Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA)

For the Bosnian Revolution

 

For the Bosnian Revolution!

 

Bosnia is a creation of the Imperialists and that is why the multi-ethnic workers now rise up against nationalism and imperialism!

 

The LCC (Liaison Committee of Communists) is encouraged by and enthusiastically greets the rise of a multi-ethnic class struggle in Bosnia that seeks to undo the capitalist restoration which has turned the Balkans into semi-colonies of imperialism, brought unemployment and economic insecurity unheard of in Yugoslavia and divided a once united working class along ethnic and religious lines.  In Tuzla, other cities and even in some Serbian cities, workers are calling for a return to workers’ ownership, and for workers’ control and self-management.  We disagree with those who see this rise of class struggle as any kind of resultant extension of the U.S.-sponsored Bosnian war against the then workers state of Yugoslavia.  This uprising is where the thing (the counter-revolution) begins turning into its opposite. We are required to illustrate the Marxist method and show how a parade of failed socialist sects and currents turned their back on this method and were suckered by the imperialist project of an independent and ostensibly democratic Bosnia and how they ultimately organized support for capitalist restoration.  The LCC provides a programmatic alternative to these democratic illusions in contrast to those who will not learn the lessons of history.

 

Covering for their incomplete political break from the League for the Fifth International (L5I), the Revolutionary Communist Internationalist Tendency (RCIT) asserts the February, 2014 Bosnian workers uprising was a logical continuation of the Bosnian “war of liberation,” which the RCIT materially supported in the 1990’s, while in the leadership of Workers Power (WP), like much of the British left, some leading figures of U.Sec., and Socialist Action in the USA, among others.  All of these tendencies to one degree or another justified their support with a bogus reading of a Leninist understanding of the right of nations to self-determination. Where nations have a defined territory, language and culture, and an independent economic life, and not incidentally also a popular will for self-determination, and an acute consciousness of national oppression, we support the oppressed nation against its oppressor. We do this so as to engage the working class of both nations against their exploiters.

 

We do not agree with Titoists and the Stalinists who claim that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had satisfactorily resolved all questions of national oppression.  When Communist Party leaders became capitalist restorationists after the death of Tito, they began to incite ethnic hatreds and divisions.  At the same time, Izetbegovic was peddling his U.S. and German capitalist-sponsored Jihadist state project.  This had little political traction for many years as the “Bosniak” population was the most Yugoslav of the multiple populations in Bosnia-Herzegovina.  They were the most proletarianized, they spoke Serbo-Croatian, they lived in completely integrated cities, and were the most urban population, and they had no separate economic life.  Their psychology of political awareness of their national oppression was enhanced suddenly with the influx of Muslim refugees from Croatia.  It was then that Izetbegovic conducted his U.S.-inspired plebiscite.  The Serbian minority of the Bosnia-Herzegovina population overwhelmingly voted against independence.  When Izetbegovic declared independence a new Bosnian state was immediately recognized by Germany and the U.S.A.

 

Then began the great contradiction of Serbian history in the 1990’s.  What would have been an entirely progressive defense of the workers state against capitalist restorationist projects in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia was itself  led by capitalist restorationists such as Milosevic, side by side with truly reactionary and even fascist elements who wished to build a greater Serbia.  On balance, each of these three regimes were noted for mass murder, and in the end the only principled way to choose between them was to choose against the imperialist project and aims, to defend not Milosevic or his regime, but the Serbian people and the remaining conquests of the deformed workers state.  Instead of giving backhanded support to NATO bombers, the revolutionary workers vanguard, the Marxists, needed to call for multi-ethnic workers militias to put an end to and prevent further ethnic cleansing and capitalist restoration. We said the nationalist madness was incited exactly to serve the capitalist restoration.  Consequently, any “leftists” who took the bait tail-ending layers of the British trade union bureaucracy and built the Bosnian relief effort and even made it the center of their activity materially aided capitalist restoration.

 

We do not take issue with the impulse to try to help a suffering population, but we wonder why the Marxist outfits who participated in this project made no effort to help the contemporaneous victims of Mt. Pinatubo, or the many millions of victims of ethnic violence and displaced survivors of the Rwandan genocide. Despite the extreme need in the world, “workers aid” charity campaigns should not be at the center of the tasks of any revolutionary Marxists.  Our central task everywhere is first to fight for the program of revolutionary Marxism.  That program demanded multi-ethnic workers self-defense guards be built, armed and sustained by the vanguard workers of the region and internationally.  The establishment of workers self-defense guards and their ascendancy would be the precondition for a workers aid program, uncontaminated with the sentimental effluvia of the petty bourgeois moralists and pacifists, who pave the road to imperialist pacification from 30,000 feet!

