10.06.1999

Left must think again

Balkans war

Whatever the outcome of the peace negotiations on the Macedonia-Kosova border this week, the Balkans will remain a tinderbox of unresolved national grievances, a strategic nightmare for the western powers.

Nevertheless the imperialists have their answers: limited self-determination for the national-state fragments under a Nato-dominated police force, parliamentary democracy, economic aid and the promise - maybe the eventual reality - of European Union membership. What Kosova has revealed is not the bankruptcy of imperialism. Rather it has been the bankruptcy of a left whose ‘anti-imperialism’ is so reactionary and trapped in the past that it sided with the red-brown Milosevic and led to the anti-Kosovar pogrom being ignored or even excused.

Since bombs started raining down on rump Yugoslavia on March 24, the Committee for Peace in the Balkans (CFPB) has been the main organisational focus for opposition to the war. Aided by the loyal foot soldiers of the Socialist Workers Party, the ‘official’ anti-war coterie has centred around Labour left members of parliament such as Alice Mahon. As well as the ‘usual suspects’, Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn, luminaries including Jeremy Hardy, Germaine Greer and Tariq Ali. Despite such a cast, the peace movement failed to pick up any real steam; it failed to enrol and ignite the imagination of new layers in society. None of the national demonstrations attracted more than 5,000. And each mobilisation was a repetition. Different route, same people. The bulk - up to half - came from the SWP, which supported the pacifist and/or effectively pro-Serb leaders of the official peace movement. Other forces included CNDers and Christians, along with Serb nationalists. The various left groupings constituted a small, though often not at all critical, minority.

While opinion polls during the war have put opposition at around a third of British society, this failed to materialise as a movement - either against the war itself or against the New Labour government which has so enthusiastically pursued the clinical butchery.

If, according to some on the left, ‘ordinary people’ seethe with anger at Tony Blair and so much of society opposes the war against Serbia, why are they not out on the streets saying so?

There are two central reasons. First, the current political climate. This is not the last year of the “red 90s” that Peter Taaffe once talked of. Neither is it the “best time to be a socialist”, as the SWP’s Candy Udwin proclaimed this year - before the SWP retreated from the Euro elections in London. On the other hand, with the collapse of the Soviet Union neither did we reach the ‘end of history’ and the irreversible victory of liberal capitalism. Yet the working class - as an idea and a political force - has been dealt a series of severe blows. We live in a period of reaction, albeit of a special type.

Associated with this has been the failure of the revolutionary left. In the 1970s and 80s, national demonstrations over 10,000 were unremarkable. As the left has declined organisationally - the spectacular implosion of the Workers Revolutionary Party, the continuing splintering of the Socialist Party/Militant and the demise of official communism - its relationship with society has qualitatively diminished. With the partial exception of Scotland - where petty nationalism has been embraced - the left no longer packs a punch. No organisation commands a social base. The most that can be boasted of is a few trade union officials and the occasional prominent militant.

This atomisation of resistance to Blair and capitalism and the shrinking of the left are not the only reasons for the inability of the anti-war movement to mobilise new layers. Perhaps they are not even the main problems. Apart from a tiny minority, the movement against Nato’s war has had no answers to the central lie being peddled by Blair, Ashdown, Clinton and Shea. The official movement has had no convincing response to the government’s sickening claim that Nato’s war is ‘humanitarian’. Moreover, the pro-Serbian and anti-Kosovar responses to this lie - whether from the SWP, the CFPB or the so-called Communist Party of Britain (Morning Star) - have further undermined opposition to the war.

To be blunt, the leadership of the peace movement appeared less humane than Nato. Everyone on the left knows that Nato imperialism has no particular concern for the suffering of the Kosovar Albanians. Yet for all that the war was fought under that guise. A material fact, because it convinced the majority and paralysed the minority. Exemplified by the Ken Livingstones and Mark Seddons of this world, the ‘something must be done’ brigade embraced a social-chauvinist and pro-war position, revealing their true colours (interestingly a swathe of the left denounced the CPGB for standing against Livingstone in past elections). However, this reflects a mass which does exist in society - those who thought that ‘we’ must help out the Kosovars. Despite misgivings, many believed that Nato was doing just that.

The peace movement has tried to ignore the reality of the conflict between the Kosova Liberation Army and Serbian forces. After having their rights denied for decades the oppressed rebelled and took up arms. Milosevic put into operation his ‘final solution’. Thousands have been killed by marauding Serb soldiers and paramilitaries. Over a million have been driven from their homes.

