Re: More Delightful Insight from Jared

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Owen Jones:
> I could say this about Serbia. Where were the radical/Marxist voices in
>Serbia? Where were the petitions and marches protesting the national
>oppression of the Kosovar Albanians and the attempt to forcibly expel them
>all?

A much better question would be posed in terms of how national minorities
have been treated in Serbia itself. I don't recall pogroms directed against
Roma in Belgrade. As far as radical/Marxist voices in Serbia is concerned,
I would recommend a recent issue of Lingua Franca which dealt with the
varieties of Marxist thought in the academy and its complex relationship to
the question of Kosovo.

> The progressives in Kosovo have been terrorised for several years by the
>KLA, who recently purged their Hoxhaite wing and have murdered and expelled
>several progressives. That makes your remarks rather tasteless.

I think I know what your problem is. You have a Platonic Ideal of the
Albanian National Struggle. In your Platonic Ideal, the oppressed masses of
Kosovo do not use their wives as domestic help, beat Serbs or Montenegrins
at random, burn down monasteries, sell drugs, goosestep, or cut deals with
western spy agencies. In your Platonic Ideal, they are much more like the
Eritrean Popular Liberation Front which adopted a form of communism in the
liberated territories and practiced sexual equality. This Ideal Kosovo
nationalist movement would invite Noam Chomsky to meet with their leaders
and would use the Internet like Subcommandante Marcos to link up their
struggle with gays in the United States and other progressive movements.

I have the same Platonic Ideal myself but it doesn't have anything to do
with politics. Like most New Yorkers, I am always searching for the Perfect
Woman, the Perfect Apartment and the Perfect Job.

I think its a mistake, however, to mix up your Platonic Ideal with the
brute facts of history and society. It is a brute fact that the KLA is as
much an expression of the Kosovo nationalist movement as the IRA was in
Ireland. The struggle for self-determination inevitably involves violence.
Armies are formed to challenge the  outside power. The KLA is the authentic
expression of the Kosovo nationalist aspirations. It was not foisted upon
the Albanian people, but grew up organically in their midst. The goal of
the Kosovo nationalist movement was to rid the province of outside
influence or control. The KLA, with outside assistance, has done precisely
that. Now it is busy burning down Roma homes and machine-gunning Serbs in
buses on their way home from work.

The desire to position oneself between the brutish KLA and the allegedly
equally brutish Serb army is understandable. It is an attempt to see things
in moral rather than political terms. Unfortunately, real politics involves
making choices. When Marxists promote Albanian nationalism, they have to
accept the consequences of their advocacy.

When I promoted the goals of the FSLN and the FMLN in the 1980s, I
understood that I was dealing with liberation movements that were not
Platonic Ideals, but real organizations rooted in the real class struggle.
The real FSLN acted in a racist fashion against the Miskitus, but also
struggled at the same time to transform social and political relations in
such a manner as to ultimately benefit the Atlantic Coast Indians.

No such emancipatory project exists in Kosovo. It only exists in the
imagination of Trotskyists who have stubbornly refused to see things as
they really are, but as they would like them to be. Philosophical idealism
is harmless in pursuit of personal goals. In politics, it is a catastrophe.

Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/