More nationalist madness in the Balkans (2001)

From the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Late June and early July saw much tension in Macedonia, threatening once more to ignite nationalist hatreds that have ripped the Balkans apart now for almost a decade.

It was uncannily ironic that as Yugoslavia was sending former president Slobodan Milosevic to stand trial in The Hague on war crimes, a mob of 5,000 Macedonian protestors, including police, soldiers and reservists, stormed their parliament and forced president Boris Trajkovski flee in fear of his life. His crime? He had agreed to a Western brokered cease-fire with Albanian rebels and also allowed NATO to ferry rebel fighters to safety from a village they had captured six miles away from the capital Skopje. Not only was the mob furious that their government had signed a cease-fire with a movement that Nato’s own command had labelled “terrorists” and “murderers”, but here was the West once again coming to the aid of insurgents.

Ostensibly, the Albanian rebels claim to be only interested in winning equal civil rights for Albanians and constitutional changes. This however is no civil rights movement. If so, then why the armed insurgents and why do they call themselves the Albanian National Liberation Army (NLA)? The answer is simple, they are nationalists bent on creating a greater Albania. They are after territorial gain and control of the porous borders which show a fair profit in drugs and arms smuggling and the lucrative trade in “illegal” immigrants. Violence and guerrilla warfare as practised by the NLA is not normally the stuff of “civil-rights” movements, which generally pursue a non-violent agenda. It is the remit of liberation forces intent on wresting territory from its present owners. What has prompted the NLA to pass themselves off as a “civil-rights” movement is NATO’s refusal to redraw the borders of the Balkans.

Moreover, why do they launch attacks on government forces? Simple – they hope to incur a heavy-handed response from Macedonian forces which would win them support from Macedonia’s Albanian population, who perhaps need a little egging on, bearing in mind their social and economic gripes, and from Kosovo – Albanians and Albania itself. They have further counted on benefiting from a similar situation when their parent organisation, the KLA, incurred such a harsh and brutal response from Serb forces that NATO was forced to intervene on behalf of the Albanians in 1998.

The risk of all-out war is serious enough. It is feared that the mob fury could now be focused on isolated pockets of Albanians in Macedonia (they make up one third of the population) now that Trajkovski has agreed to the temporary EU brokered cease-fire. At present the rebels have captured areas of territory in the west of the country and have cut off water and electricity supplies, further inciting Macedonian hard-liners in Skopje to demand armed intervention – a situation made all the worse with the rebels threatening to descend on Skopje to protect Albanians living there.

Chief protagonists of the Macedonian Slav majority, including Prime Minister Ljubco Georevski still hanker after a ham-fisted solution to the problem and perhaps the fact that the government has recently taking delivery of eight new attack aircraft – doubling the size of its air force – and that Georgevbski’s VMRO-DPMNE political party have recently handed out automatic weapons to 2000 reservists suggests they are not putting much faith in a peaceful solution to the crisis. If Macedonian Slavs, tired at the slow pace of a settlement in their favour, frustrated with the unchecked gains of the rebels, decide to even the score and attack ethnic Albanian areas, this will most certainly witness the beginning of a new wave of civil war.

 A political settlement however is still on the cards, with negotiators from the EU and NATO having set an unofficial deadline for a peaceful solution, which would then pave the way for British, French, Italian and Greek soldiers to take part in a mission to disarm Albanian rebels. The cease-fire, signed by the heads of the Macedonian army and police force as well as the NLA, consists of two linked agreements – one between the NLA and NATO and the other between the Macedonian forces and NATO, with the NLA agreeing to disarm if a political settlement can be reached.

Critics, meanwhile, warn that by acknowledging the NLA as a legitimate protagonist in debates about Macedonia’s future, the West has effectively conceded the carving up of Macedonia along ethnic lines – and this is cold comfort for Macedonian nationalists and the paramilitary groups now springing up and arguing for the expulsion of Albanians from Macedonia’s mixed communities. Many Macedonians still remain distrustful of the US, who they see as pro-Albanian following the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and are contemptuous of any Western-designed solution.

Little surprise, then, that Balkan analysts see only a deteriorating situation and one that can’t be solved by further Western solutions that sparked the storming of the Macedonian parliament.

To date the present conflict has not been as bloody as previous Balkan disagreements, but it has nevertheless resulted in 100,000 refugees who represent perhaps 5 percent of the population. It is perhaps too early to predict events in the coming weeks in Macedonia. Whilst nationalism, like the disease it is, can be diagnosed, there remains no immediate prognosis. For it feeds on fear and insecurity, alienation and ignorance which themselves can lead to irrational passions and attempts at quick-fix and spontaneous violent attempts at remedy which always prove counterproductive and detrimental to all concerned.

Nationalist conflict has raged for 10 long years in the Balkans. What, in all honesty, have any of the victors gained? What is the “independence” they yearn after, if it means being trapped within borders – artificial constructs, no, prisons – inside of the bigger prison of capitalism?

John Bissett

What’s in a word? (2022)

From the March 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The word ‘socialism’ peppers current political discussion. When Boris Johnson was seeking respite from his well-known recent setbacks by announcing a limit to rises in people’s energy bills, a Tory MP got up in the parliament to say that the Conservative Party should not be supporting socialist policies. In the United States, right-wing opponents of Joe Biden never cease to refer to his policies as ‘socialism’. And when we hear reference to what happened over much of the 20th century in Russia and Eastern Europe and still very much happens in countries like Cuba and China, the word ‘socialism’ is often used as a quick and convenient way to describe it, whether coming from detractors or supporters. Clearly, when people use the word in these different cases to characterise a form of government or government policy, they do not all have the same idea in their mind. But what unites all these uses is the idea that the state is taking charge of economic matters and attempting to control what would otherwise be determined by market forces.

Giant Ponzi scam

It’s also a word that pops up almost as a matter of course when people are trying to describe not just state control of an economy but also state dictatorship over people’s everyday lives. This has happened recently, for example, in two quite separate BBC Radio 4 programmes on Albania. A documentary entitled The Great Pyramids of Albania looked back to 1996 when a large proportion of the Albanian population fell victim to a giant ‘Ponzi’ scheme. People sold their houses, land and livestock to buy into pyramid schemes that were doomed to fail. By the end of that year, what was basically a rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul scheme had swallowed up almost 50 per cent of the country’s annual income and affected the lives of most of its population. The programme’s presenter tried to explain the psychology which hooked people into trusting this scheme, how the mass delusion evolved and then what were its dire consequences (a violent civil war in fact) once it became clear that no one was getting their money back and some had lost everything. But he did not do this without referring on a number of occasions to what had preceded this in the period from the end of the second world war to 1991 as ‘socialism’ and its end as ‘the fall of socialism’. During most of that time, what had happened was that Albania had been ruled in a direly oppressive way by a ruthless Stalin-style dictator, Enver Hoxha, who succeeded in establishing personal control not only over the economy but also over the country’s political system.

The Hoxha dictatorship

And it was the Hoxha period of Albanian history that the second recent BBC programme on that country focused on, via a recently published memoir entitled Coming of Age at the End of History, written by a woman who had lived through it. In it the author, Lea Ypi, describes how people were conditioned to believe that the one-party rule they were living under was ‘freedom and democracy’, and that this was what ‘socialism’ was. She describes reinforcing mechanisms such as the loyalty to Hoxha and the Party sworn by pupils in school every morning. But prying ears were everywhere and any hint of non-adherence to the system could lead to dire consequences ranging from dismissal from work, to ‘re-education’, to prison or to execution, and such things happened frequently. The title of the Albanian song accompanying the programme, A Pickaxe in One Hand, a Rifle in the Other, used as a signature tune by Albanian state radio, captures well the tenor of a regime characterised in the author’s memoir as ‘an open-air prison’. Once she had finished her schooldays, Ypi tells how she left Albania, studied philosophy and politics and ended up as what she is today, a Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics. Yet her memoir suggests that she is teaching her students that what happened under Hoxha was socialism, even though one might think that, with her knowledge of political theory, she would know that to label what happened in Albania in that way is an outright perversion of the word’s original meaning.

