05.12.1996
The WRP and Bosnia
John Reed responds to one aspect of Lee-Anne Bates’ criticism of the Workers Revolutionary Party
There is much in Lee-Anne Bates’ article, ‘WRP’s second wish’ (Weekly Worker October 24), that I agree with - ie, her main argument that the Workers Revolutionary Party is making an opportunistic turn, and is liquidating itself as a Trotskyist party-in-embryo. If this proves to be the case, then Trotskyism - as the defender of Marxism during the Stalinist interregnum - has suffered a grievous blow, from which only its traditional opponents can gain. Given the recent collapse of the Stalinist system, this is a tragic irony.
But does the CPGB offer a real alternative by means of what it calls ‘Partyism’? Is this the way out of the politics of sects, or is it more of the same - yet a further example of infantile leftism masquerading as communism, whose method is formalism, not Marxism?
Consider comrade Lee-Anne’s throw-away remark about the WRP’s alleged “idolising of the reactionary pro-imperialist government in Sarajevo”. One only needs to read more recent articles in Workers Press to find that such an allegation is ill-founded. Lee-Anne is also well aware that the WRP’s orientation on Bosnia has been the subject of a lively and serious debate. This includes Workers Press’ support for the breakaway opposition party to the ruling SDA. The split was in response to the Izetbegovic regime’s capitulation to the Dayton Agreement, whose aim is to ratify the partition of Bosnia, leading to the creation of a rump muslim statelet, alongside a Croatian one in the west, and ‘Republika Srbska’ in the east.
Thus the war against Bosnia, instigated in 1992 by the Bosnian Serb entity, with the backing of the ‘socialist Yugoslav’ government in Belgrade, is brought to an end by rewarding the aggressors and the main perpetrators of massacres and ethnic cleansing - ie, the Bosnian Serb Chetniks and the Bosnian Croat Ustashe. That is imperialism’s final response to a war which unleashed genocide on European soil for the first time since World War II. Owing to German and - belated - US support for Croatia’s determination to reclaim some (if not all) of its territory seized by the Serbs, it is really Croatia which emerges as the victor. No wonder many Bosnian workers and peasants are turning to islam as an alternative, albeit a regressive step. Worst of all, from the standpoint of Marxists, the working class in the region is now divided by the loss of loved ones, land, homes, and the opportunity to live and work together, united as one class. Reactionary ideologies of religion and nationalism begin to flourish again like weeds.
It ill behoves so called ‘Marxists’ who sat on their hands during the conflict, to now crow, ‘We told you so’, about the rump of Bosnia degenerating into a muslim statelet.
That is why, in 1993, the WRP was right to eschew the easy option chosen by the CPGB (and most other ‘Marxist’ grouplets) - ie, an abstentionist position. It sided with the Bosnian people (regardless of their ethnicity) in their struggle to defend a newly independent Bosnia and above all, the multi-ethnic communities, in particular in the urban industrial centres, such as Sarajevo and Tuzla.
Initially the call for Workers Aid For Bosnia came from a Serbian of the Workers’ International. Its aim was to try and build workers’ internationalism, not only in Bosnia, but also in the former Yugoslavia, as well as farther afield, by means of agitating for practical support in the workers’ movement, where possible. This not only resulted in European-wide trade union backing for convoys to Tuzla, but also speaking tours of Britain by Bosnian trade unionists. Most significantly the very first convoy in the summer of 1993 received the backing of the Croatian independent trade union organisation.
From the standpoint of an understanding of concrete reality, paradoxically, Marxists had a duty to start with the defence of Bosnia: that is, its right to determine its own future. This includes its right to secede from the old federation, especially in the light of the Milosevic regime’s brutal oppression of the Albanian majority in Kosovo in 1990; and the JNA’s army’s destruction of Vukovar in 1991, following an 87-day siege. At least many Croatian workers - also in struggle against the Tudjman regime - understood this.
Since the film of Yugoslavia’s short and tragic history is running backwards, leading to its fatal unravelling, the alternative could be the degeneration of a federal, post-capitalist Yugoslavia into ethnically cleansed statelets, ripe for capitalist restoration, and fuelled by reactionary nationalism in every quarter.
This is the stage we have now reached. Thus the struggle for Marxism, as the emancipatory ideology of the working class, suffers a further setback.
The WRP’s campaign failed to rebuild workers’ internationalism on a mass basis. Therefore many British trade unionists, for example, remain confused. At best, most were willing only to support Workers Aid at a humanitarian level. One reason for this is the fact that we live in a different period from, say, the 1930s. When Franco launched his fascist coup against the Spanish republican government in 1936, the world working class responded by volunteering to fight on the side of the Spanish workers and peasants in the international brigades. But today it is not possible to generate workers’ internationalism at such a high political level - in defence of Bosnia or even the Liverpool dockers. Why is this?
