Re: Fascists versus Fascists

At 01:41 PM 3/25/99 -0600, Alan Spector wrote:
>As someone who believes that Marxist analysis provides a very useful
>general framework for evaluating situations such as this, I would have
>to say that some of the confusion in some of the debates is the
>responsibility of some "marxian" analysis.

I quite agree with this. Here is an exchange from last month on PEN-L.

================

Joseph Green:
> But the right to self-determination isn't just necessary in 
>order to help the Albanian Kosovars. It is also necessary in
>the interest of the Serbian working class, youth, and
>progressive activists.The oppression of Kosovo has been a
>rope around the neck of the Serbian people.

I replied:
I am skeptical that demands for self-determination have any sort of
progressive dynamic in former Yugoslavia. The Bosnian republic--the last
time I checked--was mired in a reactionary brand of particularism.

I doubt if Joseph Green has a clear idea why Bolsheviks supported
self-determination of oppressed nationalities. It was not because there is
some advantage to having your own flag and the right to speak your own
tongue. Self-determination was of interest in the particular context of
struggle against imperialist nations, which were prisonhouses of such
nationalities. When the Ukranians fought along nationalist lines against
the Czar, the Bolsheviks championed their demands. When Ukranian
nationalists rose up against the Soviet government, it was correct to
suppress their movement. The only political imperative in the age of
imperialism is to make socialist revolutions.

The breakup of former Yugoslavia has not unleashed any progressive
tendencies. If anything, Marxists should be mobilizing against nationalist
tendencies, just as they should in the former Soviet Union. Bosnian,
Kosovan, Chechnyan, Azerbaijani, Armenian nationalist movements of the
recent period basically represent reactionary and particularist drives to
salvage bourgeois republics out of the detritus that the collapse of
bureaucratic socialism has left behind.

Are we advocates of self-determination for all the Congolese nationalities?
Are we for the breakup of Nigeria into Yoruba, Ogoni and Ibo homelands? I
think it is important to understand the impasse of African politics in the
same light as former Yugoslavia.

What is often forgotten is that Tito actually made a sincere effort to
provide equal social and economic resources to the poorer sections of
Yugoslavia. After the Western European banks had completed their mission of
wrecking the Yugoslav economy, Slovenia and Croatia, the more economically
advanced regions, were anxious to jump from the sinking ship. This left
Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo in a desparate economic situation. Since the
socialist movement--such as it was--had been marginalized, it was logical
that each state operate on the basis of bourgeois self-interest. Serbia
became a convenient target of moralizing European and American "radicals"
like Susan Sontag and Bogdan Denitch, but we are dealing with class
politics rather than morality. The real question is not who gets raped
more, or who has larger concentration camps, or who does more "ethnic
cleansing". Rather, it is which struggle has the potential to move humanity
out of the dark ages of capitalism. So far, there's not much to choose from.

Louis Proyect

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