Was Albania socialist?

Of course, no one has a patent on words, especially those describing ideas rather than concrete objects. Yet, when the word ‘socialism’ was popularised in the 19th century by such writers as Marx and Engels, it clearly meant an entirely different society from the one that existed then and still exists now based on buying and selling and private or state ownership of the means of living. It meant a society of free access to all goods and services based on the concept of from each according to ability to each according to need and presupposed the abolition of the wages system. Yet the dictatorial regimes, run along state-capitalist lines, that later called themselves socialist (and/or Marxist) were the polar opposite of anything Marx and Engels would have recognised as the society of ‘freedom from necessity’ which they described as ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’ (they used the terms more or less synonymously). While we must recognise that many people do not want to see the kind of society advocated by Marx and Engels but instead prefer one of the many slightly different varieties of capitalism that exist at present (‘free market’ capitalism, state capitalism, ‘mixed’ economy, etc), it does not seem unreasonable to expect them, if only to achieve some kind of clarity of thought for themselves, not to throw the word ‘socialism’ around willy-nilly. If the title of ‘socialism’ is given to any of these varieties, it betrays a lack of understanding of the concept historically and can only serve to mislead those looking for genuine solutions to the many-faceted problems perpetually thrown up by the capitalist organisation of society.

Howard Moss

Marxisms for all (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are all Marxists now — if the badges are anything to go by. A Marxist is a radical thing to be, and it’s such less bother than becoming a vegetarian or getting yourself Born Again. Yes, the fashion for Marxism has a big future — as long as it doesn't get out of hand.

The attraction is that there are just so many Marxisms to choose from. When you get tired of one you can attach yourself to another. There’s Russian Marxism: you can bore your fellow workers at union meetings with how rents in Leningrad haven’t gone up for forty years — and the need for “anti-Soviet wreckers” to be sent for a long holiday in People’s Siberia (a sort of Leninist Disneyland). Then there's Chinese Marxism: if you take that option you get your script supplied in a Little Red Book: “He who does not work his sweet and sour balls off for the State is a counter-revolutionary tapeworm". Plenty of clichés are provided with Chinese Marxism, but the grey and grey uniform can be a trifle offputting. Let us not forget Albanian Marxism. All Albanian Marxists will insist on telling you (whether you want to hear or not) that there is no inflation in Albania. As a matter of fact there's not much money in Albania either. Of course, there's Polish Marxism: the latest joke in Gdansk is that "A spectre is haunting Leninism — the spectre of trade union consciousness" (subtle, but subversive). A bit of the old African Marxism is always worth consulting if you want to see the Old Man’s words distorted; a good example is Mugabe’s “National Socialism'”— a free copy of The Marxist Misprint to the first person who tells us where that little phrase was used before.

For those who don’t fancy Marxism there are plenty of other "isms" to print on your chest. There’s Leninism — the game for people who like the sound of Marxist slogans, but detest their meanings. Trotskyism is for ideologists, who’ve been everywhere and want to spend the rest of their days infiltrating Labour Party sleeping clubs. (No wonder they call them "bedsit socialists".) There’s feminism for men who feel sorry for women, anarchism for individuals who feel sorry for themselves and masochism for Labourites who have high hopes and always end up feeling sorry.

There are some who say that Marxism is more than a badge. More than a chant. More than a tone of voice even. What more do they expect — ideas? Yes: Marxism is a way of thinking about the world. It is not a dogma to be repeated parrot-fashion by tired old secular monks or a slogan to be scrawled on a wall by a rebel who runs away. To be a Marxist is to understand the world you live in. And to change it. The educators need to be educated — the uneducated need to discover the power within them. The world can be ours — those who pose as revolutionaries are in our way.

Steve Coleman

Twisting and turning (1996)

Book Review from the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

L’URSS et la contre-révolution de velours. by Ludo Martens. EPO, Brussels.

Normally we would let the dead bury the dead. And this book (“The USSR: The Velvet Counter-Revolution”) clearly comes into this category, written as it is by someone — the leader of a Maoist party in Belgium — who believes that Stalin was a Great Man and Trotsky a Hitlerite agent. But it reveals an interesting twist to the argument over the nature of the social system in Russia when the Communist Party was in power there.

In the course of their disputes with the rulers of Russia, the rulers of China (Mao) and of Albania (Enver Hodja) came to characterise Russia as “state capitalist”. This was largely name-calling but Mao and Hodja got their State ideologists to work it up into some kind of theory; which, in Martens’s words, went like this:

  "In the Soviet Union, Khrushchev’s coup d’Etat marked the capture of power by a new big-bourgeoisie, made up of the high officials of the Party and State, who de facto own the means of production and who appropriate the surplus value created by the workers. The Soviet State is a collective capitalist".

As it happened, this description of who the Russian ruling class were and how they owned the means of production and exploited the workers was substantially correct, except why did this suddenly come to apply only in 1953 when Khrushchev took over after Stalin died? Since the political and economic structure was the same, if it applied to Russia under Khrushchev it ought logically to apply to Russia under Stalin too. Indeed, it ought logically to apply as well to China under Mao and Albania under Hodja.

As we pointed out at the time, in characterising Russia as capitalist the Maoists were more advanced than the Trotskyists who still clung to the absurd view that Russia was some sort of “workers state” . However, in so doing they were also underlining their own defence of the Chinese and Albanian regimes which of course were also examples of state capitalism.

And this is what happened. After the so-called Cultural Revolution some ex-Red Guards came to apply the same analysis to China under Mao. Others went further and applied it to Russia under Stalin. As Martens describes it from his point of view:

  “The whole French New Right, of the “former-Maoist-New-Philospher” type, started from the analysis of the restoration of capitalism under Khrushchev to then discover that the “bases” of this restoration had already been laid by Stalin”.

Some went even further, such as Michael Volslensky in his book The Nomenklatura (recommended reading, incidentally, for anyone wanting to understand the ancien régime in Russia) whose views Martens quotes as the final proof that the new class/state capitalist analysis of Russia was wrong and should be abandoned:

  “Neither the Leninist party nor its core has ever been the vanguard or even a simple part of the working class . . . In the event of the revolution they were preparing being victorious, this small group would automatically become an organisation of professional leaders. It is thus that Lenin created the embryo of a new ruling class”.

Mao, Stalin and Lenin as advocates and practitioners of state capitalism, this is where the theory Mao and Hodja patronised in the 1960s and 70s led! This has proved too much for today’s Maoist remnants who have now decided to abandon it as a “leftist” deviation. Martens backtracks on a view which he says he held and ardently defended for twenty years, in these terms:

  “We believed at the time that Khrushchev had established a new specific mode of production, state capitalism, a higher form of capitalism where the “nomenklatura” collectively owns the means of production. This thesis isn’t tenable”.

He now believes that Khrushchev didn’t after all “restore” capitalism in 1953; all he did was to embark on a course that would eventually lead to “the restoration of capitalism” but that this didn’t actually occur till Yeltsin came to power in 1991; in the meantime the Russian economy remained “basically socialist”.

So the Maoists have now retreated to the same absurd position as the Trotskyists they hate: that Russia from Stalin to Gorbachov was still basically socialist even if those at the top were feathering their own nests (as if the absence of a privileged group in society wasn’t the essence of socialism).

This view has the added advantage—and is probably a major factor in their U-turn—of allowing the ex-pro-Chinese Communists to make it up with those ex-pro-Russian Communists who haven’t become open reformists, so that they can both rally round the remaining “socialist countries” (Cuba, North Korea, China, Vietnam and Laos). On reflection, perhaps we should have left the dead to bury the dead.