The Bosnia context is much more complex, for one thing. For another, despite Stalinism’s grip on the official workers’ movement in the 1930s, then workers’ internationalism still had a resonance which is absent today. Now we must take sober account of the damage at the level of consciousness, which today’s generation of workers have inherited from the past.
At the same time, coincidental with the collapse/metamorphosis of the Stalinist regimes, we also see a crisis of the whole bourgeois order. Certainly, this does open up a new period in the class struggle, comparable to earlier conjunctural earthquakes of the 20th century, such as the capitulation of the Second International to the imperialist drive for war in 1914. On that occasion, imperialist war gave way to the October Revolution, opening the door to world revolution. But today, we have the poisonous legacy of Stalinism, the usurper of the mantle of October. After decades of betrayal of the international revolution, also the barbarism of the Gulag in the name of socialism, it is not surprising that the very idea of communist revolution is dismissed as ‘utopian’ by a majority of intellectuals and workers alike.
Despite the contradictory nature of this new objective situation, on a subjective level, Workers Aid For Bosnia was more than hindered by the opposition it encountered from the abstentionist camp. The latter revealed its ultra-left character, which flows directly from an impressionistic method. In the case of the CPGB, such a method underpins an atavistic desire to defend the regime of rump Yugoslavia (Serbia-Montenegro) as if it really is a socialist state, whereas it is socialist in name only.
Whatever its motives, as abstentionism is no answer to a real objective problem for Marxists today - specifically the new rise of the national question - even if this is the contradictory opposite to global capitalism’s need for supranational structures. In fact the national question has never been laid to rest. For neither Stalinism’s utopian goal of ‘socialism in one country’, nor capitalism, which it was supposed to bury once and for all, have been able to resolve this vital issue, so that it might disappear altogether and become a historical legacy, along with tribalism, feudalism, etc.
Both systems have failed to satisfy the rising aspirations of the masses for a higher standard of life; rather both oppressed and continue to oppress them. Indeed, given the crisis of capital itself - the continuing tendency for the rate of profit to fall - the drive is to extract even more surplus value from labour. Hence the working class is confronted by a new bourgeois offensive, which of necessity, must roll back the post-war concessions achieved by reformism. This is the basis of the bourgeoisie’s attempt to raise productivity by the means of the imposition of longer hours for less pay, speed-ups, redundancies, accompanied by the introduction of new technology; attacks on employment rights through casualisation; the dismantling of state welfare by means of a return to privatisation and deregulated markets. These attacks are presently being waged by governments in both the west and the former eastern bloc countries (led by yesterday’s ‘communist’ apparatchiks).
Hence it is not surprising that these problems proved the catalyst for the new rise of a nationalist sentiment. On the one hand, this is exploited by elements within the bourgeoisie/ex-Stalinist nomenclature. On the other it grips the masses of traditional oppressor and oppressed nations/states alike. Therefore, as Marxists, we must recognise the contradictory reality of the new nationalism: that is, distinguish between the legitimate struggles of the oppressed nations and peoples, and reactionary bourgeois nationalism - ie, aggressive nationalism or chauvinism.
In this regard, Lenin’s writings on the national question, both before and during World War I, are still essentially correct, although the situation is different. For history does not repeat itself, as though it were a loop in endless cycle.
To this end, preparatory to the further development of Marxism in the light of the present let us recap Lenin’s dialectical materialist understanding of the national question as it applied to the situation on the eve of World War I.
Firstly, Lenin based himself on the Marxist method, or the need for a “concrete analysis of a concrete situation”, as he himself put it. In a nutshell, he argues that workers’ internationalism can only arise out of the communist defence of existing bourgeois democratic struggles: ie, the right of all peoples to determine their own future, either by means of the creation of new states or autonomous areas. This also includes the right to secede from an oppressive federation of states, where necessary. It was this understanding which initially divided Lenin from Rosa Luxemburg. For her part, Luxemburg wished to make the question of Polish autonomy within the Russian empire the exception rather than the rule. Whereas Lenin argues that
“in order to eliminate all national oppression it is very important to create autonomous areas, however small, with entirely homogenous populations, towards which members of the respective nationalities, scattered all over the country, ... could gravitate, and with which they could enter into free associations of every kind” (Collected Works Vol 20, pp19-51).