 

Who is to Blame for the “War of Liberation?”

 

Completely missing from the RCIT analysis was the 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Law U.S. 101-513 passed by the U.S. Congress in November, 1990. A law that even the CIA predicted would lead to a bloody civil war.^[1]  This act resolved upon a policy of economic strangulation and military measures to carry out capitalist restoration in all six provinces of the bureaucratically deformed workers state of Yugoslavia.  Additionally, in the case of the RCIT we see a deepening of an error we trace to their days in Workers Power, where they not only misunderstood the activities of imperialism in the creation of Bosnia, or the multi-ethnic Bosnian defeat codified in the Dayton Accords, but also deepened their original error of 1991, where they took the side of the fast track Yeltsin group of capitalist restorationists in bringing about the downfall of the workers state and the USSR.  This put them even to the right of the Mensheviks, who were trying to organize defense of social property.^[2]

 

As Trotsky wrote in defense of the Soviet Union during the fight against Burnham, Schachtman, and Abern:

 

“What does ‘unconditional defence’ of the USSR mean? It means that we do not lay any conditions upon the bureaucracy. It means that independently of the motive and causes of the war we defend the social basis of the USSR, if it is menaced by danger on the part of imperialism”. – Leon Trotsky, “Again and Once More Again on the Nature of the USSR”, October 1939^[3]

 

Consequently we called for class-independent mass mobilization of the USSR workers to defend the conquests of the October Revolution from fast-track and slow-road restorationist bureaucratic plots alike.

 

We are airing these differences in front of the workers movement principally for clarification for militant workers.  We had hoped to make progress in opening a more general debate on these questions of method with the RCIT, however, their statement on the Bosnian workers uprising shows that our invitation of September, 2012, to revisit this discussion, so as to try to resolve differences that have stood in the way of increasing unity in action and more formal affiliation, have fallen on deaf ears, we are sorry to say.

 

Reassessment is Not a Crime

 

Lenin in Left Wing Communism states that: “a political party’s attitude toward its own mistakes is one of the most important and surest ways of judging how earnest the party is, and how it fulfills in practice its obligations toward its class and the working people. Frankly acknowledging a mistake, ascertaining the reasons for it, analyzing the conditions that have led up to it, and thrashing out the means of its rectification, that is the hallmark of a serious party…“^[4]  We can understand why the bureaucratic careerists of the Workers Power leadership from whom the RCIT founders split must justify all of its past and go on defending it, or as they are now doing in their February 2014 issue, burying the whole episode.  But we do not understand why the RCIT cannot revisit decisions made by that Workers Power leadership, as if they were still under Workers Power discipline.  What obliges the RCIT to make articles of faith out of these errors? When we of the LCC mistook the tempo and timetable of the capitalist restoration in Cuba, we accounted for this mistake soon afterwards and explained what led us to make it.  This may not be usual modus operandi among the sects, but it is Leninism and we resolve to practice it.

 

Once Again Self-Determination

 

Veteran Trotskyist Harry Turner summarized the Leninist conception of the right of nations to self determination as a democratic right in order to uphold “the right of nations to self-determination, i.e., the right to secede, as a correct understanding of the dialectical unity of national and international, which would enable the Marxists to lead the working classes of both the oppressed and oppressor nations to proletarian internationalism.”^[5]  It was never meant to replace class questions. Workers Power and much of the Left abandoned defense of workers gains against imperialism for petty-bourgeois illusions in “democratic” Bosnia.  For Leninists, the unconditional defence of workers states against imperialism supersedes the democratic right to self-determination.   Moreover, a ‘nation’ created by imperialism as part of the breakup of Yugoslavia, and at the expense of the oppression of other ‘nationalities’, has no right to self-determination.  Despite the episodic popular will for secession, it was made possible by NATO bombs at the expense of the Serbians.  Later in 1999 in Kosovo, for instance, a right for national secession nominally existed, but under the real material circumstances would in no way be supported by Marxists because this secession was imposed by imperialism against the remains of the deformed workers state.

 

Bosnia was born as a reactionary, capitalist restorationist state occupied by imperialism that suppressed its national minorities, particularly the Serbs. We must repeat: the Congressional 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Law U.S. 101-513 codified and set in motion the imperialist drive to destroy the Yugoslavian workers state. As one of our predecessor organizations, Workers Voice wrote in 1996-1997:

 

“…Thus the Balkan wars really began as U.S. aggression against a workers’ state (Yugoslavia), which was threatened with severe punishment unless it allowed its own break-up into capitalist ministates dominated by the U.S. Bosnia was the key country that the U.S. had in mind.

