MAOIST INTERNATIONALIST MOVEMENT POSITION PAPER ON YUGOSLAVIA
Class war in Yugoslavia
August 13, 1992
by MC86
Amerikan imperialism has been calling the shots in its ex-Yugoslavian dependency since 1948. Concentration camps, the forcible relocation of millions of poor people and ''ethnic cleansing'' follow on the heels of Amerikan investments everywhere in the world. The motivating force behind the Balkan wars is not religion, ethnicity, tribal warfare or national liberation: it is, purely and simply, profit.
With the retreat of Soviet social- imperialism, Amerikan capital's main competitors in the eight-nation, artificial "slavic homeland'' of ex- Yugoslavia are Germany, Italy, France, Czechoslovakia and Great Britain. (1)
In April, Germany rushed to stake a claim with the Croats and ''recognized'' Bosnia & Hercegovina as an independent republic; thereby deliberately inflaming the ongoing imperialist-approved war for regional domination between the Serbian and Croatian ruling classes.
Amerika held out for continued Serbian domination and assisted Serbia in the creation of a phoney ''rump- Yugoslavian'' federation on April 17 in order to guarantee Amerikan control of its multi-billion dollar export/import pipeline in the Balkans.
To oversee Amerikan interests, Milan Panic, a Belgrade-born Amerikan pharmaceutical millionaire was set up as Prime Minister of the rump- Yugoslavia, which is composed of 10 million Serbs and 500,000 Montenegrins. Suddenly, with belated cries of ''genocide'' raised against the Serbians by his political rivals in Amerika and Europe, George Bush found himself in the peculiar position of having to condemn Amerika's trusted Serbian allies at the same time Amerika maneuvers to hold the entire eastern Adriatic region in its economic grip.
Blood In the Eye
Bush knew of the mass-executions long before the media began to howl. Not only can Amerikan spy satellites spot a sty in a pig's eye from 180 miles up; but ITALIC The Economist END magazine had been casually remarking on the ''ethnic cleansing'' as early as May 2, 1992. (2)
Extermination of humans is pivotal to Amerika's cruel land-reform plan for the masses of poor peasant farmers in all of ex-Yugoslavia. With the invasion of 14,900 troops in February, Amerika's United Nations puppet positioned its divisions to oversee the expropriation of more than 2 million poor farmers from their small plots throughout Bosnia & Hercegovina, Serbia and Croatia.
Bush well knows that the 500 ''killing fields'' are run by Croatian, Muslim and Serbian paramilitary forces armed in part by the Amerikan-financed Bosnian weapons industry. (3) The Muslims are not a seperate nation. They are either Serbs or Croats and they are also divided by class.
Party Hacks
The bureaucrat-comprador bourgeoisies of Croatia, Slovenia and Serbia have run profitable manufacturing industries financed by Amerikan capital along the banks of the Danube and Driva rivers ever since Tito was kicked out of the international communist movement by Josef Stalin in 1948 for serving as Amerika's outpost in the newly liberated Eastern Europe.
The Croatian port of Rijeka and Serbia's Belgrade are vital shipping facilities serving European and Amerikan corporate merchants. Without free access to the Adriatic sea, the Danube river and seven Yugoslavian maritime ''free- trade zones,'' European and Amerikan corporations would be subject to unfavorable tarriffs and increased costs of transportation. (4)
Ex-Yugoslavia is a classic case of a developed capitalist country in bondage to international finance. Despite tremendous manufacturing, mining and agricultural capabilities, the Yugoslavian economy has been historically growth-restricted by conditions imposed upon it via the Western banks who have effectively ruled Yugoslavia through a multi-national class of enterprise managers belonging to the revisionist League of Communists of Yugoslavia.
These bureaucrat-compradors cast aside the old Yugoslavian republic as the post-World War II order crumbled. They broke into nationally-delineated bourgeois factions murdering the masses and stealing means of production and land in proportion to their strength.
The Slovanian, Croatian and Serbian ruling classes moved to consolidate control over industry and agriculture inside territories they have ruled -- under one form of production or another -- for 1000 years. Each ruling class operates on contracts with imperialist sponsors who reward these corrupted go-betweens with a cut of the surplus value wrung out of the masses. Roman Catholic and Orthodox patriarchal religious leaders of each nation provide moral justification and encouragement in their shared language to fascist forces under capitalist command.
