Yugoslavia - measuring the failure of the British left
Socialist Outlook newspaper1990sPhil HearseTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
Phil Hearse reviews Yugoslavia – the Acid Test by Attila Hoare and Yugoslavia's Break-Up by Geoff Ryan; both published by Socialist Outlook.
THERE CAN have been few international political events which have found the British far left so floundering as the war in ex-Yugoslavia. Indeed the perversity of the positions adopted by far left organisations boggles the imagination.
Faced with a daily media barrage which portrays the fighting between Serbian Chetniks, the Croat HVO and the Bosnian government forces as tribal rivalry and the battles of equally irrational nationalisms, many on the left have simply tail-ended this analysis, topped off with a 'Marxist' gloss.
It is high time that this failure was subject to a detailed critique, and at last we have one in Attila Hoare's withering polemic. Subtitled How Militant, Socialist Worker and Living Marxism capitulated to Western Imperialism and Serbian nationalism in the Balkans, Hoare shows how these currents faithfully reproduced the views of Western governments.
Take the question of arming the Bosnian resistance to Serb and Croat aggression. Douglas Hurd, in an infamous statement, opposed arming the Bosnian resistance on the grounds that this would 'only create a level killing field' (as opposed to the very uneven killing field which currently exists). This statement was reproduced almost word for word by writers for the SWP and Militant.
Right now a flotilla of Western navy boats in patrolling off the Bosnian coast to prevent arms shipments into ex-Yugoslavia. This does nothing to prevent supplies getting to Serbia, or indeed Croatia; its sole effect is to disarm and weaken the Bosnian resistance.
Self defence
Militant's main statement on this question, written by Peter Taaffe, supports the right for communities under attack to defend themselves – but then argues that Marxists could only support giving arms to carry out such defence to 'democratically elected workers committees'. Since such committees of course do not exist, then the right of communities being ethnically cleansed to defend themselves remains a worthy principle with no concrete application!
One of the most common misconceptions about the conflict is the idea that the Western imperialist states are anti-Serbia or anti-Milosevic; hence the RCP's portrayal of Serbs as the 'niggers of Europe', victimised and demonised on all sides.
Attila Hoare robustly deflates this view, together with the quasi-Stalinist positions which underlie this, and much else in the far left's analysis.
The sad fact is that a big part of the British left has a simple analysis which is crude and outrageously wrong: Croats during the last world war were pro-Nazi Ustache, but the Serbs were the anti-Nazi partisans. Today, in strict continuity with this, the Croats are pro-imperialist reactionaries, while the Serbs embody what's left of progressive Yugoslavia.
This type of thinking, a farrago of historical untruths and crackpot contemporary analysis, pervades so much of the left which prides itself on its militant 'anti-Stalinism'.
Geoff Ryan's pamphlet is a systematic analysis of the origins of the Yugoslavian crisis from the foundation of the 'second' Yugoslavia after the victory of Tito's partisans.
As Ryan shows, the left cannot come to terms with these events without a firm grasp on the role of the national question and democratic tasks in the contemporary world.
Indeed it is a crystal clear symbol of the impoverishment of the bog-standard, lowest-common denominator 'Marxism' of the SWP and Militant that anything a bit more complicated than the workers lining up one side and the bosses on the other leaves them utterly bereft.
Attila Hoare pamphlet £1.50, Geoff Ryan pamphlet £1.00. From Socialist Outlook, PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU. Add 36p postage.