Criminally the peace movement kept silent. Worse, many openly took a Serb defencist position, not just against Nato, but against the Kosovar ‘terrorists’. On demonstrations the sight of drunk chetniks proudly carrying Yugoslav flags has been common. The names of Serbs killed by Nato were displayed on officially sponsored christian crosses while the massacre of Kosovars either went unmentioned or was celebrated. Falling back on international legalese, it was said that the Kosova issue is an internal matter for Yugoslavia or subordinate to ‘anti-imperialism’.

Nato conspicuously declined to arm the KLA in any real way, insists it must demilitarise and is now making hasty preparations to ‘fill the vacuum’ in Kosova after a Serb withdrawal. Yet almost the whole array of Trotskyites, Stalinites and Scargillites actually argue that the KLA is merely the ‘cat’s paw’ of imperialism. When Ho Chi Minh accepted arms and training during World War II from the OSS - the forerunner of the CIA - was he a cat’s paw of imperialism? Were Tito’s partisans in the pocket of British imperialism when they took arms and training from the Churchill-Attlee government? Was Stalin a dupe of the west when taking military rations and arms and coordinating military action with Britain and the US? Certainly when Scargill argues, as he did at his European election rally in London earlier this week, that the KLA is the same as the contras in Nicaragua or the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, all he is doing is exposing his red-brown solidarity with the brutal chauvinism of Milosevic.

While such positions could have been expected from the likes of the CPB, the walking dead of the New Communist Party or the rump Socialist Labour Party, the SWP is another matter. For it to adopt an explicitly social-pacifist position, while equating the violence of the oppressed Kosovars with their Serb oppressors, marked a new stage in its growing disorientation. Such is the programmatic confusion of the SWP. Having taken the difficult step to dump auto-Labourism, its tailist instinct led it straight to the backside of the pacifists and Serb defencists of the CFPB.

The official line of the SWP throughout this conflict has been ‘war is bad’ - full stop. At the same time it has sickeningly argued that, as Nato is the enemy of the British working class, the left must keep quiet on the brutality of Nato’s enemy, the Serbian regime. That, argues the SWP, is a question for the Serbian working class.

The social pacifism of the SWP has at times all but smothered its routine espousal of revolution. At a recent Lambeth Against the War debate between Tribune’s Mark Seddon and the SWP’s John Rees, a leading local SWP activist actually said, “War never freed anyone”!

Speaking at the rally after the June 5 national demonstration against the war, the general secretary of Natfhe, the tertiary education union, pointed out that Kosovars had been forced to speak Serbian. An SWPer stupidly heckled: “What about Blair forcing asylum seekers to speak English?” Hardly the point - we as communists support voluntary assimilation and demand the right to learn English. Anyway by turning the internationalist maxim, ‘The main enemy is at home’, into ‘The only enemy is at home’, the SWP has effectively joined the Milosevic defencist camp. No wonder they called for a vote for Scargill in the June 10 European election in London.

The ‘social’ aspect of the SWP’s pacifism has been summed up by their ‘Welfare, not warfare’ slogan. This demand reduces a political issue that the working class must grasp and solve into an economic nostrum fully within the sphere of everyday trade unionism.

The painting of the two dozen or so operational errors of the Nato war campaign as purposely inhumane or random bombings has further isolated the peace movement. To present the bombing of the Chinese embassy as deliberate or to argue that Nato has targeted Serb children is to enter the world of fantasy. Yet such allegations have been made not only by the SWP and the rest of the peace movement, but even by some holding a principled internationalist position on the war.

It is obvious to all but the wilfully stupid that Nato has attempted to minimise civilian casualties. It has spent billions on developing weapons to be as accurate as possible. If Nato wanted to conduct a deliberately brutal war, it could carpet-bomb Belgrade. It could turn it into another Dresden. It is not only a cash-strapped Russia holding back Nato; it is concern for public opinion back home. Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Robin Cook and Clare Short may actually believe they are fighting a humanitarian war - as well as a war for European stability and security. They desperately want the public to believe it too.

Other hare-brained theories are that the war is all about securing the oil of the Caspian Sea, or, as Socialist Worker argued (June 5), that the war is a $400 billion debt enforcement reminder call to impoverished Balkan states. Even weirder has been the suggestion that the war is about the winning of Kosova so as to subject it to capitalist exploitation - the “glittering prize” of Kosova, as Spark, the youth journal of the SLP, ludicrously put it. Capitalism could exploit the two million inhabitants of Kosova for a hundred years and still not recoup financially what it has spent in the last few weeks on the war.

Surely it is time for thinking people on the left to think again.

Marcus Larsen