Now, in the case of the break-up of Yugoslavia, this could be immediately seized upon by the abstentionists, as an argument in defence of the right of the Bosnian Serbs to demand autonomy within Bosnia, from the ‘oppressive’ regime in Sarajevo. But the facts of the situation negate this argument. Firstly, there is no evidence of such oppression at that time, certainly at the level experienced by the Albanian majority in Kosovo at the hands of the Milosevic regime.
Secondly, there is ample evidence to prove that it was the latter which instigated the conflict, first in Croatia and secondly in Bosnia. In the light of Serbia’s growing economic problems within the Yugoslav federation, wherein Serbia had always been the poor relation, the opportunist communist apparatchik, Milosevic, decided to opt for a revival of the Serbian nationalist dream to create a ‘Greater Serbia’.
In so doing, he threw his support behind the “draft memorandum prepared in 1985-86 by ... the Serbian Academy of Sciences in Belgrade” (Christopher Cviic, ‘Remaking the Balkans’ RI of International Affairs 1995 pp60-64). ‘Greater Serbia’ was to be based on the Serbian diaspora scattered throughout northern and western Bosnia/Croatia, as well as the Drina valley of eastern Bosnia. This plan was immediately supported by reactionary local leaders among the Bosnian Serbs, Karadzic in particular, as well as fascist Chetnik paramilitaries. Cviic argues that “with Milosevic seemingly hell-bent on restoring the Serbs’ old hegemony in Yugoslavia, the question facing non-Serbs was whether they could afford to stay under the same Yugoslav roof with the Serbs”. But nothing prepared the Bosnian people for the barbarism that was unleashed upon them in April 1992.
Further, Lenin argues, we must fight for “working class democracy”, in opposition to the bourgeois nationalists, by counterposing “the demand for unconditional unity... of workers of all nationalities in all working class organisations - trade unions, cooperative, consumers’, educational and all others - in contradiction to any kind of bourgeois nationalism.
“Only this type of unity and amalgamation can uphold democracy and defend the interests of the workers against capital - which is already international and is becoming more so - and promote the development of mankind towards a new way of life that is alien to all privileges and all exploitation” (‘Critical remarks on the national question’ Collected Works Vol 19, pp354-57). Thus the WRP and Workers Aid for Bosnia were entirely correct to try and establish links with the workers’ organisations of Tuzla, etc.
Secondly, at the same time, Marxists do not see this as the end of the matter. We must also raise the question of workers’ internationalism, which is the only solution. That is why Lenin’s distinction between nationalism which arises out of bourgeois oppression (NB - and its Stalinist offshoot) and nationalism in general is so important:
“Combat all national oppression? Yes, of course! Fight for any kind of national development, for ‘national culture’ in general? - of course not ... The proletariat, however, far from undertaking to uphold the national development of every nation, on the contrary, warns the masses against such illusions, stands for the fullest freedom of capitalist intercourse and welcomes every kind of assimilation of nations, except that which is founded on force or privilege”(my emphasis).
This requires revolutionaries, where necessary, to take sides with all oppressed nations/states, even if this means that they are organised in an army to defend their state, which necessitates the killing, in self-defence, of other workers, who are committing acts of aggression against them. In an ideal world of course workers should call on their brothers and sisters to desist in such acts. But in the real world of Bosnia the Chetnik-inspired genocidal war of ethnic cleansing was secretly organised, and in April 1992 it was launched in a well prepared blitzkrieg down the Drina valley. Without the support of the JNA army this would not have been possible. A few months later, Ustashe-inspired Croatian forces seized Mostar, and began to besiege their helpless muslim neighbours.
In this regard, what distinguished the Bosnian state at that time (and still to some extent even today) was its multi-ethnic character. Even before independent Bosnia began its life, its citizens were able to freely choose a coalition government of muslims, Serbs and Croats. During the war the beleaguered Bosnian army, starved of military hardware by its cynical imperialist ‘partners’, retained its multi-ethnic character, even until the last shot was fired. This included Serbian officers, who considered themselves Bosnians first and foremost, who happen to be of Serbian ethnic origin. As for atrocities against other ethnic groups, it is well documented that the great majority were perpetrated by Serb Chetniks and Croat Ustashe, not by the BHA army.
Thus, in general terms, the revolutionary defence of Bosnia is no different from that of Ireland, or Palestine. Despite the former’s complex history (as part of an ethnic ‘fault line’ of the Balkans region), Bosnia developed organically into a distinct state or entity in the post-war period. Its capital, Sarajevo, was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe - that is, until Chetnik shells destroyed its centuries-old library, and their mortars blew up its citizens, including Serb ‘traitors’, who refused to remove themselves to the Pale enclave. Unless we understand these vital distinctions, in all their concreteness, we Marists have no basis whatsoever for winning the oppressed masses from their bourgeois nationalist leaders.