Internationalist Notes 20
A comrade in Britain wrote the following article. It is printed
here in an
effort to spark some reflection on the experience of the latest war and
the relationship of the traditional left to the opposition to the war.
Many of the political organizations have different names but all of them
have their counterparts here in the US as well. Many over here will
recognize the Socialist Workers Party Britain (SWP) by their sister
organization the International Socialist Organization or the ISO. The
factions of the traditional left that supported the arming the Kosovo
Liberation Army too have their counterparts here as well, in the form of
the many different tiny Trotskyist, Maoist and other "anti-revisionist"
sects. Supporters of the would be Labor Party here often refer as working
examples to either the Labour Party in Britain or the Social-Democrats in
Germany, both of whom supported the NATO bombing campaign.
The (undeclared) war in Yugoslavia shows just how totalitarian all
so-called democratic capitalist regimes have become. The USA, Britain and
the other NATO countries all started bombing a state which had not broken
the UN Charter by committing an act of aggression outside its own borders.
Yet there was hardly a word out of place in the supposedly "free" British
press. The state here doesn't need press censorship when the press
publishes virtually only what the NATO leaders want to hear. When Blair
complains that Serbian TV is censored or that Milosevic is a dictator he
only draws attention to his own domination in Britain (NATO showed just
how high they ranked the propaganda war when they bombed the studios of
Serb TV in Belgrade). It is not surprising to find therefore that the
original Rambouillet demands also included the access of NATO to Serb TV
broadcasting.
Ever since they mistakenly allowed us to see the Vietnam War on television
capitalist states have realized that controlling the flow of information
about war is more important than the arguments for starting it in the
first place. In the Falklands and Gulf Wars the TV news was heavily
censored and Kosovo was no different. As NATO had a preponderant military
power the, real war was fought by the media.
For workers back in Britain the situation has been reminiscent of Orwell's
1984. Wars are fought in some remote zone of the planet (although Kosovo
is less than a thousand miles from Britain) and citizens have to pay
careful attention to the media to remember which is the enemy power. Last
week it was Iraq, this week it is Serbia etc. "Slobba" like Saddam was
once our friend but now we learn he is a monster (except that before "we"
supported him because "we" thought he would give us access to Balkan
markets and resources).
All this one-dimensional media coverage obviously goes a good way to
explain why most working class people did not understand that this was a
war against the working class - both Kosovan and Serbian. This explains
too why the opposition to the war was so poorly supported. At first sight
Greek workers put up the most effective resistance. Greek sailors
"mutinied" rather than join the NATO flotilla, while transport workers
refused to move NATO supplies from Piraeus and Salonika. However, when we
remember that the Greek ruling class has huge investments in Serbia (which
were depreciating rapidly under the hail of NATO bombs on Belgrade) and is
also Serbia's main ally, then these movements lose their independent class
character.
Next most dramatic were the Italian demonstrations in Rome and at Aviano
(the NATO airbase) which were the biggest in any country involving up to
100,000 people. At the same time there was even something approaching a
general strike in Italy called by the rank and file unions (the COBAS).
Nothing like this was seen anywhere else, but then Italy is right next
door to the Balkans and was the main launch pad for NATO attacks. We
should also make clear that the one-day strike was not really supported by
the working class as a whole but by the most politically committed,
although according to the reports of our comrades of Battaglia Comunista a
few workers independently joined the demonstrations.
In France and the USA the anti-war movement was almost non-existent. The
French government was even able to repatriate Serbs to Belgrade who had
fled to Paris to avoid military service without opposition! In the USA
demonstrations have largely been in the hundreds in each city rather than
in the thousands. Even then, as in Britain there was a fair smattering of
Serb nationalists in these demonstrations.
In Britain there were a couple of demonstrations of around 5000 or so
(despite the claims of the organizers that they were much bigger) in
London and much smaller demonstrations involving a few hundred
participants in provincial cities like Manchester and Glasgow.
All these bits of news show that the biggest weakness of the
opposition to
the war throughout the world was the almost total absence of the working
class. In fact we could say that the current domination of capitalist
thinking over everyday life would not be possible if the working class
were more active. If we were fighting for our own issues, starting with
decent pay and better working conditions then the state would have to look
over its shoulder at the class war back home. The united offensive of the
bosses and the state against the working class on the economic front has
given the capitalists the confidence to hit workers in the Balkans with
the ultimate attack - imperialist war.
This is why it was important to link the war with all the other attacks we
have had to face over the last few years. It was a challenge taken up by
internationalists of the Communist Left. It was not taken up by the
traditional Left.
We can perhaps leave aside the Labour Party and the trades unions.