Adam Buick

The Coming Balkan Conflict? (2001)

From the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Two years after NATO and the UN moved into the former Yugoslavia to police a region beset by conflict since the Balkan break-up of the early 90s, a new conflagration threatens. Macedonian troops have clashed with Albanian rebels on the Kosovo border and, on the Serbian border, Albanian nationalists have launched attacks against Serb police positions.

Along the Kosovo/Macedonia and Kosovo/Serbia border, former members of the KLA have formed into guerrilla units intent on creating a “Greater Kosovo”. In the south of Kosovo the small and nascent Albanian National Liberation Army (NLA) aims to annex north and eastern Macedonia, whilst on Kosovo’s eastern border, a sister organisation, the UCBMP (Liberation Army of Prosevo Medvedja and Bujanovo)—all towns in the southern part of Serbia with an Albanian ethnic majority—is demanding border changes so that 70,000 ethnic Albanians living in Serbia are included in Kosovo.

Whilst the nationalist insurgents would have it that a “Greater Kosovo” is at stake, that includes the ethnic Albanian populations of Serbia and Macedonia, others envisage a “greater” Albania, an Albania merged with Kosovo which would become the largest state in the Balkans, if not the most impoverished. Control of the borders is also allegedly a reason for the recent wave of unrest, for whoever controls these also controls the lucrative and illicit trade in drugs and arms and “illegal migration”.

The UCBMP have caused such much mayhem in the Presevo Valley that NATO has handed back part of the border buffer zone to Yugoslav military control, to special units of the 7th battalion of the Yugoslav army created by former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. In other words, the West has sided with forces that battled for a Greater Serbia and only two years after NATO supposedly went to war with Serbia on behalf of Kosovo Albanians.

Once thing is certain—the West has clearly underestimated the threat of Albanian nationalism and indeed dissipated the once popular belief in Kosovo and Albania that NATO was an ally of Kosovo Albanians. There is also a lack of any consensus between NATO and the UN about the shape of any final Kosovo settlement, and US policy is still out of step with the other NATO allies.

Whilst UN officials see in KLA violence a game plan intended to provoke a swift retaliation from Macedonia (home to 600,000 ethnic Albanians) which will in turn incite Kosovos, Stratfor (the US Security consultants) sees the “primary motive for the [UCPMB] campaign in the Presevo valley [to be the desire] to provoke a harsh response and thus damage relations between the new Yugoslav government and K-For”. The UCPMB plan—if indeed it was a plan—has turned sour. The demilitarised Zone is now being policed by Serbian troops under the watchful eye of NATO and the US wishes to settle the Kosovo problem peacefully and to integrate Yugoslavia into a plan for long-term regional stability.

All the signs are that NATO’s Frankenstein is up and walking, fed on the same raw nationalism that has brought so much bloodshed to the Balkans this past decade, bent on carving out a greater Albania from Albania, Kosovo and the ethnic Albanian regions of Macedonia and Serbia. But they face repeated obstacles: not least is the desire by Western powers to cement relations with new President of Yugoslavia Vojislav Kostunica.

K-FOR (the Western peace-keeping force set up to police the region) failed to disarm the KLA, which went on the initiate a criminal network safe in the knowledge they had the backing of US Intelligence. And as the Observer reported on 11th March, that the CIA encouraged KLA fighters to mount a rebellion in southern Serbia to undermine support from President Milosevic. As one K-FOR battalion commander pointed out:

  The CIA have been allowed to run riot in Kosovo with a private army designed to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic. Now he’s gone, the US State Dept. seems incapable of reigning in its bastard army.

One Foreign Office analyst observes:

  We are not looking at a repeat of the circumstances when Yugoslavia began to disintegrate at the beginning of the 1990s. The people we are now dealing with are the fanatics who became wealthy out of national politics, crime and war. They feel that their power is being eroded and they will fight to survive (Guardian, 3 March).

Elsewhere, to the west of Kosovo, nationalists in Montenegro, lulled by the US into believing it would be permitted to split from Serbia once Milosevic was ousted, have been told to put aside these aspirations and re-forge ties with Serbia—news that is already inciting the nationalists of Montenegro. Meanwhile, Croat nationalists allied to Bosnian Croat leader Ante Jelavic are denouncing the government of the Muslim-Croat Federation, threatening to unravel the 1995 Dayton agreement which partitioned Bosnia along ethnic lines. Suddenly, Spring-time in the Balkans looks set to see war once again blossom.

For almost a century, this journal has been consistent in its opposition to nationalism, in the belief that nationalism is a killer epidemic, creating conflict from which those with the least to gain have the most to lose. Whatever cause and victory the misinformed defenders of nationhood believe they are fighting for, it pales into insignificance when compared to the real war that needs to be waged on the battlefield of ideas and against an elite who perpetuate the myth of nationhood for their own ends and always to our detriment.

We maintain that, regardless of the supposed “century-old hatreds” the real problem is that the Balkans is a cockpit for the Great Powers and their local client states and their states-in-waiting. Despite their cultural, historical and religious differences, there is more that unites Muslims and Christians, Albanians and Serbs, than can ever divide them. Their real needs—needs people the world over identify with—can only ever be fulfilled in a world devoid of borders or frontiers. We can only hope it is not too long before the long-suffering people of the Balkans come to realise this.

John Bissett

These Foolish Things: Capital corrupts democracy (1996)

The Scavenger column from the August 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capital corrupts democracy
 

Opposition supporters in Tirana, who claim that at least two of their number have been killed by government forces, held the first of a series of nationwide rallies yesterday to press President Sali Berisha to annul Sunday’s poll... The European Commission said yesterday it had received “disturbing reports” about the conduct of the election [in Albania] . . . Diplomats maintain that in spite of his increasingly embarrassing autocratic streak, Mr Berisha is also seen as the man best placed to forge ahead with unpopular market reforms. “What may be best for the region is not necessarily best for the democratic process in this country,” one Western official lamented.

(Guardian, 30 May)

Capital controls countries
  

The United States is confident that the G7 summit in Lyons will give its approval to a proposal to reduce the debt owed by the world’s poorest countries to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank . . . Earlier this year, the IMF granted Moscow a huge $10.2 billion credit to support the reforms pioneered by President Yeltsin and will clearly want to review these arrangements in the light of the outcome of the poll . . . Under the debt reduction plan for the poorest countries . . . the World Bank and the IMF could eventually provide more than $10 billion of debt forgiveness to poor countries like Uganda and Bolivia, which have approved programmes of reform in place. 

(Guardian. 6 June)

Capital games
  

Trebor . . . says the FA sent a solicitor’s letter threatening to sue for infringement of a trade mark over Trebor’s use of pictures of players in England strips [on cards in Candy Stick packets). The FA says that the appearance of its crest on players’ shirts means the shirts cannot be pictured or displayed without its permission nor, possibly, without payment for the use of the trademark. 

(Financial Mail on Sunday, 16 June)

Capital coerces
  

Britain has jumped ahead of its key European partners in the latest league table of competitiveness . . . British bosses . . . find it easier than all but two of their EU partners to hire and fire staff, “restructure” the labour force and avoid the social costs of employment.

(Guardian, 30 May)

Capital copper cock-up
  

World copper prices fell sharply when Yasuo Hamanaka, a trader for the Sumitomo Corporation of Japan, was discovered to have built up a $1.8 billion loss. Copper is heavily used in the telecommunication, electrical and automotive industries. The price reached $2,710 per tonne in May and fell to $1,855 in mid-June. Sumitomo owns 24 percent of the London Metal Exchange’s worldwide copper stockpile. The LME started investigating prices after complaints last November by major consumers. 

(Bloomberg News).

