Butchery in the Balkans (1992)

From the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War ended, many in the West breathed a sigh of relief. Western democracy and the free market were seen to have triumphed and the Red Spectre that hunted Europe had been finally exorcised. Politicians and bureaucrats began speaking of a “New World Order" and of a “peace dividend" whereby money saved on military expenditure could be put to social use and channelled into health and education programmes.

Few anticipated that the end of the Cold War would open a new can of worms. From Prague to Vladivostok, republics and tiny enclaves became caught up in a tidal-wave of nationalist fervour. Overnight, even the most recently published atlases became out of date as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia disintegrated.

Nowhere has nationalist upheaval been as intense as in the former "Socialist Federal Republic” of Yugoslavia. So enmeshed have become the politics here that a brief look at Yugoslavia’s history is in order.

Artificial creation

After the capitalist-instigated madness known as the first world war the Austro-Hungarian territories of Croatia. Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were joined with Serbia and Montenegro under the Serbian king Alexander, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was founded. Although a new constitution was proclaimed. rivalry between Serbs and Croats for political supremacy led Alexander to impose his own dictatorship in 1929, the year the republics were re-named Yugoslavia. This accentuated Croatian enmity to centralization and Serbian predominance.

Under the new Regent, Paul, Yugoslavia came increasingly under threat from the Axis powers, Germany and Italy, after 1933, and the hostility of the Soviet Union, which urged the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (formed in 1937) to work towards the fragmentation of the country. