Re: Croatia and Serbia

[Owen Jones <owen_jones@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Reply to Louis.

> Because it was ruled by an admirer of Adolph Hitler, who supported Nato's
> wars against the Serbs.

 Firstly the fact that Croatia was ruled by an admirer of Adolf Hitler is
completely irrelevant grounds for imperialism cosying up with the country.
To say that our imperialist bourgeoisie are Nazi sympathisers in general
would be silly demonisation. Since Adolf Hitler was the symbol of German
imperialism when the imperialism of countries such as Britain came into
conflict with it, they are more hostile to Hitler as a symbol than anything.

 But now we get in a mess. You claim that the main reason for imperialism
being hostile towards Serbia was its refusal to open up its markets to
foreign capital. That is thereby the reason they were friendly with Croatia
which supported its war against Serbia. And yet Croatia has privatised even
less of its economy than Serbia has. For this reason, the West should have
also been hostile towards Croatia, by your logic.

 I have already detailed the reasons why imperialism was so hostile towards
Serbia and friendly with Croatia, and why its interests lay with splitting
up Yugoslavia with catastrophic results.

> Stop talking about socialism. It just confuses
> things. If Trotsky refused to use the word socialism to describe the USSR
> in the 1930s, then why should we use as a category now? Societies exist in
> transition between capitalism and socialism. Let's leave at that.

 Comrade, I placed "socialism" in quotes. This was because I thought you
were claiming that some form of socialism existed in these countries,
because you yourself used this word. I myself believe those states run by a
Stalinist bureaucracies to have societies to have shared characteristics of
both socialism and capitalism, to be transitional. However, they were stuck
between them with no way of progressing back or forth without the
bureaucracy restoring capitalism to form the new bourgeoisie or the
proletariat staging a political revolution to remove the bureaucracy and
move to socialism. Of course this would be dependant on world revolution,
particularly in the advanced capitalist countries. In my opinion, Serbia is
a bourgeois state where the bourgeoisie are organised as the ruling class,
their origins being in the old bureaucracy, and those parts of the economy
that are state-owned are best described as state capitalism.

> Besides,
> we don't need litmus tests. We need more facts such as these:
>
> Financial Times, June 22, 2000:
> The [Croatian] state holds more than 25 per cent stakes in about 900
> companies. About 400 of these companies have been insolvent for more than a
> year, while another 300 will be examined by government and privatisation
> agency officials in the next few months, according to Neven Mimica of the
> economics ministry. "(They will) determine which of those companies has any
> market prospects or chance of surviving in a normal market environment," he
> says.

 I am sorry, but did you not read the excerpts of the bourgeois programme of
the SPS which I quoted which was a stimulating introduction to market
economics? One that proudly boasted to have been the first East-European
countries to have introduced "the market"?

> Yugoslavia had a socialist revolution. South Africa did not.

 Poland didn't have a socialist revolution. Neither did Hungary. Or
Czechoslovakia. Or North Korea. Or the rest of Eastern Europe. So what does
this mean, there must be a proletarian socialist revolution to establish a
workers' state, and thereby nearly no East-European country was a workers'
state of some form? But I find it ridiculous to defend a state as a workers'
state based on the amount of industry nationalised. Apartheid South Africa's
economy was nearly two-thirds nationalised, but I doubt any sane person
could claim that it was a workers' state sharing characteristics of both
socialism and capitalism, to which imperialism should not have been friendly
but hostile to.

 Cheers

       Owen