The
so-called Labor Movement has a long and dishonorable history, from the
First World War onwards, of supporting the British Empire and "the nation"
in imperialist war. In the First World War the unions signed up to
no-strike deals to aid the war effort. After 1945 it was the Attlee
Government that developed the British nuclear capacity, and it was Harold
Wilson who gave the US support during the Vietnam War. Those who point out
the Labour has always had a pacifist minority from Keir Hardie through to
Christian Socialists like Wedgwood-Benn are not only trying to find an
alibi for Labour but also underlining the fact that the Labour mainstream
(whether New or Old) as always put nation before class. Blair's statements
about "ethical" foreign policy about a fight "for values not
territory"
are no different from the same sentiments that imperialists always mouth.
Britain went into the First World War proclaiming its motive as defense of
Belgium when everyone knows it wanted to smash the new German Navy which
was the only threat to Britannia ruling the waves at that time. Blair was
in this war just to get the crumbs from Clinton's cake as Thatcher and
Major joined with Bush to hammer Iraq nine years ago. This is why the
Leftist groups like the Socialist Workers' Party are just misleading
workers when they pretend that New Labour is really new. The Labour Party
(which as we keep repeating has used the Army to break strikes 14 times
since 1945) is an enemy of the working class has been since 1914.
But if the class character of Labour is absolutely
clear, what of the
Trotskyist groups who are constantly trying to win Labour to their ideas
(and in some cases provide the most active members of the Labour Party).
The war in Kosovo showed how completely bankrupt the Trotskyist method is.
The main opposition to the war was the Committee for Peace in the Balkans.
This was an unholy alliance of the SWP, the Stalinoid-now-democratic
Communist Party of Great Britain and assorted Christians and CNDers
(Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). Their slogan was "Stop the Bombing".
This was totally one-sided. Basically it meant that the Committee
supported Serbia. This was the open and anti-revolutionary position of
the Stalinists. They still think that there is something "proletarian"
about Serbia. This is because it has a lot of state owned industry and
this is their idea of a socialist utopia. Less honest as always were the
SWP. They repeated the "Stop the Bombing" slogan endlessly and published
lots of pictures of victims of NATO bombs but none of Kosovan refugees.
This was no oversight but a calculated policy of support to the
state-capitalist Serbian regime. The SWP were quite right when they
pointed out that the Serbian atrocities got worse when NATO started
bombing but they did occur before that date. Workers in Britain who were
fed the Blair line would only have been confused as to which side to
support since the SWP did not stress that the war on both sides was a war
against the working class (but then talk of class might have alienated
their middle class allies in CND et al). The truth is that the SWP has no
clear class perspective and will support any regime which it sees as
anti-American (the US being for them the only imperialist state).
If the SWP were demonstrating just how far from a class perspective they
were, their smaller rivals were outdoing themselves in Jesuitical
justifications for their insane and anti-working class positions. Workers
Power, Workers Liberty, Socialist Outlook etcetera, all called for arming
the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). When we pointed out that the KLA was
being armed, first by Germany, and then at the last minute by the USA,
they got very angry. They told us that the USA would not support a real
national liberation movement. Wrong again, we said, the USA have give
direct military aid to liberation armies throughout the century. They even
supported HO Chi Minh until 1949 (when the fall of China and the beginning
of the Cold War meant that the US began to see national liberation
movements as the arms of Russian imperialism). The USA would give support
(however reluctant) to any force that would help them realize their
interests. They had after all armed Saddam in Iraq against Iran until he
tried to get too independent.
With the empirical argument lost the Trotskyists shifted to the
methodological. Marxists have always supported "national liberation"
struggles they maintain. Again not true, Marx and Engels in the last
century supported some national liberation movements. But only if they
thought the creation of a new state would help develop capitalism, thus in
the long-term lay the grounds for socialist revolution. One place they
opposed national liberation was in the Balkans. They considered that
giving autonomy to the Balkan peoples would only advance Russian
imperialism. Marxists did not support national liberation in the abstract
but as a concrete step towards working class emancipation. Today, we live
in the epoch of imperialism where there are no progressive national
struggles left. Albanian nationalism is a good example to illustrate this.
If the KLA succeed in getting an independent Kosovo their manifesto calls
on them to create a Greater Albania. This will mean destabilizing
Montenegro, Macedonia and Albania proper. It would create more war and
more bloodshed. So when the pro-KLA Trotskyists give us the moral
imperative that we must support this or that oppressed people (or else we
are not Marxist) we can only reply that they should go back and study what
Marxism really is, Lenin actually ended up with an erroneous position on
national liberation struggles but he did at least frame how we should
approach this as any other issue.
In his Letters on Tactics he criticizes "old Bolsheviks" who:
have played o regrettable a role in the history of our party by
reiterating formulas senselessly learned by rote instead of studying the
specific features of the new and living reality. (Collected Works Vol. 24
p. 44)
What the Workers Power and Workers Liberty support for the KLA shares with
the SWP and CPB is that all of them put the interests of nations before
classes. In the era of imperialism the only road to freedom is the
international working class revolution. This will abolish national
frontiers and nation-states along with commodity production and all the
other trappings of capitalism. In the meantime revolutionaries have to
propagandize against national interests and national struggles. The days
when the national struggle could be seen as the prelude to the working
class struggle for freedom have gone. As these infernal wars plunge us
further into barbarism, into even greater misery for the working class,
they are a form of class war carried out by a dying imperialist system. In
this historic context there are no intermediary stages for the working
class to go through - the alternative is socialism or barbarism for real.
