Bosnia’s
Magnificent Uprising: Heralding a New Era of Class Politics?
By Michael Karadjis
Beginning
on February 5, mass protests led by workers and retrenched former workers in
the privatised factories, along with students and other citizens, have rocked
most major industrial cities in Bosnia, notably Sarajevo, Tuzla, Zenica, Bihac
and Mostar.
The
state responded to initial protests with arrests, tear-gas and other forms of
repression. In many cases peaceful protests turned violent; government
buildings have been attacked, occupied, sometimes torched. Tens of thousands of
protestors have demanded nothing less than the complete resignation of everyone
at all levels of government from all parties, which they see as equally
responsible for the massive multi-decade theft of people’s assets by the three
wings of the nationalist oligarchy – Serb, Croat and Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) –
which have run Bosnia as their fiefdom since being granted it in the
US-engineered Dayton Accord that ended the Bosnian war in 1995.
The
main, if not only, form of theft that has sparked off the uprising is called
privatisation. Mass lay-offs, new owners stripping assets and declaring
formerly well-functioning state firms “bankrupt,” workers cheated of
retrenchment packages, workers still at work not getting paid for months on
end? Sound familiar? Some like to call it “illegal” or “corrupt” privatisation,
but for millions of workers around the world it is just called privatisation,
or bettter still, capitalism.
Perhaps
not. But which workers’ revolution begins in some kind of pure form that can
instantly be recognised?
Gordy’s
otherwise excellent prose notwithstanding, he does neither himself nor the
Bosnian working class much justice with this intrusion of cynicism. Whatever
the current uprising is or is not, it is the largest mass outbreak of unalloyed
class struggle revolt, untouched by nationalist poison, that we have seen in
Bosnia since it was ripped to bits by Serbian and Croatian nationalists – ie,
the new Serbian and Croatian bourgeoisie which had arisen on the corpse of
Yugoslav “market socialism” – in the early 1990s.
And
this is all the more significant given that the multi-ethnic Bosnian working
class, in the great industrial centres of Bosniak-majority central Bosnia, was
the living heart of the best traditions of multi-ethnic socialist Yugoslavia,
and it is in these same centres that the current revolt has broken out.
“Return the factories to the workers”!
And
their demands indicate that some of the most powerful aspects of the ideology
of that Yugoslavia – workers’ self-management of the factories, and radical social
equality – have resurfaced, perhaps never buried very too deeply in the
consciousness of the people.
While the call
for “a technical government, composed of expert, non-political, uncompromised
members who have held no position at any level of government” may sound naiive
to anyone that has experienced unelected, neo-liberal “technical” governments
in Greece and Italy, the protestors see this as merely a temporary government
to get them to elections, and moreover it would “be required to submit weekly
plans and reports about its work” to “all interested citizens.”
This demand for
such constant public oversight of the government – borne of the experience of
decades of detached and arrogant rule by the three “ethnic” wings of the
Bosnian oligarchy and suggesting a form of “people’s power” – already looks far
in advance of these other so-called “technical” governments, and certainly
coming from a different direction.
However, it is
the social program the people demand of such a government that makes it day and
night compared to these neo-liberal, anti-people governments. The third set of
demands, regarding issues related to the privatization of the major former
state companies that dominated the city’s economy (Dita, Polihem, Poliolhem,
Gumara, and Konjuh), are that the government must:
§ Recognize the seniority and
secure health insurance of the workers.
§ Process instances of economic
crimes and all those involved in it
§ Confiscate illegally obtained
property
§ Annul the privatization
agreements
§ Prepare a revision of the
privatization
§ Return the factories to the workers and put
everything under the control of the public government in order to protect
the public interest, and to start production in those factories where it is
possible
After decades of
neo-liberal onslaught, both in practice and at an ideological level, for a
rising people to demand privatised factories be “returned to the workers” is an
extraordinarily refreshing moment.
It should be
remembered that even neo-liberals and free marketeers can pretend to get behind
campaigns against “illegal” privatisations in order to safely steer them in
their ideological direction – they claim all the problems are caused by the
“corruption” of the process, or “lack of transparency” and that indeed the
problem isn’t the free market, but that the market is allegedly still not free
or “perfect” enough.
A demand for
factories to be returned to the workers – ie, to their rightful owners – cuts across these neo-liberal illusions, doesn’t
allow them the time of day.
