1953, which led to the establishment of the International
Committee that today publishes the World Socialist Web Site.
The LCR and its co-thinkers in the United Secretariat have followed
Pablo’s liquidationist and demoralised course for half a century and
Samary is no exception. In 1992, just as Yugoslavia descended into
civil war the United Secretariat magazine proclaimed, “The wretched
people of Bosnia await their relief from the troops of the United
Nations.”
In her book Yugoslavia Remembered published in 1995 Samary blamed the
dissolution of Yugoslavia on its ethnic differences saying, “The
creation of a Yugoslav state should have brought an end to the rivalry
between the communities but the religious, cultural and linguistic
differences were too great to maintain peace.”
Rather than identifying the failure to establish a socialist federation
as the main lesson to be learnt from the destruction of Yugoslavia
Samary concluded, “the main lesson here is that no serious alternative
politics in this region can avoid explicit support for the right of
self determination for all the peoples of former Yugoslavia.”
During the Kosovo civil war, Samary and other LCR members sent a letter
to Le Monde declaring, “Stop the bombings, self determination for
Kosova!” It complained that “not one of the governments which have
supported the NATO air strikes are willing to wage war against the Serb
regime to impose independence for Kosova” and argued for the creation
of “a multinational police force (including Serbs and Albanians) within
the framework of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in
Europe, which would oversee the application of a transitional
agreement.”
In an interview during the Kosovo crisis with the International
Socialist Group in Britain led by Alan Thornett, Samary said, “It is
impossible to present any kind of coherent and progressive ‘solution’
at the moment. Every day brings fresh evidence of an uncontrolled
dynamic which is degrading the conditions for progressive struggles. So
we should busy ourselves with the urgent solidarity tasks, and maintain
our critical spirit in the face of all proposals for ‘action’ which
actually make the disaster worse. And, at the back of our minds, we
should continue working on a number of long-term questions which are
essential to a solution to the whole Yugoslav crisis.”
Since the civil war Bosnia and Kosovo, as the World Socialist Web Site
foresaw, have become ethnically pure statelets run as Western
protectorates and subject to local mafias. Learning nothing, Samary
merely complained to delegates at last year’s European Social Forum
that the Balkans were subject once again to the same “structural
adjustment programs” previously imposed by the IMF.
However one cannot counterpoise to Samary’s support for Bosnian and
Kosovar separatism the rosy picture you paint of little Yugoslavia
standing all alone against Stalin, still less Serbia (or even
Milosevic) standing against US imperialism. The future of the peoples
of what was Yugoslavia depends on the struggle for the socialist
federation of the Balkans in unity with the working class of Europe and
throughout the world.
Sincerely,
Paul Mitchell
See Also:
Why is NATO at war with Yugoslavia? World power, oil and gold
http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/may1999/stat-m24.shtml
[24 May 1999]
How the WRP joined the NATO camp
Imperialist war in the Balkans and the decay of the petty-bourgeois left
http://www.wsws.org/polemics/1995/dec1995/balkan.shtml
[14 December 1995]
Marxism, Opportunism and the Balkan Crisis
http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/apr1999/balk-m07.shtml
[7 May 1994]
The Balkans
http://www.wsws.org/sections/category/news/eu-balk.shtml
[WSWS Full Coverage]
Readers: The WSWS invites your comments. Please send e-mail.
[mailto:editor@...]
Copyright 1998-2004
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/feb2004/balk-f09.shtml
------------------------------------------------------------------
WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : The Balkans
Correspondence on the failure of nationalism in Yugoslavia
9 February 2004
-------
Regarding your article, “Milosevic trial sets precedent: US granted
right to censor evidence”
[http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/dec2003/cens-d31.shtml%5d (31 December
2003):
I would be very grateful to Paul Mitchell if he could list the human
rights abuses by Serbia that the USA exploited as a pretext for yet
another proxy war. I was born in 1949 and all my life the USA has been
at war. Do you [portray] Izetbegovic to be a perfect democrat, as does
Catherine Samary, an expert-ignorant and journalist-actionaire of le
monde-diplomatique?
What I cannot figure out is why do the Trotskyists hate Yugoslavia? We
stood against Stalin, didn’t we? All alone! And still all alone
Milosevic stands against American nazi imperialism!
Best regards
OD
------
The United States government and its allies in NATO claimed they bombed
Yugoslavia in 1999 to prevent human right abuses. Politicians and
officials exaggerated figures of Serbian atrocities against ethnic
Albanians and compared the Kosovo civil war to the Nazi Holocaust.