Those who argue for tactical support for bourgeois forces have abandoned
any revolutionary agenda and thus are renegades from the working class.
Jock
The Party and the GLP are the Objects of Grave
Accusations on the Part of a Journal in Reggio Emilia
This article was published by the comrades of Battaglia Comunista,
publication of the Internationalist Communist Party (Partito Comunista
Internationalista - or PCint) which forms the oldest section of the
International Bureau for a Revolutionary Party. These comrades do work
with GLP (Gruppi di Lotta Proletaria - Class Struggle Groups) many of whom
are comrades as well.
That the so-called mass media, or rather the medium of information, are
the instruments of disinformation and falsification of events, it is not
necessary to be a revolutionary Marxist to understand this, it is
sufficient to have even the slight glimmer of average intellect common to
all human beings. It certainly is true that the war, lieu of the
reappearance of terrorism has caused an acceleration of the process of
twisting reality. Indeed, it is totally predictable, newspapers and
television tripping over themselves to discredit and strike back at the
opposition to the war and to capitalism that the war has generated.
Neither is it important to evaluate how many of those that oppose the war
are coherent or whether they are able to effect the slaughter in the
Balkans; like a monster drunk with blood, the bourgeoisie is quick to tear
to pieces anyone who crosses their path. For example, the "base" unions
have been singled out by various denizens of the political life of the
government and the opposition - as possible "sanctuaries" of terrorism.
Now these unions do not constitute a real anti-capitalist alternative, as
they have demonstrated many times, but notwithstanding this, they are a
sign of how many have been forced into the margins of compatibility with
the system, these come to be seen as an annoyance to the bourgeoisie. In
the generalized vacuum of today, even an openly reformist current as base
unionism is an impediment to the latest turn of the screw on the workers,
that the government is preparing for autumn, constituting the only -
although illusory - point of reference for those who would say "no" to the
bosses and their union accomplices. Both the aforementioned escaped
notice; even this preventative attack that comes from the government and
the opposition "united in struggle" should be a further demonstration of
how the bourgeoisie is no more disposed to tolerate any manner of
reformism.
Even our party and the GLP (Internationalist Communist Party and the
Gruppi di lotta proletaria - Workers Struggle Groups) are implicated in
this national witch-hunt by "La Gazzetta di Reggio", the local journal of
Reggio Emilia. The pretext was taken from a leaflet that we had
distributed in Reggio, May 22, during a demonstration against the war. The
following morning the Gazette published an article where they insinuated
continuity between ourselves and terrorism, in which a reporter "was
informed" that we have "distributed delirious communiqués", alluding to
the typical language of the Red Brigades (BR - Brigate Rosse). They then
passed to open accusations. In fact, they explicitly declared that our
flyer (also signed by the GLP) "contained language and methods of armed
struggle".
To whoever knows us even only a little, it is evident that there is a
stellar distance separating us from the "language and methods of armed
struggle", but it is also evident that for the average journalist to
inform and inform correctly is the last thing on his mind.
Of no less gravity was the article that appeared in the same paper on May
30, in same alarmist tone. So much so that we would have laughed were it
not so serious:
"The Investigation of a Revolutionary Leaflet - The Police are on the
Trail of the GLP"! "The leaflet has ended up in the hands of the
policeŠ"
etc.
"The police investigate", "is on the trail of the GLP? It is as if the
comrades of the GLP were in hiding. They have always had their contact
addresses listed in their review and posted on the Internet as well, they
publish their own initiatives and interventions, in short, they carry out
normal political (revolutionary) work. Even more ridiculous was the
assertion, made with a wink, that "the pamphlet has ended up in the hands
of the police". That would certainly not take a 007, given that the very
same flyer was distributed on a national level for the strike against the
war on May 13. To the contrary, it was in Bologna and then in Reggio that
it passed directly into the hands of the secret police. But why all the
derision? In the face of our firm request for clarification, the gazette
in a short correction, (as if it excused the journalist) the author of the
article in question published a brief telephone interview with one of our
militants where, for better or worse (more for the worse if the truth be
told) elaborated our traditional position on terrorism. The article,
according to the explanation of journalist "that it was not done in bad
faith", if tending banally towards the insipid and empty-headed habit of
sensationalism, in whose basis of "information", both TV and journalistic,
but of a more shady nature, emerges dubiously. Behind all of this there is
the rabid reaction for which we see functioning in the same context as the
formerly "red" (?) Emilia Romagna, against the only ones that had anything
serious to say on the subject of the war and the war mongers.