The Stakes
In the regional population of 23.8 million, the labor force of 9.6 million breaks down into 27% working in mining and manufacturing, 29% in agriculture and an incredible 44% in bureaucratic and military/police jobs. (5)
Despite an pre-war annual inflation rate of 2,700% a year (now 36,000%), the $13.1 billion in regional exports during 1990 nearly balanced against $13.8 billion in imports. (6) A mere $700 million trade deficit demonstrates that the region is a giant sluice for foreign monopolists as they have sloshed value-laden goods in and out of the extensive Danube and Adriatic markets.
The USSR, Germany and Amerika collusively used the area as a huge dumping ground for over-produced commodities, even as they engineered the purchase of these useless wares by contracting high-interest loans with the ex-Yugoslavian government. In treaty-negotiated return for dumped consumer goods and industrial machines, the imperialists received under-priced raw materials and access to highly-exploitable underemployed female labor for piece-assembly of semi- processed imperialist-originating products for regional distribution. (8)
The regional per capita income of $6,540 and the drippings from a Gross National Product (1990) of $154.1 billion has accrued mainly to the managerial classes and the labor- aristocracy. The 53.5% of the population composing the rural poor have principally born the costs of inflation through constantly decreasing living standards and the cheapening of their wage- base. The region exports food crops and irreplaceable raw materials to imperialist countries even as it imports subsistence foods from these same parasitical countries. (1) (7)
Ex-Yugoslavia also serves Amerika as a source of strategic weapons-grade metals and as an espionage listening- post.
Was Yugoslavia a Socialist Country?
But the greatest service that revisionist Yugoslavia provided to finance capital was its abandonment of the socialist road in 1948 after two short years of proletarian dictatorship. Tito's counterrevolutionary political economy actually served as a model for the traitor Khruschev's economic policies during the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union.
In fact,''the Tito regime . . . set up many fascist prisons and concentration camps, where tens of thousands of revolutionaries [were] tortured to death . . . .'' Tito elevated the kulak (rich peasant) class to powerful political and economic positions in the countryside through the promotion of ''free competition'' and hired labor. (8)
It is sections of the bribed working- class and the rich farmers that now form the reactionary shock-troops who murder and expell the poor peasants from the land. The assets of millions of poor farmers and urban proletarians have been seized as regional capital is concentrated for expropriation by competing imperialists and their ultra-nationalist capitalist running dogs.
Ted Koppel Shits
Euro-Amerikan cultures cringe when the techniques imperialism uses every day against the Black masses of the world pop up in white on white. One problem for the imperialists is that with the current world war-driven global migration of laboring populations -- the major European industrial centers are not willing to absorb more refugees than they can control: hence, the death camps and the immigration quotas. (9)
When the smoke clears, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and whatever is left of the trans-national populations in Bosnia & Hercegovina, Kosovo, and Vojvodina will compete to serve imperialist capital. The road will have been cleared for the EEC and Amerika to continue dumping massive amounts of out-dated and de- valued analytical and scientific instruments, electrical power generators, telecommunications equipment and avionics on the region through joint ventures financed by imperialist loans and paid for by the cheap labor of starving refugees. (10)
The whipped cream on top -- for Panic's pharmaceutical business anyway -- will be acceptance of new GATT restrictions. Drug patent laws, for example, will be extended from the present seven year limit to a minimum of fifteen profit-sucking years. (10)
Alternatively, the eastern European masses might organize themselves and chop the capitalists off at the neck - - again.
Notes:
1. Exporters Encyclopedia 1991-91, p.
1510.
2. The Economist, 5/2/92, p. 18.
3. The Economist 6/20/92, p. 50.
4. Official Export Guide 1992, p. 694.
5. Official Export Guide 1992, p.
697.
6. Official Export Guide 1992, p. 697;
The Economist 5/2/92, p. 59.
7. Comptons Encyclopedia.
8. Is Yugoslavia A Socialist Country?
Renmin Ribao & Hongqi 9/26/63.
9. The Economist 5/23/92, p. 53.
10. Official Export Guide 1992, p.
695.
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