13.02.1997

National question and the ‘lesser evil’

Martin Blum discusses a working class answer to the national question in the former Yugoslavia

Comrade John Reed, a former member of the now defunct Workers Revolutionary Party (Workers Press), presented an opening at a CPGB London seminar recently, which saw a long, but by no means exhaustive debate on the nature of the Bosnian war.

The 1990s have seen the national question coming to the fore. It is vital that communists develop an understanding of these movements, these conflicts, in order to develop a clear working class perspective to solve these contradictions in our own interests.

For me, the most revealing and damning aspect of comrade Reed’s position came in his final summation. In his defence of supporting the Bosnian state in its war against the Yugoslavian (ie, Serbian) and Croatian states he said: “Unfortunately, it was in a period where the working class did not have a role to play.”

To my mind, this a liberal capitulation in the face of a reactionary meltdown of the former Yugoslavia. Not one of the belligerent states had any progressive element for the working class to defend.

This, of course, is disputed by Reed. He claims that the banner of ‘multi-ethnicity’ under which Izetbegovic and his government fought was reason enough to support the Bosnian state against the forces of Croatia and Serbia. This defence of the Bosnian state is cloaked in the guise of the right of the Bosnian nation to self-determination. It is debatable that there was a ‘multi-ethnic’ Bosnian nationality rather than Serbs, Croatians and Muslims living in Bosnia.

Comrade Reed opened the seminar with an examination of Lenin’s position on the rights of nations to self-determination. He quite correctly identified national self-determination as central to the socialist revolution and the communist programme. I agree with him that we do not merely champion this democratic right to ‘remove it from the agenda’, but because communists have a universal programme for humanity, which can only be carried out by the revolutionary class, the working class.

Reed reiterated Lenin’s position of there being two periods in the development of capitalism: one, the period of the collapse of feudalism and absolutism; and two, the period of fully formed capitalist states. Lenin says that in the first period national movements are to the fore and for the first time become truly mass movements. In the second period, class conflict, “highly developed antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie” (VI Lenin The rights of nations to self-determination Moscow 1970, p11), is more the order of the day.

Reed claims that this schema is no longer current and that a third period of structural crisis in world capitalism with the anachronism of the bourgeois nation-state in the period of globalisation and transnational corporations (TNCs) is upon us. He borrows the title of Trotsky’s Transitional programme to call this the epoch of capitalist decay. The outcome of this third period is the (re)emergence of national questions.

I have some sympathy with Reed’s assessment and have recently been grappling with something similar in trying to understand the emergence of the national question in Britain over the past two decades or so. However, I feel that to develop a separate period in the development of capitalism as distinct as the two identified by Lenin is to go too far. Certainly, in the way Lenin developed his schema in The rights of nations to self-determination to discern “a clear distinction ... between the two periods of capitalism” he seemed to imply that national questions diminish in the second period of “fully formed capitalist states with a long-constitutional regime” (ibid).

This clear distinction is an abstraction by which Lenin was developing useful categories to understand the concrete specificity of the national question in the Russian revolution. In his writings on Ireland of around the same period, Lenin highlighted the central role of the national question in the UK - the oldest of “fully formed capitalist states with a long-constitutional regime”

The contradiction between what Reed described as the anachronism of the bourgeois nation-state in the age of globalisation and TNCs is not new. Certainly, it is being exacerbated, which is leading to the (re)emergence of national questions in the metropolises of capital, not just in the periphery and semi-periphery.

As I quoted at the beginning, central to Reed’s and the WRP’s support for the Bosnian state (at the beginning of the war) were two points: one, that the working class had no role to play; and two, the progressive clement of the Bosnian ‘proto-bourgeoisie’ is in its defence of ‘multi-ethnicity’ against Greater Serb nationalism. This leads him to support the ‘most progressive’ bourgeoisie. I reject both assertions.

Comrade Reed took us on an historical journey back to the Bosnian entity in the 14th century - its tolerance of religious minorities and other nations and creeds, claims Reed, is a golden thread through the Bosnian ‘national psyche’ to be supported against the genocidal revanchism of Greater Serbia.

