13.05.1999

‘Left Trotskyism’ and imperialism

The current war between Serbia and the Nato imperialists, fought over the question of Kosova, poses an acute dilemma for many would-be socialists. In this situation you have two distinct strands: the monstrous oppression of the ethnic Albanian population of Kosova by the ultra-rightwing, racist Milosevic regime in Serbia; and the increasingly indiscriminate bombing of Serbia itself by Nato.

Many more serious elements on the left, particularly the ‘harder’ Trotskyist formations, find themselves caught in a particular cleft stick over Kosova. For them, ‘unconditional military defence’ of any force in a backward country that gets into a fire-fight with the imperialists is a point of honour. But for communists there is another principle - that of defence of the rights of the oppressed against their oppressors. The particular configuration of the current Balkans war, the naked clash of these two principles in a war fought centrally over the question of Serb attempts to forcibly retain Kosova against the will of the overwhelming majority of its population, and indeed its being quite prepared to simply expel the Kosovar population in order to populate it with Serb settlers, poses this dilemma point blank. This is where a false dogma comes up against life itself, and the result has propelled several of these groupings to the opposite side of the barricades to the historic, and indeed the immediate, interests of the working class.

For Marxists, opposition to national oppression, genocide and mass forced population transfers is a question of principle. That is why Marxists give critical, but unconditional support to all struggles against such oppression. The actual way in which such questions are posed varies according to circumstance - our fundamental purpose in opposing national oppression is to ‘solve’ the democratic questions as much as is possible under capitalism, in order to demonstrate to the workers and the oppressed masses that it is not extra-class forms of oppression that are the main obstacle to human liberation, but capitalism itself. Thus, while supporting struggles against national oppression, we only support the aspects of such struggles that have a real democratic content. Fundamentally, we are for the equality of all peoples, and in situations where one people oppresses another of comparable social weight, Marxists must be particularly careful to oppose forms of revanchist chauvinism from the currently oppressed population that simply aim to reverse the current relations of oppression.

However, this is not the situation in Kosova. According to the 1991 Yugoslav census, the percentage of the Kosovar population that is ethnic Albanian is approximately 85%. The percentage that is Serbian is around eight percent. The remainder consists of small numbers of Turks, Roma and some Slavic muslims. If anything, in fact, the 1991 census likely understates the ethnic Albanian population of Kosova, since in 1991 there was an ethnic Albanian boycott of the census, in protest at Milosevic’s removal of Kosova’s status as an autonomous region and its forcible incorporation into Serbia. The Serbian population is a national minority that is entitled to full equality. But there is no way it can be allowed to play a role out of proportion to its numbers in determining the national rights of the Kosovar population.

In Kosova, in other words, you have a straightforward democratic question. Yet the intervention of Nato has complicated matters considerably. For it is a fact that, rather than allowing the right of self-determination of the Kosovar Albanians, Nato aims to carve out a ‘protectorate’ of at least part of Kosova, which may well become a highly contaminated and ruined ‘Gaza strip’ for what is left of the Kosovar people after the war. This is obviously not liberation for the Albanian people, and thus socialists should stand for the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of the Nato forces, and should seek to agitate against the war. The workers’ movement should be for the defeat of the Nato forces - but they should be relieved of their weaponry as they leave by the armed formations fighting for the liberation of the Kosova Albanians.

By contrast the position of many so-called ‘left Trotskyists’ is not primarily motivated by the aim of liberation of the oppressed. It is the dogma of ‘defence’ of Serbia that is their primary consideration. However, since the proclaimed war aims of the imperialists are to force Milosevic to relinquish the Serbs’ monopoly of armed force in Kosova, this ‘defence’ of Serbia, when push comes to shove, has nothing whatsoever to do with any defence of the rights of the Serb people to self-determination. Of course, in the event of an attempt by the imperialists to turn Serbia into a colony, Marxists would defend the right of the Serbian people to self-determination just as much as the Kosovars. But at this point this is not at stake. Rather, the defence of Serbia by the ‘left’ Trotskyists’ comes down to the defence of the right of Serbia to occupy Kosova, irrespective of the views of the Albanian population.

This is a scandalous position, that quite clearly puts these ‘left Trotskyists’ on the side of the oppressor against the oppressed. It amounts to de facto support of forces involved in massive forcible population transfers, against the victims of those population transfers. It is a position that - in practice, if not in theory - amounts to support for ethnic cleansing, dressed up as anti-imperialism. Indeed, so scandalous are the implications of this, that they are keen to dress up their position in euphemistic language, avoiding baldly stating the real reactionary implications of their position, which in reality puts them on the ‘left’ wing of a red-brown coalition.

The dogma that it is the duty of the left to become ‘revolutionary defencists’ for any underdeveloped country that comes into conflict with the imperialists, irrespective of the issues of the war, has produced some interesting contradictions in one of these ‘left Trotskyist’ organisations, the International Bolshevik Tendency. After the war began, the IBT wrote, hypothetically, if somewhat bizarrely:

“We call for the defence of Yugoslavia (including Kosovo) against Nato forces, but we do not defend the ‘territorial integrity’ of the existing Serbian state. We adamantly oppose the renewed wave of murderous ‘ethnic cleansing’ being carried out by Milosevic against Kosovo’s Albanian citizens in the wake of Nato’s attack. The Kosovars have every right to forcibly resist their Serb oppressors and to determine their own future. All communities (including members of Kosovo’s Serb minority) have the right to self-defence against communalist pogroms.