 

Bosnia-Herzegovina was created after a referendum in which 99% of the Serb population rejected the idea of belonging to an “indepen­dent” Bosnia and demanded their right to secede. The referendum, ordered by Izetbegovic, was conducted against the advice of the EC, which at the time was against the break-up of Yugoslavia. The Serbs’ refusal to belong to the new capitalist Bosnia started the war there…”-(See “Could the Muslims in Bosnia Have the Right to Self-Determination?”^[6])

 

The Workers State

 

The destruction of the Yugoslavian workers state was truly a tragedy as along with capitalist restoration and imperialist bombings, came ethnic civil war and genocide.  The League for a Fifth International (L5I)/Workers Power response to counterrevolution was to send food, medicine and clothing to Bosnia through the International Workers Aid campaign. So the Marxist answer to genocide and imperialism, following the L5I, is humanitarian aid? Is the response to counterrevolution begging the UN to stop arms blockades?  Was this arms embargo real or a diversion from the imperialists’ arming of Izetbegovic? We know it was a diversion; it was for public consumption by the credulous.

 

And what was the L5I and assorted “Trotskyists’” basis for siding with the Bosnians in an all-sided genocidal civil war?  The Bosnians were victims of Serbian and Croatian chauvinism, but the Bosnian state also oppressed the Serbian national minority in Bosnia.  The capitalist restorationist forces utilized chauvinism to destroy working class unity, thus preventing even a discussion of the internationalist workers military aid in the form of dock strikes, hot cargoing and mustering armed multi ethnic workers detachments formed up by the trade unions that were needed to fight the restoration and stop the reactionary forces from breaking up Yugoslavia.  Lest there be any doubt about this, it should be common knowledge that the multi-national membership of the miner’s union of Bosnia-Herzegovina had sent material aid to the striking British miners in 1984-85, a sore point for Anglo-American capitalist politicians and mentioned in the commentary on the 1991 FOA law.

 

As ethnic cleansing became a major content of the conduct of the inter-ethnic warfare the capitalists so desired, what was needed from revolutionary Marxists was a concentrated effort to raise multi-ethnic, multi-national international armed workers brigades (mobilized by through a fight against the social chauvinist bureaucrats) to defend the workers state against the counterrevolutionary breakup and to defend all ethnic groups in the three-sided genocidal civil war and alongside the Yugoslavian workers, to fight to defeat imperialism and to fight for a workers political revolution to oust the Milosevic Stalinist bureaucracy of slow-roader capitalist restorationists. Workers actions, from strikes against NATO intervention to shutting down NATO airbases should have been organized in the imperialist countries.  Instinctively, if not laboriously misled, any politically class-conscious worker would have opposed NATO bombing of Serbia as part of the struggle against her or his “own” ruling class.  Not only on the principle of opposing imperialism, but also in defense of the workers state.  It takes social-chauvinists and their left tail to dissuade advanced workers of their historic program.

 

Instead, the L5I/WP and Socialist Action, et. al., applied the idealist logic of the reformist left which proceeds not from dialectical historical materialism, but from bourgeois morality, the “good” guys versus the “bad” guys.  Thus they had independent little Muslim Bosnia being attacked by big power Serbia. This is semi-Cliffism and belongs methodologically to the Third Camp renegades from Trotskyism.  It was Burnham who openly renounced dialectics and then discovered poor little “democratic” Finland attacked by the big Russian power on his way into the Third Camp. And then shortly thereafter he renounced Marxism setting off on his path to serving U.S. imperialism.^[7]  It was the bourgeoisie, local and international, that attacked the moribund, deformed workers state and social property in the Balkans, while the Third Camp cheered in the name of democracy.