In any conflict, along the lines of Clausewitz’s famous axiom, we must look behind the veil of ‘official’ war policy in order to understand the true nature of the programme of the belligerent forces. Otherwise we end up in the situation of the CPGB during World War II when it supported the British state against Hitler because the former claimed to be fighting for democracy, civilisation and against fascist dictatorship. The reality was, of course, that it was fighting for its spoils in an inter-imperialist conflict.

There is no doubt that the Izetbegovic regime fought the war under the official state policy of multi-ethnicity. It remains state policy to this day. And no one doubts the progressive character of multi-ethnicity; the “right and fact of people to work, love, marry and play together”, as Reed puts it. But did, and does, the Izetbegovic regime represent this? And did the Bosnian population recognise this in the Bosnian state? In both cases, I would argue no. The first election results, as Reed admits, resembled an ethnic census. The Serb minority clearly felt that their national aspirations (which, like all nationalisms, were reactionary) were not allowed for under multi-ethnicity. This was leapt upon by the Serbian proto-bourgeoisie. Where was the right of Serbs and Croatians to self-determination? For Reed, this is a non-issue, as anyone who wanted to determine differently to ‘multi-ethnicity’ within the confines of the Bosnian state was to have no right to self-determination.

So whence this veil of ‘multi-ethnicity’ for the nascent Bosnian bourgeoisie? For this we need to understand the nature of the bureaucratic socialist Tito regime.

The formation of the Yugoslavian ‘socialist’ federation was posited on the understanding of the need to solve the national question. The formation of Yugoslavia was a progressive step. Central to this understanding was the need to curb the Croatian Ustashe and the aspirations of a Greater Serbia.

Of course, this was handled in a typically ham-fisted, top-down, bureaucratic fashion. The borders of Bosnia were consciously drawn to establish it as a ‘multi-ethnic’ state in order to curb Serbian and Croatian nationalism.

Bosnians (secular Muslims in the main) were put into leading bureaucratic positions. But typically - as in the USSR, where the number two was Moscow’s man - the number two ‘boss’ in Bosnia was Belgrade’s man. This generally meant a Serb.

This is, of course, no way to democratically solve the national question in the interests of the working class. Under such conditions, the self-serving bureaucracy merely puts a lid on the contradictions.

The decade following the death of Tito - the ‘one true Yugoslav’, as the old joke goes - saw the unravelling of the counterrevolution throughout eastern Europe, with its culmination in 1989-91. The bureaucracies set the task of forming themselves as a new ruling class, as a capitalist class. Not everyone was going to be able to join the new club.

One of the first tasks all these nascent bourgeoisies faced was carving out an internal market. Centripetal national forces in the counterrevolution were fought tooth and nail. At times, armed conflict developed. Gorbachev faced the breakaway of the Baltic states; Moldova had its Rumanian minority; Czechoslovakia had its ‘velvet divorce’; and we have all seen Yeltsin’s crisis around Chechnya.

In the former Yugoslavia, the bureaucrats-turning-bourgeoisie laid claim to the territory laid out by Tito - and then some. Croatia eyed territory in both Bosnia and Serbia, while keeping a careful eye on the intentions of German imperialism. Serb nationalists dreamed of a Greater Serbia and Bosnia, the weaker of the proto-bourgeoisies, began a struggle to maintain its existing borders. Thus war.

There was, and is, nothing progressive in any of the programmes of these nascent bourgeoisies. With Croatia draped in the Ustashe red and white check and the Serb call for a Greater Serbia, this is easy to see, for even the most woolly headed liberal. But the Bosnian proto-bourgeoisie used a rallying cry of ‘multi-ethnicity’ for its purpose of establishing an internal marker, for defending its borders. Given the top-down positioning of ethnic Serbs (and Croats) in the Bosnian bureaucracy by Tito, it is not surprising there were cases where such people identified their reactionary interests with their fellow bureaucrats around the Bosnian state. Hence our famous general and his ‘multi-ethnic’ militia (of which 70% was Islamic). Undoubtedly, other Bosnian Serb bureaucrats saw their best interests with a Greater Serbia.

To dismiss comrade Reed as being a woolly headed liberal who reads The Guardian would be too easy. Where does his dismal understanding of the Balkan war come from?