“The Kosovo Liberation Army is made up of people who are just as committed to a programme of national exclusiveness as Milosevic and his ilk. The KLA is determined to gain independence from the Serbs and only signed the Rambouillet agreement (which specifies that Kosovo remain nominally part of Serbia for three years) as a manoeuvre. They hoped that Serb intransigence would lead Nato to attack.

“While we offer no political support to the bourgeois-nationalist KLA, we nonetheless side with them militarily in their struggle for freedom from their Serb oppressors. If, in the course of the present conflict, the KLA should become subordinated to, or begin to operate essentially as an auxiliary of, the Nato aggressors, our attitude would change to one of favouring the victory of the Yugoslav army over both the imperialists and their auxiliaries” (IBT statement, March 30).

This position shows the absurdity of the dogma of ‘revolutionary defencism’ of counterrevolutionary bourgeois regimes, applied in extremis. The IBT, effectively advises its hypothetical forces on the ground that they should support one side in a war, characterising their struggle as a “struggle for freedom”. But with the proviso that if, at some future point, these forces do not behave in a manner that the IBT approves of, their forces should change sides in the middle of a war and support the crushing of the forces it previously characterised as waging a “struggle for freedom” by their Serb “oppressors”. It would seem to anyone with any knowledge of warfare that such hypothetical IBT formations could legitimately be shot by either side as being a dead cert to become enemy agents!

The IBT have apparently drawn this to its logical conclusion. They now write:

“The KLA can no longer be considered as any kind of national liberation movement - it is today simply a cat’s paw of imperialism. We have therefore dropped the call for ‘independence for Kosovo’ as an immediate, agitational, demand because in the present context it can only serve as a cover for the schemes of the imperialists.” (IBT statement, May 8).

Yet they are strangely sanguine in their more recent statement. Nowhere in this statement do they quote or reiterate their earlier point that in such an event they would favour “the victory of the Yugoslav army over both the imperialists and their auxiliaries”. Instead they regail us with a quotation from Lenin against reactionary Polish nationalists thus: “We stand in the tradition of Vladimir Lenin who, in the midst of World War I, asserted that: ‘To be in favour of an all-European war merely for the sake of restoring Poland is to be a nationalist of the worst sort ...’ (‘The discussion on self-determination summed up’). Lenin observed that Marxists do not regard the right of self-determination as a categorical imperative ...” And they cite chapter and verse:

“The several demands of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but only a small part of the general-democratic [now: general-socialist - IBT] world movement. In individual concrete cases, the part may contradict the whole; if so, it must be rejected. It is possible that the republican movement in one country may be merely an instrument of the clerical or financial-monarchist intrigues of other countries; if so, we must not support this particular, concrete movement...”

However, this comparison is absurd. It could equally be said that we should on the same basis condemn Milosevic and the Serb nationalists for being prepared to provoke a general Balkans war, dragging in the imperialists, in order to hang onto Kosova against the will of its inhabitants. In any case, Lenin was not advocating support for the suppression of Polish nationalists by either tsarist Russia or the kaiser’s Germany. Such a course he would have condemned as social chauvinism and class treason on the part of anyone who advocated it. The IBT does not merely condemn the undoubted chauvinism of the Albanian nationalists as being comparable to that of the Polish nationalists of the World War I period (which of course in many ways it is - though this did not stop Lenin from supporting Poland’s right to self-determination as a weapon against that same reactionary nationalism). No. They go qualitatively further than that, and advocate the victory of the oppressor over the oppressed.

‘Ah,’ the IBT will say, ‘but in this instance, Milosevic is fighting imperialism.’ In a sense, this is true. But one has to ask - what is Milosevic fighting imperialism about? He is fighting for the right to rule Kosova, against the will of its inhabitants. Is this a progressive aim?

The IBT will of course say, no. This is not in itself a progressive aim. But for them the presence of imperialism makes it a progressive aim, because any victory of an underdeveloped state against the imperialists is by definition progressive, irrespective of what the intrinsic issues of the conflict may be. But here they part company, not only with reality, but even with the Lenin that they misuse to justify their dogma. For unlike them, Lenin did not consider that any struggle against imperialism was ‘progressive’. Quite the opposite, and the IBT’s delving into the discussions among the Bolsheviks on the national question during World War I misrepresents the positions of Lenin by omission. Of course, as Marxists we should be able to think for ourselves, and not have to depend excessively on uncritically regurgitating quotes from the old masters when formulating a line. But it is a bit rich to quote poor old Lenin to justify giving ‘military support’ to Milosevic’s genocidal and reactionary ‘anti-imperialism’ when Lenin made it quite clear that in his view:

“Imperialism is as much our ‘mortal’ enemy as is capitalism. That is so. No Marxist will forget, however, that capitalism is progressive compared with feudalism, and that imperialism is progressive compared with pre-monopoly capitalism. Hence, it is not every struggle against imperialism that we should support. We will not support a struggle of the reactionary classes against imperialism; we will not support an uprising of the reactionary classes against imperialism and capitalism” (VI Lenin ‘A caricature of Marxism and imperialist economism’ CW Vol 23, p63).

And today we should not support the venal Serbian bureaucratic/mafia proto-bourgeoisie in its struggle against ‘democratic’ imperialism to re-establish the reactionary Serbian medieval myth of Kosova and carve a Greater Serbian state out of the living body of the Albanian people. This is a reactionary struggle against imperialism par excellence.

Ian Donovan