US Defence Secretary William Cohen told CBS News in May 1999 that
100,000 men were missing, and “may have been murdered” and David
Scheffer, US war crimes envoy claimed that more than 225,000 ethnic
Albanian men were missing.
No sooner had the war finished then these lies began to unravel. A
press spokesman at The Hague war crimes tribunal, Paul Risley, told
reporters, “The final number of bodies uncovered will be less than
10,000 and probably more accurately determined as between two and three
thousand.”
There are many articles on the World Socialist Web Site about the lies
put out by Western governments to justify their intervention in
Yugoslavia. You will not find one that suggests “Trotskyists hate
Yugoslavia,” as your email claims. The Marxist movement does not
analyse phenomenon in moralistic terms like hatred. It has always
addressed the terrible legacy of capitalism and Stalinism
scientifically and historically in order to provide the peoples of
Yugoslavia and the Balkans with a perspective to overcome it.
Yugoslavia broke with Stalin in 1948, but its leadership never broke
with the nationalist perspective of Stalinism.
Despite the conflicts between Tito and Stalin, the Communist Party of
Yugoslavia (CPY) still upheld the anti-Marxist and
anti-internationalist perspective of national socialism that
constituted Stalin’s theory of building “socialism in one country.”
This theory was in direct opposition to the perspective of a Socialist
Federation of the Balkans that was formulated by Marxists in the
nineteenth century and developed by Leon Trotsky.
Svetozar Markovic, the founder of the Serbian socialist movement,
developed the concept of a socialist federation of the Balkans in the
1870s. The first congress of Balkan Social Democratic parties in 1910
called for a Balkan federation “to free ourselves from particularism
and narrowness; to abolish frontiers that divide peoples who are in
part identical in language and culture, in part economically bound
together; finally to sweep away forms of foreign domination both direct
and indirect that deprive the people of their right to determine their
destiny for themselves.”
In his theory of Permanent Revolution, Trotsky insisted that in
countries with a belated bourgeois development only the working class
could bring about democracy and national emancipation. Trotsky
elaborated this perspective for the Balkans saying, “The only way out
of the national and state chaos and bloody confusion of Balkan life is
a union of all the peoples of the peninsula in a single economic and
political entity, on the basis of national autonomy of the constituent
parts. Only within the framework of a single Balkan state can the Serbs
of Macedonia, the Sandjak, Serbia and Montenegro be united in a single
national-cultural community, enjoying at the same time the advantages
of a Balkan common market. Only the united Balkan peoples can give a
real rebuff to the shameless pretensions of Tsarism and European
imperialism.”
Stalin and his faction attacked this perspective by claiming that
nationalism in the Balkans was inherently revolutionary because it
rested upon the peasantry. They shifted the CPY from its earlier
proletarian internationalist position towards one that encouraged
national and ethnic separatist movements and in the process deposed the
entire CPY leadership in 1928.
Tito rose to power in the CPY and came to lead the resistance to Nazi
occupation. However, he came into conflict with the proposals to
install a popular front government in Yugoslavia as part of the
redivision of the world agreed between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin
in 1944. With the CPY-led partisans enjoying mass support, the
bourgeois representatives resigned, and in November 1945 the Federal
People’s Republic of Yugoslavia was proclaimed.
Tito started negotiations on a Balkan Federation with Bulgaria and
supported a revolutionary uprising in Greece, but this perspective was
soon abandoned under pressure from Moscow in favour of pan-Yugoslav
nationalism. The prospect that backward Yugoslavia could pursue a
self-contained socialist development in a divided Balkan region was
impossible from the start, as the Trotskyist movement recognised. It
posed the question, “The alternatives facing Yugoslavia, let alone the
Tito regime, are to capitulate either to Washington or to the
Kremlin—or to strike out on an independent road. This road can be only
that of an Independent Workers and Peasant Socialist Yugoslavia, as the
first step towards a Socialist Federation of the Balkan Nations. It can
be achieved only through an appeal to and unity with the international
working class.”
This question and the analysis made by the Trotskyist movement can be
found in The Heritage We Defend—A Contribution to the History of the
Fourth International by David North.
Faced with growing economic problems and increasing threats from
Moscow, the Tito leadership at first tried to accommodate itself to
imperialism, and later to manoeuvre between the two superpowers. In
1950 Tito’s government supported US imperialism in the Korean War and
also supported Moscow’s suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.
When Tito died the bureaucracy increasingly turned to free market
policies with Slobodan Milosevic, a protégé of the West, setting up the
Milosevic Commission in 1987 to justify the introduction of IMF
“structural adjustment” programmes. The austerity measures sparked off
strikes and other mass protests by the Yugoslav working class. Seeking
to divert the class struggle, ex-Stalinist bureaucrats such as
Milosevic, Tudjman in Croatia and Izetbegovic in Bosnia promoted
nationalist sentiments, while seeking support from Western governments.