Further demands
include “equalizing the pay of government representatives with the pay of
workers in the public and private sector” – a demand that has rarely been heard
since Lenin wrote ‘State and Revolution’ in 1917 – as well as elimination of
all kinds of special and additional payments to government representatives (eg,
for sitting on committees etc) and “other irrational and unjustified forms of
compensation beyond those that all employees have a right to.”
Similarly, in
Sarajevo, citizens demanded, along with resignation of everyone in government
from all parties, release of arrested demonstrators, an end to the “larceny of
society cloaked in politics” and criminal prosecution of those responsible,
that society begins “conversations and actions at all levels of government in
order to establish a more socially just
order for all social strata; and for all those whose human dignity and
material basic needs have been endangered or destroyed by the transitional
theft, corruption, nepotism, privatization of public resources, an economic
model that favors the rich, and financial arrangements that have destroyed any
hope for a society based on social justice and welfare” (http://www.jasminmujanovic.com/1/post/2014/02/the-demands-of-the-people-of-tuzla-sarajevo-english.html).
So while it may not yet be the “workers’ revolution” promised “in
1844,” it would be hard to disagree with Bosnian activist Emin Eminagić that
this upsurge “could be the long-awaited opportunity to reintroduce the notion of
class struggle into Bosnia and Herzegovina's society, moving away from the nationalist
imaginaries of political elites” (
http://www.rosalux.rs/userfiles/files/Emin%20Eminagic_Tuzla%20protests.pdf).
“We are hungry in three languages”
explains a banner in demonstration in Zenica.
Background: The rise of bourgeois nationalism and
the destruction of Bosnia
It is extremely
significant that there has been no trace of nationalist poison in any of the
demands of the rising people. Nationalism was a product of rising capitalism
within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the 1980s – the ideology
of the rising bourgeoisie in the dominant nations, especially Serbia, Croatia
and Slovenia – as they threw off the shackles of the Communist ideology, under
the leadership of Broz Tito, of “Brotherhood and Unity,” ie, working-class
solidarity between the various nations that made up the federation.
Bosnia was the
hardest nut to crack, because while the five other republics within the
Yugoslav Federation represented, however imperfectly, five different Yugoslav
nations, Bosnia was the only fully multi-ethnic republic – a republic
completely mixed between Serbs, Croats, Muslims (Bosniaks), “Yugoslavs” (ie,
those of mixed birth or who chose not to use an ethnic identifier) and others –
it was Yugoslavia itself writ small. And likewise, the working-class cities of
central Bosnia were in turn Bosnia’s heart – where workers of all these ethnic
groups worked in the same factories, lived in the same apartment blocks – how
were the new nationalist bourgeoisies to divide them?
And yet divide
them they – both these nationalist bourgeois cliques in neighbouring Serbia and
Croatia, and the western imperialist powers – had to do; because a working
class united across ethnic lines was not going to be much good for economic
“reform,” ie, the privatisation/theft of what was then legally owned by the
working class.
Especially when
this Bosnian working class had such a militant history of class struggle.
Indeed, it was none other than the miners in this thoroughly multi-ethnic city
of Tuzla in northern Bosnia who organised collections and sent support to the
heroic British miners’ strike of the 1980s. Not a tradition the British ruling
class wanted to maintain at any rate; perhaps partly accounting for Tory-ruled
Britain being the most solidly supportive of the demands of Serbian bourgeois nationalist
leader, Slobodan Milosevic, to split up Bosnia into newly created, ethnically-cleansed
statelets.
The problem with
splitting Bosnia along ethnic lines being that people didn’t live in separate
areas, but all together in cities, and in an interlocking, completely scattered
patchwork in the countryside. Thus to create a “Serb Republic” within Bosnia as
demanded by Milosevic, and likewise a smaller “Croat Republic” as demanded by
his partner in crime, Franjo Tudjman of Croatia, required massive “ethnic
cleansing,” in what became a euphemism for genocide.
And the main
victims of this were the plurality of the Bosnian population who were at once
the most scattered throughout Bosnia geographically, the most urban-based and
proletarianised, and who did not have a national “fatherland” outside Bosnia to
arm them to the teeth – namely, the Bosnian Muslims, and the mixed Bosnians.
