AUT: Aut-Op-Sy stuff

[Steve Wright <pmargin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

here's something from a friend currently travelling in Europe

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Paul Bowman wrote:

>However, it is impossible to get rid of value exchange and the wage
>relation
without abolishing the state, the latter being no more than a organisation
of people bound into an authoritarian structure by the authroity of the
wage - a soldier who obeys orders not because his wage, bread and future
existence depends on it, but because he or she chooses to is no longer a
soldier but a volunteer - soldiers who don't get paid are notoriously
useless or even dangerous from the point of view of state power (c.f. Zaire,
etc.).

This is a fairly minor point but nevertheless... I have been travelling in
Serbia and the Serb half of Bosnia recently and have met several men who
spent the whole war (92-95) in the Bosnian Serb army. After 92 they did not
get paid and in 95 they didn't get even get fed. Yet there was only one
major rebellion (in Banja Luka in 93) throughout the war. Many of their
commanders and politicians were selling weapons to the opposing armies and I
heard several stories of hard won offensives stopped not by enemy action but
by orders from above apparently sometimes when the commanders had been paid
off by the 'enemy'. Despite all these 'betrayals' the hold of nationalism
ran deep enough to keep them at the front, although given the Serb
atrocities the Serb soldiers had good reason to fear the consequences of
Bosnian and Croat advances upon them and their families.

When I get back to Australia I'll subscribe to the Autopsy list and
hopefully send a fuller account of what I learnt in the ex-Yugoslavia.

Peter


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