27.05.1999

Socialist Labour bull

Royston Bull may have been squeezed out of the Socialist Labour Party, but ‘Bullism’ (perhaps ‘Bullshit’ would be a more accurate term) lives on in the pages of the SLP’s official organ, Socialist News.

Witness the article by Dave Coates, a supporter of Bull’s Economic and Philosophic Science Review, in the May-June issue of Scargill’s paper. In seeking to provide some kind of intellectual justification for craven ‘Yugoslav defencism’, comrade Coates plumbs new depths of absurdity by offering his readers a short essay on the theme of history as grand conspiracy.

Under the lurid headline ‘A bloody war secretly planned’, Coates tells us that the imperialists’ offensive against Serbia “has been planned for 20 years” and that “like all wars, it was planned in secret”. The

“destabilisation of Yugoslavia actually started in 1980, with the withdrawal of United States-backed financial support for the Yugoslav economy. The effect: economic, then ethnic friction - and by 1989 when inflation peaked at 2,000%, friction had already turned bloody.”

Think about this statement for a moment. The only logical conclusion to be drawn from it actually amounts to an argument in favour of imperialist ‘aid’: ie, if only the US and other imperialist powers had continued to pump resources into their ‘socialist’ client, then all would have been well. The sacred ‘integrity’ of the Yugoslav ‘workers’ state’ would have been preserved by foreign loans. This is indeed a grotesque position for any ‘Marxist’ to adopt, but then we are dealing with the fetid mind of a supporter of the Stalinist EPSR.

In the interests of consistency, Coates should surely be arguing that the problems of Yugoslavia began not in 1980, but in 1948, with Tito’s break with Stalin’s ‘socialist’ bloc, Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform and the acceptance of western protection and arms supplies. Coates is no doubt aware that Stalin and his cohorts denounced Tito and the Yugoslav ‘official communists’ as fascist-Trotskyists, and for the sake of Coates - and certainly his fellow SLPer Harpal Brar - it is also worth citing the ultra-Stalinist Enver Hoxha:

“After many patient efforts to bring the renegade Tito into line, when they were convinced that he was incorrigible, Stalin, the Bolshevik Party and all the other genuine communist parties of the world unanimously condemned him. It became obvious that the work of Tito was in the service of world imperialism. Therefore he relied on and was supported by American imperialism and the other capitalist states. Joining the chorus of the bourgeois propaganda and in order to earn the credits he received from the imperialists, Tito, among other things, slandered that Stalin allegedly prepared the attack against Yugoslavia. Time proved that Tito was lying” (E Hoxha With Stalin Tirana 1984, pp25-26).

As any schoolboy knows, Tito’s Yugoslavia, whatever its merits as a ‘workers’ state’, was in hock to imperialism for decades. The exigencies of the present times, however, particularly the need to portray Serbia - with Coates and others the terms ‘Serbia’ and ‘Yugoslavia’ are tellingly interchangeable - as an innocent victim of imperialist plotting, mean that the old Stalinist orthodoxy must be suppressed. Yugoslavia’s supposed status as an imperialist client must somehow be ignored, its balancing off international capital depicted as something on which the perfidious imperialists began to renege some “20 years ago”.

According to Coates, imperialism’s conspiratorial “hidden agenda” in the Balkans was “to trigger nationalist separatist movements in Bosnia and Kosovo, with the ultimate aim of further destabilising Yugoslavia”. This proposition does not bear serious examination where Kosova is concerned. As we have laboriously explained on many occasions, the imperialists have nothing to gain, and potentially much to lose, from Kosovar independence. Their strategic geopolitical design for the region encompasses the creation of stable, economically viable states amenable to exploitation. Where Coates sees a covert conspiracy, history itself provides abundant evidence of a very overt cock-up. Ever since Germany’s precipitate recognition of Slovenian statehood and independence, the imperialist powers’ handling of the Balkans has been a long record of miscalculation and hasty improvisation rather than the fantasy of astute and devilish “planning” that Coates would have us believe.

Facile talk of giant conspiracies is bad enough, but there is worse to follow. More than half of Coates’s article is taken up with a breathless, almost hysterical litany of atrocity stories - no doubt kindly provided by the Tanjug press agency in Belgrade - aimed at discrediting the Kosova Liberation Army. Among the “reports on Kosovo you will never see or hear through our press, radio or television” are allegations about attacks on Slavic churches, poisoned wells, burnt crops and “Slavic boys knifed”. The crescendo comes with stories of a little boy who was raped and had his ear cut off by the “Albanian death squad butcher”, Lyan Mazreku, not to mention the “amputations, eye-gougings and decapitations” purportedly carried out by the KLA. In short, to quote one of Coates’s more subdued utterances: “KLA forces, backed by the CIA, are up to their necks in the blood of murdered civilians.” We who have memories cannot but recall similar stuff about the IRA in Ireland and the NLF in Vietnam.

Coates’s message is that, in order to justify its bombing, Nato has “whipped up a campaign to demonise president Slobodan Milosevic”. The “truth”, however, is that the Serbian regime is composed of lily-white innocents - indeed, he tells us that, prior to the outbreak of hostilities, the Serbian government was “planning to give financial assistance for repair and rebuilding to those Albanians whose homes had been damaged or destroyed by the KLA”. Not a word from Coates, of course, about the ‘ethnic cleansing’: ie, mass murder, rapes, arson and deportations systematically carried out by Serbian army and special forces in the last two months. The hundreds of thousands of refugees are a material fact that cannot be disguised by the war propaganda of any side. Coates, unlike his counterparts among other ‘Yugoslav defencists’, does not even bother to try and represent this act of state terrorism as a ‘justifiable’ counterstroke to the atrocities supposedly performed by the KLA. He merely observes a very significant silence on the subject.

The attitude of the Weekly Worker to the KLA is well known. We support the just struggle of the Kosovars for self-determination and independence, but we do not see the KLA through rose-tinted spectacles. Like all national liberation movements led by petty bourgeois or national bourgeois elements, it is deeply flawed. There have no doubt been occasions on which the KLA - in conditions of extreme provocation and organisational weakness - has replied to barbarism with barbarism. We condemn atrocities from whatever quarter, but we also unreservedly condemn the way in which certain organisations on the left - particularly the SLP, the Morning Star and the New Communist Party - set out to deceive the working class by giving a totally distorted picture of the Serbian conflict.

Socialist News tells us that “signed articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors”. It is time then that the SLP’s labour dictator, Arthur Scargill, gave his considered opinion in a serious article. That for the moment he is prepared Bonapartistically to allow his remaining left liberals to prattle on, while they are verbally assaulted by the EPSR and Brarite Stalinists tells us much about the theoretical and moral bankruptcy of his party.

Socialists are duty bound to take sides: against Nato’s air war, against Milosevic, for Kosovar self-determination and independence. Blair’s candidates for the EU parliament are for imperialism and Nato. On June 10 the SLP will stand to all intents and purposes as a red-brown extension of Belgrade. Only the Weekly Worker list is for international solidarity and anti-imperialism. The bigger our vote, the better.

Michael Malkin