And as the newly
independent bourgeois states of Serbia and Croatia, via their massively armed local
Bosnian proxies, began in April 1992 carving out their new “states” via ethnic
cleansing, Britain and France enforced a criminal arms embargo on the Bosnian
Republic, in violation of UN Article 51 on the right of UN-member states to
armed self-defence, and in defiance of overwhelming votes in the UN General
Assembly for this embargo to be lifted. Britain and France demanded nothing
less than Bosnia’s surrender, its capitulation to one or the other of the
unjust ethnic partition plans they continually proposed.
Bosnia’s
multi-ethnic government – led by Bosniaks and anti-nationalist Serbs and Croats
at all levels – rejected these demands for ethnic apartheid and recognition of
ethnic cleansing. While massively outgunned, it attempted to hold on at least
the Bosniak-majority regions (the few it could defend against massive ethnic
cleansing) and the mixed working class cities of central Bosnia.
Once again,
Tuzla, where the current revolt broke out, played a key role, alongside the
capital Sarajevo, in maintaining a powerful multi-ethnic flavour for the
resistance, not an easy task as over a million Bosniaks were driven into the
small part of Bosnia still controlled by the government, from the 85 percent of
the country which had been conquered and “cleansed” as Serb and Croat
“republics.”
The Dayton republic of apartheid and dysfunction
In the end it
was US intervention in late 1995 – following three and a half years of
slaughter – that granted half of Bosnia as an ethnically cleansed “Serb
Republic” (RS), though Serbs were only one third of Bosnians, to the regime of
the right-wing Serb Democratic Party (SDS), which had led the ethnic cleansing;
the timing would almost suggest this was a reward for the SDS-led army having
just committed genocide in the Bosniak town of Srebrenica, which was included
in RS seemingly just as a matter of course.
However, worried
that granting a “Croat Republic” as well would leave a land-locked,
poverty-stricken, revenge-seeking “Muslim state” in the heart of Europe, the US
prevailed upon the Croat nationalists to accept a “Federation” with the Muslims
in the other half.
As such, this
US-engineered Dayton Accord was far from an equal document:
§ The Serb nationalists got what
they had fought for, an ethnic republic in far more of the country than could
conceivably be “theirs”; but they could claim they were short-changed by not
being allowed to unite with Serbia.
§ The Croat nationalists were
not only denied the “right” to unite with Croatia, but did not even get their
own republic like the Serb nationalists, and so considered themselves
short-changed; but given the weakness of the Bosniak people and of the
Federation as a whole, Croatia felt it had gained the same effective suzerainty
over half of Bosnia as Serbia had gained over the other half, and used this to
promote Bosnian Croat interests.
§ The Bosniaks lost the war, in
being forced to cede half the country to RS, with the sop that the other half
could still be called a “Federation,” and so were now forced to play the same
game, trying now to compete with the Croats to dominate the Federation, where
they at least had the advantage of numbers.
Importantly,
this “Federation” was no real concession to multi-ethnicity; not only had the
damage been done, and rivers of blood divided these two populations (and both
from the Serbs), but moreover the entire constitution of Bosnia was re-written
to create ethnic quotas at every level of government, in both halves of the
country, from the municipal level right up to the weak federal government. And levels there are: as Cerkez explains, “nearly
4 million people are governed by more than 150 ministries on four different
levels of government.”
And on top of
this morass of ethnic-based politics, an international overseer – the High
Representative – was appointed to be the final arbiter of politics in Bosnia –
and to represent the interests of western capital, the European Union, the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as they attempted to push a
neo-liberal economic “restructure” on to the battered country: such issues as
overall economic direction were never to be up for popular vote.
And so in peace,
the policy of national division became dominant; and so every political issue
that arose could become diverted into the nationalist box; every election, at
every level, became a forum for the ethnic bourgeoisie to try to grab more of
the spoils while spouting ethnic lies to their impoverished and frightened
constituencies, while in the end, to form governments, grotesque coalitions of
ethnic-based parties came into being, often mutually hostile, but competing
with another such unprincipled bloc, a recipe for permanent dysfunction.
So while the
Bosnian Serb, Croat and now Muslim bourgeoisie stripped the economy and thieved
the people’s assets – as required by neo-liberal “economic reform” – there
could always be someone else to blame, another national group ready to take
away the (unequal) “rights” they had all achieved at Dayton, in order to
prevent the battered working people from putting the blame on their “own”
thieving class.
