German article on the Balkans

["Chris, London" <100423.2040@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 24th January Wolfgang forwarded to the list
an article carefully translated into English in 3 parts

Marxists and War in the Balkans

by Theodor Bergmann and Wolfgang Haible

In some ways the most serious contributions are the ones most
difficult to respond to on this list, and six days seems a century ago,
when it really should not.

This article is valuable on several counts. Quoting Hegels strangely
poetic phrase about the owl of Minerva, it modestly, and correctly
points out that knowledge and perspective inevitably often come
only towards the evening of a process.

The article though is not just a serious theoretical article. Because it is
a contribution to a debate within the PDS, which hold seats in the Bundestag,
it actually perhaps uniquely on this list brings us directly into contact
with public political practice - should the PDS group have voted for or
against German participation in the NATO rapid reaction force, in the NATO
peace enforcement unit, in supporting the European Union financial plans
for economic reconstruction, for war crimes tribunals.

Some comments by me on the article:

I particularly welcome the opening sentence:

<<
Our position to the war does not start from universal, non-historical
principles, but has to be based on the studies of the concrete
historical situation. This distinguishes us from both pacifists and
bellicists.>>

IMO this links it with some of the earliest strategic principles of marxism
as laid out in the Communist Manifesto, to have no sectarian principles to
impose on the movement.

I disagree however with the authors' unqualified reporting of Lenin's line
of "revolutionary defeatism" of the first world war. I am increasingly
certain that as the twentieth century draws to an end, the owl of Minerva
would in fact be sweeping around the head of Robert Grimm in Zimmerwald,
and not the head of that brilliant but sectarian polemicist,  Vladimir Ilyich.

The quotation from Lenin on the Balkan war of 1912-13 however is particularly
interesting. The demand for total exclusion of all foreign capitalist pressures
sounds right in principle, but says nothing about the economic progress of the
area. Presumably it implies that a fairly rapid leap from feudalism to
socialism was possible if these pressures could conceivably have been kept at
bay.


In Part II, Bergman and Haible put emphasis on external forces in the
disintegration of current Yugoslavia. While it is particularly their duty
to criticise the German bourgeoisie, I think the internal contradictions
especially the economic contradictions of the uneven accummulation of capital
(or if you prefer surplus - the word does not matter) in different parts of
the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, are the more important.

I found the brief sketch of the loss of revolutionary commitment of the
Yugoslavian communists, convincing psychologically. It did not touch
in a concise article, on what organisational form, if any, could have
compensated for this. (Perhaps the members of the PDS have internal discussions
about their own structures....)


Part 3

The emphasis on the existence of anti-war movements in all parts of
Yugoslavia, is very much to be welcomed. I think that one of the lessons of
20th century is how in apparently popularly based movements, small groups
can have disproportionate influence. We have to distinguish between the
Serbian war criminals and the great mass of Serbs.

The report quoted by Neues Deutschland of the meeting of 4000 people in
Belgrade in July to found the Yugoslav Left, is interesting for its
political programme of peace and civil rights. This is a programme that
at this stage IMO could probably unite potentially the great majority of
the population, including those with bourgeois tendencies, which is
very important at this stage for reuniting working people in
former Yugoslavia, paradoxically enough.  That does not preclude others from
campaigning for a more specifically socialist future once again, but on the
contrary is an essential condition for such a campaign.

The importance of good access to the media is convincing.

I think the authors are right to ask why certain liberal and alternative
sections of German public opinion have been won over by the German government
to its interventionist position, like the leaders of the Second International
were won over in 1914.

The suggestion of listening to Yugoslav migrants in
Germany is an interesting one. How about a forum, maybe private, with the
results published? - ordinary workers from all different backgrounds - how
to deal with conflict, from a working class, not a bourgeois point of view.

But if the PDS is to have more influence and credibility with elements like
the Greens, I suspect its members should read more Grimm, and less Lenin,
on the question of war and peace.

I have tried to do you the honour of writing a stimulating reply.

Many thanks for your stimulating article.

Viele Gruesse!

Chris B
London.







This is a contribution to a PDS discu



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