 

And the L5I/WP was not far behind, failing in their internationalist duty to defend the working class gains in Yugoslavia.  Instead of subordinating the armed defense of the Bosniaks to the defense of the Serbian deformed workers state (which would have facilitated multi-ethnic militias on two fronts,) Workers Power made the main contradiction between Serbia as oppressor nation and Bosnia as the oppressed, and then gave imperialism the role of attacking Serbia and defending Bosnia. So the exercise of aid to the Bosniaks is a cover for capitulating to democratic imperialism. The RCIT tells us that none of the revolutionary forces would have called upon NATO to intervene on the part of Izetbegovic’s Bosnian rebellion.  We have to ask what forces would those be?  Do they mean Tariq Ali or Alain Krivine, or other U.Sec. leaders who like Workers Power called for NATO to arm Izetbegovic’s forces? In any case, they were more fastidious, and stated that they did not want the intervention of NATO troops. Workers Power (LRCI) didn’t make this fancy distinction. As the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International (LCMRCI/CEMICOR) wrote:

“The LRCI opposes defending Yugoslavia against imperialism. It doesn’t want to expose the devastating consequences of imperialism’s blockade and the ethnic cleansing that more than one million Serbs suffered. When NATO launched its worst attack ever, in 1995, the LRCI refused to defend the Serbs. They demanded that imperialism “Send heavy artillery, tanks and planes to the Bosnian army” and “tanks and heavy artillery, and yes if possible planes and Scud missiles” and even “international volunteers” to support their Bosnian proxies. They said: “Far from condemning the B-H forces because they are carrying US weapons revolutionaries should demand the maximum necessary arms to the B-H forces. Unfortunately those with the arms are generally imperialist countries or third world dictatorships.”

When the imperialist puppets (Croatia and Bosnia) were wiping out all the population from Krajina and western Bosnia, Workers Power (October ‘95) demanded of them more resolution in that task: “if they can now surround and annihilate Arkan’s fascist volunteers in Western Bosnia that will be a service to the workers of the whole world”. These troops not only annihilated the Serb military resistance but expelled one million native inhabitants.

We always defended the Croat and Muslim communities against Great Serb ethnic cleansing (like we defended the Serb civilians against the Croat and Muslim pogroms). We said that the only way to achieve that was, as Trotsky recommended in the 1912-13 Balkan wars, to unite the multi-ethnic proletariat against all their rulers. The LRCI, as we showed in other documents, shifted its position many times during the war.“[8] – “Trotskyism vs. centrism on Kosovo”, Class Struggle, No 21 April-May 1998

“In the Balkan wars the LRCI leaders sided with everybody. In the conflict between Serbs and Croats they sided with both camps at the same time. Until November 1992 they opposed the independence of Bosnia and condemned Izetbegovic’s Bosnian Muslims as reactionary, ethnic cleansers and pro-imperialists. One month later they decided to support them, and later on to ask imperialism to send weapons money and men for them. In 1992 they organised a common demonstration in Vienna with Great Serb monarchists and a year later with Muslim and Albanians who were asking for NATO intervention against the Serbs. They always said that they were willing to defend the Serbs against NATO and its Muslim and Croat allies if imperialism bombed them. However, when it happened they called for a dual defeatist position in those bombardments, for more resolute action by the Muslim-Croat troops who were ethnically cleansing almost one million Serbs, and for imperialism to give tanks, planes and missiles to their local puppets.” – “10 Years of the LRCI”, Jose Villa[9], Class Struggle No 29 September-October 1999

And now the RCIT is left to try to somehow clean up their treacherous act. No amount of spin can cover this up or undo it.  At the same time, Socialist Action in the USA predictably performed like post-Barnes Barnesites.  It is not too great a stretch to say that Barnesism never met a nationalist movement it didn’t like. This was integral to their sectoralism. They are not good at understanding the international activities of the US government except where troops are concerned.  They called for a Bosnian victory over Serbia.  Their program is pacifist democracy and capitulates to imperialism. At anti-war conferences they vote to refuse to blame capitalism for imperialist wars.

 

In place of the Third Camp’s overweening concern with the squeamish moralism of the liberal intelligentsia, Marxists take their stand on the working class position and employ the scientific method in the examination of history, the activities of all social class forces and the influences of all relevant cultural facts. As early as 1970, with the publication of his book, Islamic Declaration, it was possible to identify Izetbegovic as a reactionary Bosnian Muslim nationalist whose goal was a mono-cultural, anti-communist, and even Jihadist independent state. Naturally he became a personality of utility for the U.S., German and Austrian imperialists, among others, and thus for the Gehlen Organization, the C.I.A. and “Radio Free Europe.” When Bosnia-Herzegovina was inundated with Muslim refugees from Croatian ethnic cleansing in 1991, Izetbegovic conducted his secessionist plebiscite with U.S. authorization and support. The subsequent “U.N. Arms Embargo,” the subject of Workers Power’s echo of the old Schachtmanite ”poor little Finland,” was propaganda for the initiated, and to hear this repeated nowadays by Austrians, who must understand in detail the dark prehistory of the restorationist movements in the circles of the veterans of the Grand Mufti’s Bosnian army and the Croatian Ustashas’, is truly shocking. The Austrian RKOB section of the RCIT should ask themselves whose troops are doing EUFOR occupation duties in Bosnia, threatening the mass movement with imminent repression?  Our readers should be advised these are Austrian troops. We demand NATO/Austrian troops out now!