Indeed the very
lopsidedness of the Dayton set-up aggravated this ethnic politics. RS leaders
could continually threaten to leave Bosnia and unite with Serbia, knowing
full-well it was impossible; Bosniak leaders could threaten to try to get RS
abolished, again knowing it was impossible, however morally correct it may seem
in the abstract – in practice, as a form of threat, it could only act
divisively now the deed was done; Croat leaders could threaten to split the
Federation and form a third, Croat entity. And then they could each scare and
homogenise their “own” people with these threats of what the other group might
do.
Thus the
significance now of today’s non-nationalist demands, not to mention ones which
call for factories to be returned to the workers. In fact, this is not the
first action cutting across ethnic lines – last June’s “Babylution” was a
precursor, a brief multi-ethnic mass protest against the incredible dysfunction
of a system in which parties and state agencies were unable to reach enough
agreement to issue identity documents to babies, which led to the death of a
child unable to cross the border for urgent medical treatment. But that brief
moment has now been overshadowed by the current mass revolt.
Why is most revolt taking place in the Bosniak
areas?
But a question
then arises – why has the uprising largely taken place in the Federation, and
even within the Federation, overwhelmingly among the Bosnian Muslims? In fact,
it hasn’t been only Muslims – there have been smaller outbreaks in RS, particularly
in its capital Banja Luka, and indeed the people of Prijedor put forward a
similar list of demands to those in the Federation cities; and within the
Federation, Mostar, a city divided between Muslims and Croats, has also been
impacted. But overwhelmingly it is the case.
After all, the
venality, the corruption and the theft have been no less obvious in RS than in
the Federation; in fact the propensity of RS leader for many years now, Milorad
Dodic, to farm out contracts to friends and connections is notorious. For example, the proceeds from the 2008
sale of RS Telecom were used to set up the Investment-Development Bank,
supposedly to help citizens buy homes or small businesses to expand by lending
at low interest rates, but most of its largest loans were given to “foreign-backed companies with offshore bank
accounts and assets that exist only on paper,” largely companies with ties to
Dodik himself or his regime, including $2.2-million loan for a business run by
his son. Dodik himself personally signed off on all these loans (http://www.rferl.org/content/Banja_Luka_Bank_Controlled_By_PM_Hands_Out_Millions_To_Family_Allies/1807881.html).
At one level,
the answer is easy: this is a working class uprising in the big industrial
centres most impacted by neo-liberal “restructuring” and privatisation/theft;
and Muslims dominate in these cities. Of the twenty largest cities and towns in
Bosnia, fifteen are in the Federation.
There are
however other factors. First, the RS is probably slightly better off at the
level of functionality. In its great wisdom, the international overseers of
Bosnia carried out a “decentralisation” of the Federation mid-last decade,
splitting it into ten cantons, while leaving RS as one entity. Now, while
“decentralisation” might sometimes be a good thing, in the circumstances all it
meant was a decentralisation of the already cumbersome ethnic-based
bureaucracy: a proliferation of the problem, with vast extra layer of competing
“ethnic” bureaucracies now running lots of new governments.
But this
“cohesiveness” of the RS, while better in some ways, is also based on the less
democratic and more uniformly nationalist nature of RS; even the competition in
the Federation between Bosniak and Croat parties, however venal, and the remnants
of officially non-ethnic parties from the past, however unreal, offers some
kind of break from the stultifying uniformity in RS. Even the differences
between the different parties within RS are virtually non-existent, all based
on the alleged need to “protect” the “Serb nation,” despite them getting the
best deal from Dayton. It also means a more cohesive repressive apparatus.
Which leads to
the main point: reactionary nationalism was always stronger among the Serbs and
Croats, reflecting the real interests of their ethnic elites to try to carve
out parts of Bosnia as their own and to link these to the outside
“fatherlands.” This means that, despite the wear and tear, this nationalism
still has something of a hold in their regions, enough to divert a section of
the population.
Thus the reaction
of RS leader Dodik to the uprising in the Federation and even its tentative
spread to RS was to denounce the whole thing as a plot to abolish the RS; and
while this may seem self-evidently absurd, when protestors turned up in the RS
city Prijedor to make the same demands being made nation-wide, across the road
a counter-demonstration raised hackneyed old nationalist slogans. Same in
Belgrade in Serbia itself: one demonstration in solidarity with the Bosnian
uprising, opposed by a counterdemonstration supporting war-criminal former
general Mladic.
“If such a
thesis is repeated for years in almost all media in Republika Srpska, the fear
is understandable. Such a narrative eventually produced paranoia - systematic
and planned. I would even say such paranoia was produced by the authorities
themselves because it is easy to direct public attention there than to solve
the problems in the economy, the health system, education and such normal
problems. Here is still easier to be poor
and hungry then be traitor. Because if you are poor and hungry, you are at
least not contemptible.”
In contrast,
while the Bosniak elite inevitably became an eager player in the national game
after Dayton, this nationalism was never more than skin-deep among the Bosniak
masses, particularly in the industrial centres. As explained above, their
survival as the most scattered and the most urbanised, yet also militarily and
economically weakest, group required the maintenance of a multi-ethnic
republic, meaning that even the aspiring Bosniak bourgeois elite had little use
for nationalism which could only benefit its opponents.
Thus, when
British and French and UN “diplomats” continually tried to force ethnic
partition plans onto Bosnia during the war, drawn up in consultation with Serb
and Croat nationalist warlords, the inclusion of a “Muslim” statelet alongside
the Serb and Croat statelets was the aim of the Muslims’ enemies, not their own;
a land-locked apartheid ghetto into which all the ethnically-cleansed Muslims
from the rest of Bosnia could be driven into. Thus when the Bosniak leadership
finally accepted such plans under the pressure of genocide, strangulation
sieges, embargo etc, it was in the form of national capitulation, not a product
of their own nationalism at all.
And so if this
nationalism then became necessary and useful for the elite after 1995, it never
had the same sway over the masses as elsewhere. Thus it is no accident that,
imbued by less nationalist poison, the Bosniak workers have led the way back to
the slogans of self-management and internationalism.
The collapse of Bosnia’s economy
Bosnia’s
catastrophic economic situation, featuring some 40 percent unemployment and 57
percent youth unemployment did not come from nowhere, and the thieving of the
triple-headed ethnic elite carries major blame. Emin Eminagić gives an
example of the kind of pillage that privatisation involved, in the former state
chemical factory Dita (
http://www.rosalux.rs/userfiles/files/Emin%20Eminagic_Tuzla%20protests.pdf):
“In 2002, 59 percent of Dita's capital was allegedly bought by the
workers … (yet) this was dragged on until 2005, when Dita was bought up by a
chemical company under the name of "Lora" which is under the
ownership of Beohemija, a chemical conglomerate based in elgrade Serbia … According to the financial reports from 2010 Dita was
already going dwnhill (yet this) was preceded by several years of great production …
What actually happened between 2007 when the privatization took place and
2010/11 (the year that strike and protests occurred) remains a mystery.
According to some workers, between 2009 and 2010, they were ordered to put salt
into the chemical mixture the company used to make detergent which damaged the machines they used, thus slowly destroying
actual production capacities of the company . … Until now, the workers are owed
over 50 salaries, most of them cannot retire, as they are lacking several years
of work service due to the privatization
process that had been dragged on since 2002.”
One has to imagine such examples
multiplied manifold.
Yet while the
ethnic-based oligarchies are to blame, their actions are only to be expected
within the political order imposed by Dayton and an economic program driven
through by the international caretakers dictated by the International Monetary
Fund, the World Bank and the European Union.
The latest IMF
austerity program, imposed five years ago, froze budgets, slashed wages and
veterans’ benefits and sped up privatisation, massively driving down
consumption and doubling public debt. Bosnia was already in deep economic
crisis, and as per the norm, the IMF “cure” was to make matters worse, by
forcing already battered working people to pay for the theft of the new
capitalist elite.
The situation
had been accentuated by the “free trade” policies imposed by the European Union
as conditions for future membership, allowing foreign goods to pour in. As
Andreja Zivkovic explains, “the economic model is based on opening up to
foreign capital. Until 2008 foreign capital flows fed growth based on imports
and consumer debt, but at the same time destroyed industry and created the
present debt crisis. On the one hand, an overvalued currency pegged to the Euro
enabled the borrowing needed to pay for imports; but on the other, it acted as
a disincentive to investment in the real economy and made exports uncompetitive”
(http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/break-with-dayton-bosnia).
In particular,
free trade agreements with neighbouring, richer, Serbia and Croatia in 2001,
negotiated by their ethnically-connected Bosnian elites and approved by the EU
as a kind of “apprenticeship” for full free trade, proved disastrous. By 2004,
Serbian and Croatian products were dominating the markets in the two halves of
Bosnia – ironically, it was easier to trade “free” across the official Bosnian
borders than for the two halves of Bosnia to trade with each other. With
Serbian and Croatian capital also grabbing assets in the two halves – for
example, the 2008 sale of RS Telecom to Serbian capital – one might say the two
neighbours were seeing the economic fruits of their victory in the war.
As Bosnian agriculture
collapsed under the weight of these imports, in 2005, hungry farmers from both
sides of the divide set up a protest camp outside Sarajevo and camped there for
many months – and were ignored.
At the time the IMF
program was imposed in 2009, the somewhat more democratic environment in the
Federation made it the centre of resistance. While RS had already carried out
significant privatisation, the Federation was far behind; and meanwhile,
benefits for disabled veterans were 10 times higher in the Federation than the
pittance they were getting in RS, making massive cuts a centrepiece of the IMF
program. The IMF demanded cuts of 207 million euros from the
Federation’s budget, some 10 per cent of its entity, cantonal and municipal
budgets, while RS had to cut 73 million euros.
Despite general strikes and massive veterans’ demonstrations in the
Federation – veterans threatening “social revolution” – the IMF program was
driven through in slightly amended form in June that year. Yet given the moral
weight of the veterans – who had defended Bosnia through the darkest years –
the Federation parliament then rejected the legislation to cut veterans’
benefits by 10 percent in October.
Ironically, the fact that the RS budget was at that point experiencing
a one-off windfall from its Telecom privatisation helped the argument that the
RS’s more successful privatisation was a good thing. Naturally, this could not
be repeated as the state lost these constant revenues, and the effects of the
ramping of privatisation in both entities since 2009 speaks for itself –
including what happened to the proceeds of this privatisation, as explained
above.
International intervention?
In this context, the threat by
Valentin Inzko, the international “High Representative” or grand vizier
of Bosnia, of intervention by EUFOR (European Union) troops “if the hooliganism
continues” is entirely understandable from the point of view of the imperialist
overlords and their system of neo-liberal pillage, gravely threatened by a
horizontal, class-based uprising evoking the best of the socialist past. In
this sense, the Bosnian workers are in the same boat as the Greek workers who
have been resisting the catastrophe imposed on them by the same system.
This may come as a surprise to some liberals who see the international
presence as a balance against the competing nationalist oligarchies. It is true
that, given this ethnic partition and dysfunction, the international overseer
may appear the only unifying factor. However, the Dayton constitution means the
HR must work through these oligarchies, while trying to smooth over any serious
division; ultimately, European and American capital, which the HR represents,
has only these oligarchies to work with to maintain capitalist rule.
Thus when one faction or
another of the ethnocracy steps too far out of line, threatening the entire
Dayton order, they may be sanctioned or even sacked or jailed by the
international vizier. This occurred, for example, in 2001, when then Croat
member of the presidency, Ante Jelavic, and his Croat Democratic Party (HDZ),
attempted to split the Federation by organising a referendum to set up a third,
Croat, entity within Bosnia. He was sacked by High Representative Wolfgang
Petritsch, while NATO-led Stabilization Force (SFOR) troops raided the
Hercegovacka Bank, which he was using to finance the referendum, froze its accounts,
seized documents and closed down most of its operations. Muslim and Serb leaders have similarly been sacked or threatened.
But these actions are, on one hand, exceptional, and on the other, they
allow the ethnocracy to demagogically pose as the victims of foreign colonial
rule and thus keep alive “ethnic” politics. This ultimate foreign sanction thus
acts to prevent not only mature independent institutions, but also the
development of a real democratic alternative to the ethnocracy.
The fact that these international sanctions don’t include action against
the “regular” economic crimes that the nascent capitalist classes are expected
to carry out in the neo-liberal EU is highlighted precisely by this threat of intervention
against the working class uprising: the class interests of all wings of the
oligarchy and international capital are paramount. “Valentin Inzko: Useless clown”
reads one protest banner.