Capital hauls in the Internet
  

The new buzzwords are “branding", “infrastructure” and “gateways” as big business tries to bring about a cultural transplant for the Internet—from a global mutual help society in which hardly anything is paid for into a source of corporate profits for the next generation . . . This week BT and its US partner, MCI, announced their plans to take control of the Internet.

(Guardian, 13 June)

The Scavenger

Mixed Media: ‘Albanian Art’ (2013)

Vojo Kushi by Shijaku

The Mixed Media Column from the January 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Socialist Realism’ was the official art of the People’s Republic of Albania between 1944 and 1990. Socialist Realism originated in the state capitalist USSR and was adopted throughout Eastern Europe. When Soviet leader Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, state-capitalist Albania alone opposed this ‘revisionism’ and continued to revere ‘Uncle Joe’ right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Partisan War against the Germans and the Liberation of Albania in 1943-44 is a source for Socialist Realist paintings in the National Gallery in Tirane. The Victor by Haxhiu depicts a heroic partisan amidst ruins with German POWs trudging into captivity in the background, while Vojo Kushi by Shijaku heroically romanticises a partisan in a red shirt atop a Wehrmacht tank throwing a hand grenade inside.

Workers in Albanian industry are portrayed, notably in the steel works depicted in 30 July 1978 by Ceka which recalls Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes) by Menzel. The Assembler by Kokushta is an inspiring painting of a worker on a girder with red flag flying above an industrial landscape of the building of Albania’s hydro-electric scheme in the 1970s.

Female Nude (1961) by Shijaku is beautiful and definitely not ‘socialist realism’ but it is ‘realism’ in the style of Courbet.

The enhanced status of women in Albanian society is captured by Socialist Realism in a painting of male and female engineers by Hysa in 1969, Milk Woman by Sulovari, Factory Worker by Blido, Bricklayer by Dule, and as athletes in The Relay Race by Nalbani. In the 1970s art in a Formalist style of Modernism (mainly Expressionism and Fauvism) developed operating within the official parameters of Socialist Realism.

Socialist Realism was formulated by Stalin in his 1932 On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organisations which decreed that art had to be unambiguous and elevate labour to heroic status. In 1934 the Soviet state instructed that art had to be ‘proletarian’, of everyday life, realistic in the representational sense, and support the aims of the Party. This effectively discouraged the avant-garde and any form of experimentation.

Socialist Realist rigidity was not encouraged by Lenin. He did not believe in a ‘year zero’ for Art: ‘proletarian culture must be the logical development of the store of knowledge mankind has accumulated’. In the years after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution experimental ‘revolutionary’ art was encouraged in the shape of Constructivism, and in the cinematic art of Vertov and Eisenstein.

Marx in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts identified the role of labour in man’s ability to reproduce ‘in accordance with the laws of beauty’. Engels wrote in The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man that ‘labour has given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael’, and in Dialectics of Nature he wrote ‘Italy rose to an undreamt-of flowering of art, which seemed like a reflection of classical antiquity’.

Marx and Engels would be uncomfortable with the rigidity of ‘Socialist Realism’.

Steve Clayton

Bugged by mill-ennui – From Dark Ages to Grey Ages (1999)

From the December 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

By the time you are reading this, you will know whether there has been a Wall Street Crash. If the world is lucky, the bubble won’t burst, it’ll just deflate. But nobody’s been feeling lucky for quite some time. Capitalism has made pessimists of us all.

For me, the summer of 1998 was the most depressing I can ever remember. While it was nothing but a polite winter in Britain, elsewhere, from Texas to China, countries seemed to be having catastrophic droughts, heatwaves or floods, suggesting that a huge environmental payback was imminent. An air of doom pervaded the rest of the year as people expected a global slump to follow the Asian crisis, while and India and Pakistan squaring off a nuclear war seemed more likely than ever. The news, and my friends, seemed full of foreboding about what fate had in store, and 1999 advanced upon us like footsteps ringing down a corridor on Death Row.

Many sensible people were inclined to believe the Nostradamus prediction that the world would end in 1999, but even the prospect of Armageddon could not shake us out of apathetic resignation. The end of the century. The end of a millennium. The end. Here, Britain has suffered a kind of bleak fin de siècle despair, a leaden “mill-ennui” that has produced the worst electoral voting figures on record and the most crushing sense of apathetic defeat in modern times.

In line with this mill-ennui, some people have been talking about the end of capitalism. What they mean is the end of civilisation, a dread abyss, the destruction of everything and the rule of chaos. On the 70th anniversary of the Wall Street Crash, analysts observed uncanny parallels between then and now, and a huge stock-market crash was expected by many. If history repeats itself, the consequences of global depression, unemployment and protectionism could lead to the rise of fascism, invasion and global war. The destruction incurred would then give capitalism a new lease of life for the 21st century. Faced with this doomsday scenario, prospects for socialism and even survival could look extremely bleak. In that sense one can only hope the optimists of a “managed downturn” know what they’re talking about. But when they assure us that “the fundamentals are sound”, J K Galbraith for one experiences “a slight feeling of unease” (Money Programme, BBC2, 24 October).

The real Third Way
It’s bad enough already for the people in eastern Europe. Under the old system it was secret police, propaganda and bread queues. Now it’s mafia, unemployment and bread queues. The Albanians thought pyramid schemes were what capitalism was all about, and lost everything to the first swindlers that chanced through their area. Many east Europeans, judging by the phoenix-like rise of the old “communist” parties, are contemplating a return to square one, the devil they know, but that prospect appals. The rest of them blanch at rebuilding Lenin’s statues, and must really be looking for a Third Way, never mind Tony Blur’s idiotic soundbites.

That there really is a “Third Way” of doing things is what this journal, and this organisation, are in existence to argue. The picture we represent of a peaceful, co-operative human culture based on a society of abundant resources is pleasant and reasonable but, unfortunately, so far removed from the selective reality of the news bulletins that people, by and large, just don’t believe it’s possible. For many people it’s not a matter of reasoning, it’s a matter of faith, and people don’t have any faith in themselves, let alone each other. According to the sociologists, all the old idols, the so-called “grand paradigms” of Fascism, Sovietism and Capitalism, have been historically discredited, but they continue to prowl in the dark, like the Undead.

Nobody feels liberated, just lost. Many will embark on a faddish search for “alternatives”, racing frantically but uncritically round a large dreary circle of other people’s abandoned cults until they arrive back where they started. For those with money, comfort-buying consumerism is all that’s left. The media advertising cry has become a ceaseless scream in our ears. Everybody’s claim seems equally just. We don’t know who to believe or what to believe in, baffled by the multiplicity of values and viewpoints in this inert postmodernist swamp we call a culture.

The only common hard ground in this swamp appears to be the prejudice that human nature is basically bad, or at best unreliable. It follows from this that any society made up of humans must be bad, or at best unreliable. Anything else is a Utopia. The future will be just more of the same, or worse. If Nostradamus had predicted that in 1999 we’d all have millennial misery then he’d have got one right at least. Thanks partly to an odd love affair that we humans have with wailing Cassandras who predict dire things, but thanks mainly to ourselves for doing those dire things anyway, we arrive at this most significant date believing that the sky is about to fall on our heads and there’s nothing we can do about it except smile wanly and pass the anti-depressants.

Meanwhile politicians have been acting out a kind of danse macabre with a flaming Earth as their stage. None of them appear to be doing anything apart from striking postures and smiling with photogenic insouciance. In Britain, our capable trendy leader Tony is revealed as Thatcher’s spawn, grinding an already prostrate working class under his designer boot, appearing on platforms with former Tory grandees like Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine, and while airily informing Scottish factory workers that he can’t save their jobs or stop the recession, energetically pretends to be fascinated by the urgent needs of constitutional reform.