Despite his elevation to guarantor of the Dayton Accords that ended the
Bosnian conflict, Milosevic came into conflict with the US. Washington
had concluded that the dissolution of Yugoslavia could not proceed
whilst the Serbian ruling elite strove to preserve a unitary state in
which it played the dominant role.
This brings us to your criticism of Katharine Samary, a supporter and
election candidate for the French Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire
(LCR, Revolutionary Communist League). The origins of the LCR lie in a
split in the Fourth International in 1953, a few years after Tito split
with Stalin. Michel Pablo was a leader of the Fourth International in
the late 1940s and early 1950s who, under the difficult circumstances
facing the Marxist movement at the time, developed the theory that
Trotskyism could never win the leadership of the working class and
could only act as advisers and “left” critics of the existing social
democratic, Stalinist and petty bourgeois nationalist organisations.
The dissolution of the Trotskyist movement was prevented by the
intervention of James P. Cannon and the American Socialist Workers
Party and the publication of the “Open Letter” opposing Pablo in
November 1953, which led to the establishment of the International
Committee that today publishes the World Socialist Web Site.
The LCR and its co-thinkers in the United Secretariat have followed
Pablo’s liquidationist and demoralised course for half a century and
Samary is no exception. In 1992, just as Yugoslavia descended into
civil war the United Secretariat magazine proclaimed, “The wretched
people of Bosnia await their relief from the troops of the United
Nations.”
In her book Yugoslavia Remembered published in 1995 Samary blamed the
dissolution of Yugoslavia on its ethnic differences saying, “The
creation of a Yugoslav state should have brought an end to the rivalry
between the communities but the religious, cultural and linguistic
differences were too great to maintain peace.”
Rather than identifying the failure to establish a socialist federation
as the main lesson to be learnt from the destruction of Yugoslavia
Samary concluded, “the main lesson here is that no serious alternative
politics in this region can avoid explicit support for the right of
self determination for all the peoples of former Yugoslavia.”
During the Kosovo civil war, Samary and other LCR members sent a letter
to Le Monde declaring, “Stop the bombings, self determination for
Kosova!” It complained that “not one of the governments which have
supported the NATO air strikes are willing to wage war against the Serb
regime to impose independence for Kosova” and argued for the creation
of “a multinational police force (including Serbs and Albanians) within
the framework of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in
Europe, which would oversee the application of a transitional
agreement.”
In an interview during the Kosovo crisis with the International
Socialist Group in Britain led by Alan Thornett, Samary said, “It is
impossible to present any kind of coherent and progressive ‘solution’
at the moment. Every day brings fresh evidence of an uncontrolled
dynamic which is degrading the conditions for progressive struggles. So
we should busy ourselves with the urgent solidarity tasks, and maintain
our critical spirit in the face of all proposals for ‘action’ which
actually make the disaster worse. And, at the back of our minds, we
should continue working on a number of long-term questions which are
essential to a solution to the whole Yugoslav crisis.”
Since the civil war Bosnia and Kosovo, as the World Socialist Web Site
foresaw, have become ethnically pure statelets run as Western
protectorates and subject to local mafias. Learning nothing, Samary
merely complained to delegates at last year’s European Social Forum
that the Balkans were subject once again to the same “structural
adjustment programs” previously imposed by the IMF.
However one cannot counterpoise to Samary’s support for Bosnian and
Kosovar separatism the rosy picture you paint of little Yugoslavia
standing all alone against Stalin, still less Serbia (or even
Milosevic) standing against US imperialism. The future of the peoples
of what was Yugoslavia depends on the struggle for the socialist
federation of the Balkans in unity with the working class of Europe and
throughout the world.
Sincerely,
Paul Mitchell
See Also:
Why is NATO at war with Yugoslavia? World power, oil and gold
http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/may1999/stat-m24.shtml
[24 May 1999]
How the WRP joined the NATO camp
Imperialist war in the Balkans and the decay of the petty-bourgeois left
http://www.wsws.org/polemics/1995/dec1995/balkan.shtml
[14 December 1995]
Marxism, Opportunism and the Balkan Crisis
http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/apr1999/balk-m07.shtml
[7 May 1994]
The Balkans
http://www.wsws.org/sections/category/news/eu-balk.shtml
[WSWS Full Coverage]
Readers: The WSWS invites your comments. Please send e-mail.
[mailto:editor@...]
Copyright 1998-2004
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved