Re: Hot Pursuit

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>But it must also be said that LP has ducked Owen Jones' more substantive
>criticism with poor wit and weak sarcasm.
>
>Dave

Everything that could have been said on Yugoslavia has already been said
here. For new subscribers, I urge you to go to the Marxism webpage and do a
search on "Yugoslavia" or "Serb" or "Kosovo" and you will get back links to
dozens of articles. The debate unfolded along lines roughly similar to the
debate on East Timor, except that I excluded outright pro-Nato views which
were only being promoted by a single person on the list, Chris Burford.
Burford is a member of something called New Democracy, I believe, which is
a Eurocommunist type grouping in Great Britain.

My reply to Owen was written last night after having attended an art
opening where the wine was flowing. Now that I am sober, I will make this
point: what is needed is solid historical and economic research about
Yugoslavia. For example, if one refers to FRY as "bourgeois", it is
incumbent upon the person using that term to develop a precise class
analysis. Unfortunately it is much easier to throw around epithets, which
was not really Marx's method. To really come to grips with the exact class
nature of rump Yugoslavia (basically Serbia and Montenegro) would require a
systematic analysis of economic journals, government statistics, bulletins
of the CP's, etc. Paul Phillips, an economics professor on PEN-L, who has
visited Yugoslavia many times and who spoke up forcibly in support against
Serbophobia during the war confessed when asked the question "What is
Yugoslavia" that he didn't know. War and economic blockade had made it more
difficult to do research. The next time he visited the country, he'd be in
a better position to make an evaluation.

So in the Trotskyist press, from Worker's Liberty to Solidarity to Green
Left Weekly, where nobody reads the language, nor has access to the sort of
journals I am referring to, there are all sorts of facile characterizations
of the Milosevic regime. Norm Dixon assured us that the Milosevic's were
preparing to flee, with stolen money in their suitcases. But at the same
time, their son was supervising the construction of an amusement park with
backing by imperialist banks. Is this the way that Trotsky analyzed the
USSR in "Revolution Betrayed"? Is this the way that the Trotskyist movement
came to terms with the East European transformations after WWII? Of course
not. At that time, it was filled with many serious Marxist scholars.

I am not opposed to people staking out one position or another on
Yugoslavia. What I am opposed to is superficiality.




Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)