This doom and gloom is more than the usual force-of-habit. Owing to an accident of calendars, the West is arguably in an especially reflective mood, contemplating a moment which occurs only once in a thousand years, the dog days of a millennium which started off in the Dark Ages and has ended up, many think, back there. If there is ever a time when society is going to review its history, its future and the meaning of it all it is likely to be at a time like this. But if people have become millennial about political realities for a while, it hasn’t inspired them with revolution, just revulsion. Religion may profit from this, since it feeds on despair like flies feed on cowshit. Fascism, the supposedly dead paradigm, is crawling from its grave once more to prey on the terrified but tethered scapegoats.

Reasons to be cheerful 
But to predict that the 21st century will be an exact replay of the 20th is to take no account of how things have changed in the interim. Without being pollyannas, we can easily find reasons to be more cheerful about the 21st Century than this. You only have to look at how far humanity has come this century in the matter of science and technology. Victorian writers thought of their steam-driven world as a paradise of technology and wrote paeans of praise to this new empire of reason, or else they pointedly lyricised about flowers just to be awkward, but they would have been awed into silence by the discoveries of the following hundred years.

From balloons to space stations, from the Penny Black to the Internet, the speed of change is as startling as it is unprecedented. Our general history looks like a bomb exploding. When this millennium began we were still in the Iron Age. In the thousand years before that, practically the only invention of significance in Europe was the stirrup, a device which turned the cavalry horse into the first tank. But then began a long slow accumulation of critical mass, followed by an accelerated expansion of development so powerful that its effects can now be detected in days and weeks and no longer in decades and centuries. It would be ludicrous to suppose that in the future this acceleration will not continue, just as the fragments of an exploding grenade do not stop suddenly in mid-air and fall to the ground.

Whether we know anything more as people than we used to is debatable. Ignorance is still rife, despite our literacy and sophistication. Our culture has certainly not kept pace with our discoveries. But it is having to change, whether people like it or not. We aren’t cowed by the priests like we used to be. Science made fools of them. We aren’t impressed by politicians any more. They made fools of themselves, and the press did the rest. Few believe in the Queen, or the Pope, as being anything but empty forms left over from bygone times. The rich are not revered, although their wealth is. Even the police are represented in popular TV shows as routinely criminal and corrupt.

Little by little, the ideology that underpins capitalism is being stripped of its pretensions, exposed and embarrassed by the ever increasing intensity of the public glare. The 21st century begins with the advantages of hindsight and experience the 20th never had. The resistance to fascism is huge. Capitalism’s own fear of global war is bigger still. The Internet is changing the face of popular culture and ideology. We are already in the midst of a social revolution that makes a lasting return to parochialism ever less probable. Now, in the face of that revolution, people are starting to describe the 20th century as the Grey Ages.

Post-modernism is the trendy name for nihilism, a belief in nothing, and nihilism is a state of ideological bereavement. Workers have been orphaned by the paternalistic state which now, clearly, cares nothing for them. Yet bereavement is merely a phase, and humans will recover. Post-modernism will pass. History cannot stand still. Lust for life and hunger for truth will return, and the war of ideologies will become more savage and deadly. But whereas ideologies in the past have relied on the severe restriction of information, ideas in the future will have to fight on more even ground and more on their merits.

Unable to prevent good ideas penetrating society, the owning class will face a massacre of its mythology and a wholesale change in the consciousness of the worker. Unless the rich can find a way to prevent it, the “wired” society of the future will open the way towards revolution.

Paddy Shannon

Next month: beginning of a three-part series on the Impact of the Internet.

Tolpuddle and today (1990)

From the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The annual Tolpuddle Martyrs Rally is held every July to remember six Dorset farm labourers who in 1834 were sentenced to seven years transportation to Australia for the crime of organising a combination of workers to protect and attempt to improve their wages and conditions. In the past few years Socialist Party members and supporters in and around Dorset have attended this event, organised a stall offering a wide variety of socialist literature, and generally argued the case for world socialism and against capitalism in all its forms.

The Tolpuddle Rally, in common no doubt with many other trade union and working class events, shows the positive and negative aspects of working class organisation in the 1990s. On the more positive side, there is the anger of many workers at the problems, frustrations and limitations imposed upon us by a social system based upon minority class ownership of the means of life, production for profit and the exploitation of the useful majority; our ability to struggle and organise against such conditions is also clear. The problem is that workers seem too content to endlessly struggle against particular problems, attempting to treat them in isolation from the social system which creates them.

The events that the Tolpuddle Rally commemorates took place well over 150 years ago but despite the gap in time many similar problems remain today. One such example is trade union organisation. Workers at GCHQ are still involved in the basic struggle for the right to combine to protect and attempt to improve their wages and conditions of employment, following the ban on trade union organisation in that establishment in 1984. Trade unionists as a whole have in the last few years seen the introduction of legislation designed to weaken their ability to engage in effective industrial action. These events in themselves say much about the concept of freedom and democracy in capitalist society.

The struggle for trade union rights is of course a vital one so long as society is divided into two classes: those who produce but do not possess and those who possess but do not produce. For the former, trade union organisation is the only means of protection from the encroachments of capital. However, trade union organisation needs to be more about working class self-organisation and democratic control from bottom to top and less about letting leaders make decisions on our behalf. Secondly, trade unions which attach themselves to political parties which support capitalism, such as the Labour Party in Britain, risk having their effectiveness reduced when that particular party is in government. Also, the effectiveness of trade unions is very much dependent on economic conditions. Finally, whilst trade union organisation is vital for working class industrial self-defense, it is not an end in itself; workers also need to organise consciously and politically to abolish the system which is the root cause of the need to engage in this endless day-to-day struggle.

Fruitless diversions
Workers have been distracted from engaging in all-out struggle against the root cause of their problems by becoming involved in fruitless diversions and worthless causes. The two distractions that were most evident at Tolpuddle this year were the Poll Tax and state capitalism.

The collapse of state capitalist dictatorships in much of Eastern Europe has not deterred small groups of extreme dogmatists from putting forward the obscene idea that state capitalism equals socialism. The group next to the Socialist Party stall, the Revolutionary Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), were putting forward the outrageous claim that Albania is a socialist country where people live in peace, harmony and prosperity. "Hands Off Albania!" their headline screamed. The one interest socialists have in Albania is in looking forward to the day when workers in that country follow the example of other workers suffering under the heel of state capitalist dictatorships and organise to bring down that system, not as an end in itself but as a prelude to co-operating with workers in the rest of the world to establish genuine freedom and democracy.

There are hopeful signs that the end of the detestable regime in Albania might not be that far off. Whilst most workers have quite rightly rejected the idea that systems similar to the one in Albania can in any way serve the interests of the working class, groups such as the RCP(ML) have succeeded in distorting the idea of socialism in the eyes of millions of workers across the world. The fact that any person, group or party should still put forward such undiluted crap is a testimony to their inability to understand the world they live in.

As for the Anti-Poll Tax Campaign, whilst this might be seen as less dangerous than the nonsense put forward by the Albania Supporters Club, in many ways it is just as damaging if only because more workers are attracted to it. Whatever the rights and wrongs of their actual campaign. what stands out is how such reformist demands direct workers' energies towards single issue campaigns and distract their attention away from analysing and acting on the real cause of their problems. Thousands and maybe millions of workers may be drawn to this campaign but. even if it is successful in abolishing the poll tax and replacing it with something else, workers would still be left facing a hundred-and-one problems. The poll tax is not the cause of workers’ problems, which existed in abundance before it was even thought of. Policies such as non-payment could well leave workers facing action by the state which will result in them becoming more impoverished than would have been the case had paid their poll-tax bill, and the failure of such campaigns will lead to political disillusionment.