 

Izetbegovic did not seek and certainly did not get any measure of democracy. The workers of all communities know this now from experience, and they want their factories back!

 

Workers Struggle Today

 

The multi-ethnic demonstrations and strikes today put the notion of the national question of Bosnia below the ground. Workers today are explicitly rejecting nationalism and ethnic chauvinism as they recognize that they have a common enemy in the bourgeois state and imperialism.  If as the RCIT claims, there was a continuation of the “war of liberation”, you would see continuing inter-ethnic violence and not the multi-ethnic strikes where the workers are demanding their factories back.   Self-determination is not the question and never really was.  Bosnia was an artificial imperialist creation and everything since the Bosnia-Croatia Federation has been a top-down regime and no expression of any national aspirations of an oppressed nationality for self-determination.  The Bosniaks were had by U.S. and German imperialism.  On the left it was L5I/WP and Socialist Action who attached the national question to Bosnia, tail-ending the trade union bureaucracies of the NATO countries. In the end, the idea of the Bosnian Muslim independent state was junked by the Dayton Accords.

 

As can be seen by the recent protests and mass strikes against privatization of the remaining state enterprises and the effects of the market, capitalist restoration has been a bust. The workers reject the bourgeois parties. All of these parties perpetuate the ethnic divisions that don’t take place in the neighborhoods or factories. Solidarity protests have also now reached Serbia, raising the specter of multi-ethnic workers struggle throughout the Balkans.

 

Workers are rapidly coming to the conclusion that capitalism and imperialism have nothing to offer them but starvation and death. They desperately want to go back to workers ownership and control. But they can only go forward and a good first step is that they are building ‘forums’ and ‘assemblies’ on majority votes. We should call these embryonic workers councils, which however need to throw out the non-workers, i.e., bourgeois and oppositional petty bourgeois agents, who will try to sidetrack the workers back into a bourgeois parliament.  Thus we have a problem with the call raised in many places for a government of technical experts.  We have seen governments of technical experts manage the crisis of capitalism at the expense of the working class in Italy and Greece. The Balkan states need workers governments.

 

If the messrs. imperialist stooges of the nationalist parties, the so-called democrats, propose a new constitution, then we call for a delegated and accountable Revolutionary Constituent Assembly instead, exactly to give the masses’ demands full expression instead of lip service and suppression by the mouthpieces of the banksters. However, so far we think this is an unlikely development in the utterly fake democracy of the Federation of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, whose parliamentary output at all times is subject to the over-ruling or the pleasure of the Dayton Accords’ ‘High Representative,’ a bourgeois Czar installed by the U.S., NATO and the IMF. Therefore we see no point in raising an RCA demand which at this juncture would have to seem confusing to the workers and cause them to ask ‘which is your REAL program? A constitutional bourgeois democracy or a multi-ethnic government of the councils of workers and peasants?’

 

We make it clear what OUR real program is:

 

The embryonic workers councils need to coordinate across all of Bosnia on a strictly multi-ethnic, gender and age equality, and put out the call to all of the former Yugoslav states for a workers council government, a call to implement a campaign of occupations, strikes, workers militias, building to a political general strike to put a workers and peasants government in power with a program for the renationalization of all industries, enterprises and banks, etc, under workers control with no compensation for major stockholders.

 

Our program must also be directed towards the entire European working class and be capable of stopping NATO and the UN and other agencies from inevitably imposing martial law and repressing the development of the revolution. Like the Marikana miners, Syrian revolutionaries, Egyptian workers, Brazilian and Greek youth, to name just a few militant masses in motion, the Bosnian uprising is a signal for all to join forces in struggle internationally.  For the working class to live, imperialism must die. It is the Bosnian workers who are teaching the self-proclaimed Trotskyists in the imperialist countries the lessons of history – get out of their way!

 

Critically the order of the day is the creation of a Leninist-Trotskyist revolutionary workers party to provide leadership to fight for a workers and peasants government of democratic workers councils and militias.  For workers revolution throughout the region!  For a Socialist Federation of the Balkans!  For a revolutionary workers international, the world party of socialist revolution!  Workers of the world unite!

 

02/24/2014

 

Liaison Committee of Communists

Integrating the RWG (Zim), CWG (A/NZ), CWG (USA)

 

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