Where to?
Of course the so-called “ethnic passions” were never only that in the
first place, and even at their height represented the new class forces that
were burying the corpse of “market socialism.” He is quite right, of course,
that the last twenty years of “liberalism,” presumably meaning a mixture of the
capitalist market with elite bourgeois democracy, has only perpetuated these
“ethnic passions” rather than overcoming them.
How could it be otherwise? Despite the ascendancy of the ideology of
singing the praises of “the market,” not just among reactionaries but also
among most stripes of left-liberals ever since the collapse of the grotesque
Stalinist aberrations of socialism around 1990, it is nothing but a system of
ruthless dog-eat-dog competition for survival, however much it may be supplemented
by band-aids, liberal anti-corruption wish-lists and chatter about “civil
society” for the comfortable middle classes, while the working classes
retrenched from and plundered by the “liberally” privatised enterprises are
sent to hell.
This liberal ideology has had an unexpected staying power – countless
times throughout the world what have begun as genuinely popular upsurges,
featuring the same “radical demand for justice,” have been side-tracked into
the liberal morass. As noted above, this often takes the form of explaining
that the privatisation and neo-liberalism that are the targets of the upsurge
would be perfectly fine if only they had less corruption, more “transparency,” more
“accountability,” the involvement of “civil society” and so on. Rather than
privatisation – ie, capitalism – itself being the problem, the problem is the
incompleteness of the privatisation, its impurity, the fact that it is still
mixed with “corrupt” state interests and the like.
As if there were another form of capitalism. As if their “pure” version
even existed, let alone had any answers if it did.
In the case of Bosnia, the alleged problem is the “ethnic” corruption
of the process. As if there is another way.
Slogans such as “return the factories to the workers” are declaring all
this to be rubbish.
Does that mean it is impossible that this upsurge too can be diverted?
Who would want to make such a brave prediction. In fact, even the “factories to
the workers” slogan is more a specifically Tuzla phenomenon – while all the
protest demands feature issues of radical social equality, right to work,
reversal of thieving privatisation etc, only the Tuzla workers have put up this
ultimate demand.
We can certainly say that the “ethnic” stranglehold over the militancy
of Bosnian workers has been broken, and this is significant enough, and that
some of their slogans point towards a more significant break with the logic of
capitalism.
That this challenge has arisen in Bosnia is entirely logical. The Socialist
Yugoslavia under Broz Tito had many of the faults of the other eastern European
regimes, including being run by a massive privileged bureaucratic caste which
repressed genuine opposition; and where it was different, in its “market”
version of socialism, this was unable to escape the logic of break-neck
competition, economic anarchy and unemployment that characterise “market
capitalism.”
On the other side, however, Yugoslavia always had a more politically
liberal atmosphere than elsewhere in the east, and above all its unique
doctrine of “workers’ self-management” of the factories, and “social” property
– the liberation of the means of production from bureaucratic control – is a
powerful legacy that lives on in the consciousness of working people. A
possibility, an image, of a different world (regardless of the fact that these
worker self-managed enterprises at the time were undermined precisely by being
thrown into the world of “the market”).
Thus it is not only the call for factories to the workers, but in
particular the word “return” – they were
ours, after all.
Nevertheless, even if the workers in Tuzla were to physically re-take
control of their enterprises, this example would need to spread elsewhere in
Bosnia, and indeed elsewhere in the Balkans, for it to have a chance of posing
a new socially just order.
In Greece, for example, the lull in the movement against EU-IMF imposed
socio-economic catastrophe that was experienced through 2013 was broken when
the workers at Greek Radio-Television (ERT) took over their own enterprise when
the regime tried to close it. It became a rallying point, a source of hope, an
example of a different way. But after several months, it could no longer
survive on its own.
Nevertheless, the movement for socialism needs such sparks to
demonstrate that “another world is possible.” To again quote Zizek:
“Even if the protests gradually lose their power, they will remain a brief
spark of hope, something like the enemy soldiers fraternising across the
trenches in the first world war. Authentic emancipatory events always involve
such ignoring of particular identities.”
This is well-said, with the necessary addition that the “spark of hope”
we are speaking of here is not only this ignoring of “ethnic” identities but
also the clear pointers towards a new emancipatory socio-economic order.