Opposition to one specific policy such as the poll tax will not create conscious socialists as this can only be achieved by a movement whose one aim is the abolition of capitalism through education, organisation and democratic and conscious political action. This is not to deny that it is the experience of capitalism that causes workers to ask fundamental questions about the society they live in and to seek explanations and alternatives. The point is that more often than not reform movements lead only to dead-ends and disillusionment.

Socialist presence

What then can be achieved by attending events such as the Topluddle Rally? Whenever workers gather, and particularly at events where ideas are being discussed and exchanged, socialists have to be involved in putting forward the basic fact that capitalism cannot be reformed to work in our interests and that alternatives such as state capitalism are no alternative at all. Unclear ideas cannot be defeated by ignoring them.

What was achieved at Tolpuddle this year on 15 July was that the socialist movement was seen as being alive and active and putting forward a clear alternative. Participation was very encouraging. Apart from members and supporters from the Bournemouth area, support came from socialists in London, Brighton, Bristol, Surrey, Kent, Wiltshire and Devon. All in all about 20 members and supporters were engaged in selling literature, distributing leaflets and engaging in political debate.

To the workers we came into contact with at Tolpuddle and to all workers throughout the world, the socialist message is loud and clear. Don't waste any more time or effort attempting to reform capitalism or in the delusion that in some part of the world state ownership has proved itself to be a more effective or humane system than the private variety of capitalism.

Instead of campaigning for this or that reform join the movement which has as its sole aim ending a social system which cannot satisfy the needs of human beings and replacing it with one that could—one based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of producing and distributing the things we need to live, production directly for use. and free access to all goods and services on the basis of self-determined need: in short, a world-wide system run by human beings for human beings.

Ray Carr

Tito and Balkan Capitalism (1980)

From the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

The truth behind the crocodile tears

Josif Tito, President of Yugoslavia, died on May 4, 1980. The media commentators dug out the cringing cliches that they use to describe the despots of foreign states that are (actually or potentially) the allies of British capitalism. The editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg, said in a leading article (5/5/80) that Tito was “a man of extraordinary stature”, and that he "belonged among the great men of his time"; the whole-page obituary in the same paper said he was "perhaps one of the few remaining idealists", and so on. Reporting his funeral, Keith Graves on the BBC news (8/5/80) said "this was the day when the world mourned" (did you mourn, dear reader?) and Sue Lawley, on Nationwide (8/5/80) said Tito had "brought brotherhood and freedom to a divided nation”. The pundits could not have been more servile if he had owned an oil-field. But these comments belong in the fantasy world of highly-paid journalists and broadcasters: they have no connection with the facts.

In reality Tito was a remorseless ruffian, an implacable hatchet-man, who rose to power by jailing and killing potential rivals, and who then lived in ostentatious luxury as front man for the Yugoslav ruling class while the workers toiled m poverty to produce the good things that the Yugoslav upper class enjoyed. A tyrannical dictator of Tito’s stamp would be attacked without mercy by the British media if he was an enemy of the British ruling class; as a thorn in the side of Russia, he was, and is, glorified.

A glance at the historical background is necessary to understand Yugoslavia, its relations with other countries, and the internal and external strains that threw up such bully-boys as Tito. As capitalism established itself in south-eastern Europe during the nineteenth century the existing political divisions (that is the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires, all dating from an era when the landed aristocracy had held the power) became increasingly out-of-date. Capitalism needed new political structures, and the "nation-state” was in much of south-eastern Europe the chosen vehicle. The idea behind these so-called nation-states- that homogeneous “nations" of convenient size, with one language, one culture and united economic and social interests, occupy neatly-divided sections of the earth’s surface has always been an illusion. The Albanians, for example: they speak two dialects so divergent that they should be regarded as two languages rather than one; they do not by any means all dwell in what is called Albania—many are scattered across the Balkans, others live (and have lived 600 years and more) in southern Italy; and among those speaking Albanian languages live others speaking other languages. However, capitalism has forced us to swallow greater illusions than that. So an entity called "Albania” was created in part of the old Turkish empire, with an Albanian national anthem, Albanian armed forces and history-books full of Albanian patriotism: all based on the class-division of capitalism—the many, poor, labouring, and ready to die for the (newly designed) flag and the few, prosperous, leisured, and ready to let them. It would have been a farce if it were not so tragic, and it was paralleled throughout the Balkans.

Motley people

The earlier empires creaked and groaned under the stresses of the First World War, and two of them (the Austro-Hungarian and the Turkish) collapsed entirely while the third, the Russian, survived only under entirely new management. But the reorganisation of the Russian empire, as capitalism established its political power there, meant that for twenty years after 1917 Russia had to concentrate on internal affairs and postpone its previous steady advance across Eastern Europe.

East of the Adriatic, between Italy and Albania, was a heterogeneous collection of people, languages and religions (Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Moslem) — the Slovenes in the north, the Croats around Zagreb to their south, the Dalmatians on the coast, the people of Slavonia further east, the Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Serbians, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and so on. Most of them spoke Slav languages, and most were too few to populate a state suitable for independent capitalism on their own. so they were all lumped together, willy-nilly. Some were less willing than others: the Montenegrins, who had already had a brief existence in a separate state before the war; the Macedonians, who wanted to join up with other Macedonians in Greece and Bulgaria, and the Croats, who feared the Serbs would swamp them. Serbs and Croats spoke dialects of the same language, but had been divided by their separate and antagonistic histories—the Serbs had the Cyrillic alphabet and the Eastern Orthodox church, the Croats had the Latin alphabet and the Roman Catholic church. In among this already motley collection of mainly Slav peoples were many Hungarians and Albanians, with sizable populations of Turks, Rumanians, Gypsies, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Germans, Ruthenians, Czechs and Italians, as well as smaller groups of Poles, Austrians, Greeks and Jews. Capitalism forced all these people together in one discordant mass, and called the concoction the Kingdom of the South Slavs, or Yugoslavia. The King of Serbia, Peter Karageorgevitch, became King of Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia and the other Balkan states created or confirmed in 1918 were always shaky, lacking the morale-boosting propaganda advantages of a long history and furthermore Russia, though still pre-occupied with establishing state capitalism, never ceased to cast its eyes covetously at eastern Europe. The Balkan countries became increasingly autocratic. King Alexander, Peter’s son, overthrew the democratic constitution and became a dictator in 1929. The rumbling discontent (and sometimes more than rumbling — Alexander was assassinated by a Croat dissident on a visit to Marseilles in 1934) was all to Russia’s advantage. The Russians organised underground parties of the discontented in all the eastern European states (as well as elsewhere) in the 1920s and 1930s, using, as many other capitalist states before had done, revolutionary language to cloak expansionist aims. The Yugoslav "Communist Party” was formed in 1919, although of course it had nothing whatever to do with Communism. One of its members was Josif Broz, later known as Tito.

Russia’s puppet

Broz was born in 1892 near Zagreb, then in the Austro-Hungarian empire. As a young man he worked in a car factory near Vienna, then joined the Austrian army and was captured in Russia during the First World War. When the 1917 revolution broke out Broz became a Bolshevik and served for three years in the Russian army. Returning to Yugoslavia, he worked for the Russian-inspired underground (the "Communist Party” was banned in 1921). In this puppet party of the Russian Bolsheviks Broz worked hard (or his Russian masters. As Zagreb branch secretary he denounced the Yugoslav leadership to the Comintern (the Russian-led international organisation of Bolshevik-style parties) and the old central committee was sacked wholesale by the Russians, and a new one appointed which would be more loyal to Russia. After this success, Broz was arrested and jailed for five years by the then Yugoslav dictatorship. Emerging in 1934, he became a member of the Yugoslav party’s central committee, and began installing in influential party positions members devoted to himself (much as Stalin had done in Russia in the early 1920s). Then he left for Moscow as Yugoslav link-man with the Comintern.