For this we must understand that Trotskyism, and the Healyite stable that this comrade originated from, completely misunderstood the culmination of the counterrevolutionary process in 1989-91. The collapse of Stalinism did not occur the way Trotsky and his followers expected.

On the whole, 1989-91 was a period of ‘democratic’ counterrevolution. In almost all cases it was peaceful. This runs completely against the grain of Trotskyism. For them, the counterrevolution was the transfer from a ‘degenerate’ or’ deformed’ (‘moribund’ even) ‘workers’ state’ to a bourgeois state.

In Trotsky’s The class nature of the Soviet state, the Old Man asks, “How is the imperceptible ‘gradual’ bourgeois counterrevolution possible?” He goes on to try to answer his own rhetorical question:

“Until now, feudal as well as bourgeois counterrevolutions have never taken place ‘organically’ but they have invariably required the intervention of military surgery ... The Marxian thesis relating to the catastrophic transfer of power from the hands of one class into the hands of another applies not only to revolutionary periods ... but also to the periods of counterrevolution” (L Trotsky The class nature of the Soviet state London 1990, pp7-8).

The multifarious Trotskyist organisations could not see the counterrevolution in its final moments. They could only see the political revolution against the bureaucracy. In most cases, the mass of the population went along with the bureaucracy in its desire for the market.

For Trotsky’s followers at the time, to claim otherwise was the same as “running backwards the film of reformism” (ibid).

The other major aspect of the tenets of Trotskyism is that, given the ‘proletarian’ forms of property they claim existed in these countries, given a move by the bureaucracy to usurp such forms of property, the ‘superstructure’ consciousness of the workers would be thrown into action to defend the ‘proletarian base’.

This, of course, did not happen. The workers did not act as a class in defence of the so-called ‘degenerate workers’ states’. Workers were swept along in the reactionary carnival being led by the overwhelming majority of the bureaucracy and international imperialism.

Bureaucracies began their painful (yet for them rewarding) task of joining the world capitalist class.

This leads comrade Reed to the position that the working class could “unfortunately” play no role. He thus searches for the ‘lesser evil’ in the Balkan war. Largely predicated on a body count or on who was losing at a particular time.

In pre-imperialist times, it was quite correct to support the progressive bourgeoisie. But in the period of imperialism, in the arena of counterrevolution and a war between nascent bourgeoisies carving out internal markets for themselves, Marxists can take no sides, no matter what mystifying ideology the protagonists are draped in.

The correct position, the correct orientation, was to organise class conscious workers in Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia for the defeat of their respective governments. For such workers in Bosnia (of whom there were few, given the election results) to signal to Serb workers that they are supporting ‘their’ government is to send out a non-independent class message and to send Serb workers into the arms of the Serbian nationalists.

And what is the fruit of the WRP (Workers Press) orientation to this war? One comrade at the meeting claimed that the European left’s ‘abstentionism’ (does he mean revolutionary defeatism?) ‘led’ the Bosnian masses to go over to muslim reaction.

In defence of his comrades’ activity through Workers Aid for Bosnia, comrade Reed referred to a recent meeting in London between trade unionists from Bosnia and Kosovo. This meeting, it was claimed, was only possible through Workers Aid’s 30-truck convoy towards ‘red’ Tuzla.

Amazingly, comrade Reed believes the three main outcomes of this meeting vindicate his position. These are: defence of free trade unions, international solidarity and the right to defend their ‘own’ country.

The slogan of ‘defence of one’s country’ should send shivers down any internationalist’s spine. Given the concrete situation of a reactionary war, this ‘outcome’ is an abomination. Even if the Bosnian government was originally to be sided with (which I reject), even these comrades say that this is no longer the case since Izetbegovic’s signing of the Dayton Agreement. Now even for them the slogan, ‘defence of one’s country’, must be thrown out of the workers’ movement in Bosnia.

Comrades, as you pointed out, understanding this conflict is vital, not just in and of itself, but precisely because such conflicts have arisen and will arise again. To link the revolutionary movement and aspirations of our class with any reactionary and anti-working class state, no matter what the emperor’s clothes, is to huddle beneath the banner of the bourgeoisie, to lead class conscious workers to abandon a programme of revolutionary working class independence and to capitulate to what is perceived or hoped to be the lesser of two evils.