Re: Blindness, foolishness, or what?

[bernie wool <bernard.wool@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nestor seems in his response to the appeal from the Mitrovica miners
(locked out from the the Trepca group of mines) to think that all
workers should be fully fledged Marxists, and also of his particular
persuasion.  Perhaps also he thinks that, like all workers in the Former
Yugoslavia, they were stupidly naive to believe that their workplaces
were 'social property', as part of 'actually existing socialism' before
the collapse of the Yugoslav Federation as established under Tito.
According to Nestor, that is because they were 'stupid'.

Isn't it a fact that, to the great discredit of both the working class
and its organizations in the main imperialist countries and the
so-called 'Left', no-one made the slightest attempt to discover what was
going on in Kosova since 1989?  Whatever the 'truth' of events in the
last year, more than a million fled the area before a co-ordinated
terror machine that took its orders from Beograd.  Or were the busloads
of Arkan's psychopaths really well-meaning relief workers, and were the
many horrifying first-hand accounts of what they did carefully prepared
in advance by NATO agents, who queued up to tell lies to the bourgeois
media?  Of course many of these miners, like the majority, saw NATO as
their only means of salvation, and saw clearly the international working
class sitting on its thumbs along with a 'Left' from which they had had
nothing, and which, in any case, was more concerned with getting mileage
for its many and wonderful little grouplet-lines as the events
unfolded.  Sadly, they did not have access to the Internet to 'tune in'
to disourses such as these.  I am sure they would have learned a great
deal had they been so privileged; that is, had what unfolded been
anticipated by 'Marxists'.

There is a tendency on this list, it seems, that holds the view of
'critical support to the national bourgeoisie against imperialism' that
has a long history, I think going back to Trotsky's call for such
support to the 'Negus' (Haile Selassie) when Ethiopia was invaded by
Italian fascism in the mid 30's.  His call was long before the near
completion
of capital's global hegemony, when it becomes increasingly difficult to
separate imperial capital from national capital, such is the slopping
around of finance capital today.  Sticking to this line seems to me to
create enormous difficulties for those who do so.  It can only be
supported by the selective coralling of 'evidence' that Jared Israel
seems prone to, or by a sort of 'mature' patronising that Nestor resorts
to.

Alienation stems mainly from only one capital today, except in a few
remaining corners where its national form still has a hold, as in the
OPEC countries, who still have some vestige of independent action, as
witness the massaging of oil prices in the last year.  Whether or not
there was a form of political extraction of surplus labour in the former
SU and YF et al. - Meszaros' view - the situation for the last decade in
those countries is the pouring in of finance capital with the willing
connivance of those regimes that supplanted those previously there- and
it is not doing a great deal of 'good' is it?  In every case the
supplanters emerged seamlessly from those previous regimes, and the
Milosevic family is a good example.  They are major shareholders in the
Trepca group of mines, and have for years been negotiating their sale to
a Greek transnational mining house.  Likewise, those at the immediate
periphery of the EU have been queuing up to join that economic axis, and
even NATO!  East Germany did, and that is a whole can of worms in
itself.  It is no secret that among Milosevic' ambitions was for a YF
held together by Serbia to join that queue.  That has fallen apart for a
whole number of reasons, not the least of which was a general suspicion
of the motive emanating from Beograd.

Let us suppose, and it does not strain credulity, that the FY had
entered the EU along with Poland, the Czech and Slovak Republics,
Hungary and even Romania.  What then would become of this 'line'?  Would
there have been some magical economic process whereby they moved from a
'non-imperialist' to an 'imperialist' status?  Or would it then be
necessary to erect a whole new classification scheme - 'wholly-old
imperialist', 'new, almost imperialist', 'just a shade like they used to
be', 'those who definitely need to be covered by the old line' and, of
course, 'the Great Satan' across the water?  All the while, the working
class, wherever it be, looks on in astonishment at this orgy of
trainspotting.  Some, lucky or patient enough to have heard of Marx and
his critique of political economy, may well say, "Oi, ain't we supposed
to be an international class, alienated from the product of our labours
by capital in all its forms?  This lot of hand-users [I use the Italian
formulation to make this universally understood] cannot recognise a
class enemy if it jumped up and bit them in the arse.  NATO now shows
itself to be one and the same as Milosevic when it comes to our
livelihood.  A plague on both their houses".  Their only option is to
turn once again to workers elsewhere, for the 'Left' is no longer worth
the effort, whatever their 'line'.  The last thing they need are the
tired old formulations of the past, and they can only make their own
history through an international turn independent of capital in all its
forms; one that negates the old nationally oriented, defensive
combinations into a necessary international offensive.

That is what is new and positive in the Balkans, and it is not limited
to Kosovar and Bosnian workers, but draws in elements of the Serbian
working class.  It is surely no accident that it was conscripts from the
main Serbian mining area that unilaterally withdrew from Kosova in
disgust, to form the nucleus of a real left-opposition to Milosevic.  As
it happens, the Mitrovica miners are not making financial appeals to
'poor, little rich kids' in universities nor to 'official' unions, but
directly to communities most devastated by the same policies of
privatization in the EU - in Britain among the north-east mining
communities and in the Liverpool docklands.  They have done this without
recourse to the 'Left', largely because it no longer exists as a
credible force but as a positive hindrance to internationalism.

It is sad to see Nestor's cynicism, born, I suppose, out of a protracted
experience in Argentina, where I am led to believe the 'Left' has been
as schismatic and sectarian as anywhere and the working class isolated
in its own internal defensive actions for decades.  More to the point,
however, is whether it is born out of a failure to recognise the moment
when national and imperial capital become one and the same, and the
negation of nationalism into internationalism.  As I am in no doubt that
he would observe, Britain from where I write has been the hotbed of
dogged nationalism by the working class for well over a century, though
it has had its internationalist moments.  While that was born out of the
superexploitation of Britain's colonies, it no longer has any material
basis, and the shocks of realising that here will make those elsewhere
pale into insignificance.

BW