In 1936 disloyalty to Stalin and Russia was again rearing its head in the Yugoslav party. The whole of the Yugoslav politburo was called to Moscow and dismissed from office. The loyal Stalinist Broz became organisational secretary. In 1937 the Yugoslav party secretary, Milan Gorkic, was arrested; he and most of the other Yugoslav party leaders were jailed and executed by Stalin. Broz was Stalin’s close collaborator in this sweeping slaughter, and ascended over the bodies of his dead colleagues to the leadership of the Yugoslav Stalinist party. In 1938 he returned to Yugoslavia as Stalin’s trusted emissary. He advanced men he could rely on to positions of power, and purged those not slavishly obsequious to Stalin and himself.

The war

The war came, and Yugoslavia was occupied by the Germans. When Russia entered the war, Broz (or Tito) loyally called for an insurrection against the German occupation forces, with the immediate aim of helping the Russians, and to pave the way for a Stalinist takeover of Yugoslavia after the war. The Yugoslav royalist government, in exile in London, had also organised clandestine warfare against the Germans under General Mihailovitch, so that they should have armed forces in the country ready to seize power again after the war. The two sets of terrorists, or freedom-fighters (the nomenclature depends on one’s political convictions) fought against each other as much as against the Germans. The same was happening in other east European states, which suited neither Russia nor the Anglo-American allies. The British and Americans wrote off most of the Balkans as being Stalin’s reward for fighting the war, but insisted on Greece remaining as an Anglo-American client state.

So Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt came to an agreement at the Tehran Conference of 1943. The British and Americans would abandon Mihailovitch and the other “right-wing” guerillas of eastern Europe, while Stalin promised to abandon the Stalinist partisans of Greece. Henceforward in Greece only the anti-Stalinists, and in Yugoslavia only the Stalinists, got military aid from the Allies. So when Germany collapsed in 1945, Tito was able to smash all opposition—Mihailovitch was captured and executed, and Archbishop Stepinac, leader of the Yugoslav Catholic Church, sent to jail—and establish a Stalinist dictatorship. In the same way the government of "liberated" Greece, backed by the Anglo-Americans, was able to smash the Stalinist organisations EAM and ELAS, while Russia, keeping its promise, stood by with folded arms.

Many of those who fought under Mihailovitch against the Nazis had to flee the country to escape Tito’s revenge. The writer, working in South Wales just after the Second World War, lived in a hutted encampment that also housed many of those (Yugoslavs and others) who had chosen the wrong anti- Nazi army to fight in, and as a result had lost their families and homelands, and were doomed to permanent exile, labouring in a foreign land.

Stalin was triumphant. The warm water ports on the Mediterranean that Russia had craved for 150 years seemed now firmly in his control. But the plans even of capitalist superpowers not infrequently go awry. The new Yugoslav ruling class were restive as clients of the Russian empire, and Tito aspired to be Yugoslav dictator in his own right, not merely as Stalin’s vice-regent. Relations between Stalin and Tito deteriorated, and then the Comintern, on Russian orders, expelled the Yugoslav party from the fold. When other countries became uneasy under the yoke later—on Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968—the preponderance of opinion within the native ruling class was in favour of Russia, against the home-grown boss. In Yugoslavia it was not so. Tito had done too good a job in gaining control of the party machinery and its propaganda weapons. Though border incidents were almost a daily occurrence for some years, Stalin was never able to re-assert his control.

Having carried out many purges in the cause of Stalinism, Tito now carried out others in the cause of anti-Stalinism. Opponents were executed or jailed. Twelve thousand Yugoslav Stalinists found themselves in prison on the Adriatic island of Goli Otok. At the same time the other Balkan states, under Russian instructions, rooted out and put on trial any members who the Russians felt might follow Tito’s example, and declare their independence of Stalin. Executions of so-called Titoists became common throughout the remaining Stalinist countries of eastern Europe.

But Tito himself survived, and after Stalin’s death his successor Khruschev visited Yugoslavia to explain that it had all been a mistake. Thereafter Tito played a cunning game, allowing both superpowers, Russia and America, to woo Yugoslavia with economic and military aid. He also tried to create a “third world" bloc under his own leadership, independent of both Russia and America. In all things, he defended and promoted Yugoslav capitalism. 

He claimed that capitalism in Yugoslavia was socialism; a good propaganda line to persuade the oppressed and exploited that they are really free. Tito himself saw the facts clearly enough, when his own interests were not involved, and he himself described the Russian system as state-capitalism. But honesty in capitalist societies is often available for export only.

Tito's dictatorship remained as tyrannical os he felt necessary for the prolongation of his own power and his state-capitalist system, and he continued until the end to put opponents in jail, such as his former comrade Djilas, or to have them killed. In 1971 he purged the Croatian party leadership for "nationalism", and followed it with a purge of the Serbian party leadership for "liberalism". Dissidents who fled abroad were pursued by the Yugoslav secret police. The Times (29.4.80) reluctantly referred to the accusations of Yugoslavia "arranging the murder of Croat emigres”, and thus drew an indignant letter from a reader with a Serbian surname (Pavlowitch) reminding the editor (6.5.80) that "the list of murdered Serbs is also most impressive: at least one in Paris, three in Brussels, two in Canada, two in the United States, one in Stockholm and one in West Germany, the last one Dusan Sedlar, on April 16 in Munich. Not to mention the known cases of kidnapping, one in Switzerland and one in Rumania".

As political boss of an autocratic country Tito was not dissimilar to others of the same kind. (And over eighty per cent of the world’s population is in the grip of dictators: capitalism breeds them, as a dead rat breeds maggots.) While his opponents were fitted with prison garb, or their winding sheets, Tito sported flashy uniforms and diamond rings, and his hat always had more gold braid than anyone else's. While those who differed from him were incarcerated in their cells, or their graves, Tito was driving expensive fast cars, or was out shooting game. While those who had not been spry enough to change sides at exactly the right moment stared through the barred windows, if they were that lucky, Tito amused himself in luxurious speed boats, cruising round his island of Brioni. While those who held incorrect opinions forced down prison food, or themselves fed the worms, this large-bellied bon vivant savoured the succulent delicacies of state banquets.

And the great majority of the Yugoslav people, drudging in workshops and factories, and on the farms and railways, accepted it all os being part of the natural order of things. Since they supported capitalism, they were brainwashed by Tito’s propaganda machine into hero-worship of "the leader". Turning out in their thousands to Tito’s funeral ceremonies, they demonstrated their own political ignorance, just as so recently the loyal crowds in Iran turned out to support the Shah, or in Uganda to support Amin. In a socialist—a sane—society people will find it difficult to understand how such a blood-stained monster as Tito was ever allowed house-room by human beings—much less permitted to lord it over an entire country as a dictator.

Alwyn Edgar

Things fall apart (1997)

From the April 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Sucked in and spat out like raw eggs", was how one member of the British public described the unfortunates who invested and lost everything in Albania’s "pyramid funds". It seems that pure logic alone should have told those who thought they were on to a winner that all would come to nought, and if not that then surely the experience of Russians and Rumanians who had also been conned in the past by such "get- rich-quick" schemes.

The Albanian pyramid fund schemes were quite simple. Investors were offered large rates of interest from the money they had persuaded others to invest. Obviously, sooner or later, and especially in a rather insular population of three million, a saturation point would be reached when the funds ran out of investors’ money. Collapse was as inevitable as night follows day.

But after decades of poverty and authoritarian rule under a Stalinist regime, and then media stories about western living standards being just on the horizon, we can hardly blame the Albanian working class for falling for the scams. After all. even "enlightened” workers in the western world have been conned into depositing their money in dubious schemes for as long as living memory. Remember Maxwell and his pension scheme?

For the average Albanian the pyramid funds were deemed a safe bet because the government was believed to be closely involved and would act as protector of hard-earned money the people had invested. A further incentive was the fact that at the inception of the funds there was no banking system, and little prospect of work or other methods of making money. Little wonder then that so many—an estimated one million households—were prepared to invest all and everything into schemes which were advertised as charity and welfare funds guaranteeing regular pensions.

During the peak period of the pyramid funds, it was widely believed that the economic transition from authoritarian state capitalism to something resembling the western model was running smoothly. Even the World Bank believed that Albania was quicker at learning the western economic and democratisation process faster than Russia and other former eastern bloc countries. In truth, Albania was no different. What money there was in circulation had been earned by some Albanians working in other countries, for instance in neighbouring Greece and Italy. Furthermore, much money going into the funds was via drug-trafficking operations, arms sales to those involved in the nearby Balkan conflict and money-laundering operations.

Meanwhile, the European Union was only too happy to sanction aid schemes— $1,200 million a year—ignoring a scam that was being watched over by a corrupt Albanian government. Anything was better than "communism" and if Albania was en-route to democracy, then what the hell. Though the US did level token condemnation at the pyramid schemes, the business community in Britain, as well as certain leading politicians, supported Berisha's ruling Democratic Party. Berisha could even be found standing beside Margaret Thatcher on the Tory Party Conference platform in 1991.

The world capitalist elite was full of praise for Berisha. For one thing he was determined to see through painful economic reforms that would have given leading Tory Party officials an orgasm and he had achieved commendation for a rapid land redistribution programme. Regional support was reinforced when it was believed he could appease ethnic tensions in the neighbouring regions of Kosovo and Macedonia which had sizeable Albanian populations.

In November of last year many investors were enjoying a 40 percent return on their deposits, even reinvesting that. Thousands had sold their homes to fund their investments. By January, the popular Gjallica pyramid fund had collapsed and investors had lost everything. An estimated $2 billion was gone overnight.

In the Mafia town of Vlore, tens of thousands took to the streets, rioting and fighting with police, demanding their money back, incensed by the idea that they had been duped by the government. Berisha tried unsuccessfully to deflect the blame on to others, even promising to repay lost money. His words fell on deaf ears. Mass civil unrest followed in the towns of Fier and Barat and spread quickly to other parts of Albania. Army bases were attacked and looted, public buildings were firebombed and prisoners released from jails over-run by rioters.

Albania’s opposition parties co-operated to form a joint venture they named the Forum for Democracy, demanding not only the government’s resignation, but that it be replaced by a government of technocrats—"economic experts"— whom they argued could best handle die growing unrest.

As the tidal wave of protest spread, becoming bloodier by the day, Berisha declared a state of emergency and in an attempt to assuage the anger on the streets sacked his prime minister and government. With martial law in place, Berisha cut links to the outside world, blacked out the independent media, imposed a night-time curfew, banned political activity and ordered police to “shoot to kill" rioters. Anarchy waited in the sidewings.

WB Yeats once wrote a memorable verse that seems to have become a much-quoted epitaph for modern times:

"... Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." 

This verse is from the prophetic Second Coming and Yeats makes a verbal play on the phrase, making it refer to cyclical repetitions of unrest that have occurred before.

The words are well suited to the chaos that has returned to Albania after the overthrow of Enver Hoxha’s tyrannical regime in 1991 and which has plunged the country into a long and protracted period of unrest. They are finding a twisted echo in graffiti sprayed across walls the length and breadth of Albania: "Albania needs God again". The slogan hints immediately at the seriousness of events in Albania and of a desperation born of a belief that there can be no foreseeable mortal solution to the ongoing problems of Albanians.

In truth, the solution is wholly mortal. It comes of workers in Albania realising their common class position with their counterparts the world over and in rccognising that their god Mammon needs to be dismissed like every other god the master class would have us worship, before we can—any of us—live in comfort and security.

Indeed, if ever a model should be held up to workers of the insanity of the money system it should be the pyramid investment schemes of Albania. 

John Bissett

Fake "socialism" ends in Albania (1991)

From the August 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The dramatic events in Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1990 found at first little echo in Albania, the small Balkan state which had often been described as one of the last strongholds of Stalinism. Over the last nine months, however, political and economic changes have affected Albania too, though, as elsewhere, it remains to be seen just how far-reaching they are.

For many years. Albania was isolated politically as well as geographically. It had diplomatic relations with neither Russia nor America, and was the only East European state to support the Chinese government in the Sino-Soviet dispute. The country was ruled in classic Bolshevik style. The Party of Labour (the "Communists") ruled with an iron fist, and the Party Leader, Enver Hoxha, was a brutal dictator. Industry was state-owned, workers laboured long hours for a pittance, rationing was widespread, there was a ubiquitous secret police, and any speaking out of line was ruthlessly punished.

Relations with China gradually deteriorated in the 1970s, as China became more friendly with the USA and Yugoslavia. A number of Albanian leaders were removed from office after the arrest of the "Gang of Four" in China in 1976, as Hoxha sought to defend his position. He died in 1985, to be succeeded by his deputy, Ramiz Alia.

Hoxha’s policies had in fact become slightly more flexible in his last few years, as the drive for economic development made closer links with other countries imperative. Diplomatic and trading ties were begun with a number of states, and the border with Greece, which had been closed since the Second World War. was reopened. Albania was also linked for the first time with the European rail network. Italian ships were allowed to call at the Albanian port of Durres. Under Alia, these policies were continued, as Albania received valuable foreign exchange through export of oil and iron ore.

These developments proceeded only slowly until last year. Then comprehensive new laws were passed, decentralizing the economy and permitting overseas investment and some kinds of private enterprise. The UN Secretary General visited Albania, and so did a top Chinese leader, no doubt passing on advice about the economic reforms in China. The state-capitalist regime in Albania was being relaxed just a little, its inefficiency being plain for all to see.

At the same time, the Party of Labour was supposedly made more democratic, but it (and its leaders) retained a stranglehold on power. Then last December things began to move faster. There were demonstrations on the streets, and Alia had to concede the formation of opposition parties and "free" elections for 31 March this year. But this did not defuse the situation, and the strikes and demos continued. In February a giant statue of Hoxha in the capital was pulled down—in the circumstances, a highly symbolic action in a country where there were still few ways of expressing political opposition. Another possibility was emigration, and many Albanians hijacked ships and fled to Italy across the Adriatic, though many were forcibly sent back.

The March elections gave the Party of Labour a majority, with two-thirds of the parliamentary seats. But their success was confined to the countryside, and in the towns the opposition (spearheaded by the Democratic Party) won most of the votes. Even Alia failed to be elected in Tirana. But around two-thirds of the population live in small villages where the Democratic Party, which had been in existence for less than four months, could make little impact. The election result was greeted by violent protests in the towns, and at least three protestors were killed by police.

A new constitution was published, abandoning all the spurious claims to being socialist and allowing private businesses to be set up (but few people had the resources to do so). In May a general strike began, and workers demanded pay rises of up to 100 percent, far more than the government was prepared to offer. The Party of Labour was split, with Alia prepared to give more concessions, while hardliners who still revered Hoxha set themselves against any changes whatsoever. At the beginning of June the government collapsed, unable to stop the strikes or restore order. A coalition government took control, run by the Democrats and the "Socialists" (as the Party of Labour has been misleadingly renamed). New elections are to be held next summer, while the government tries to tackle the appalling economic problems and the expectations aroused by the dramatic events of the last six months.

It is too early to know what will transpire in Albania, and clearly a lot can happen between now and next years elections. Popular support for the various parties may fluctuate widely, and the old ruling class will be challenged by the new private capitalists. Ordinary workers have gained some freedom to protest and organise. Yet again the failure of state capitalism has been exposed, and the rapidity of political change has been remarkable. In whatever guise. Albania is likely to be integrated more and more clearly into the world capitalist system.

Paul Bennett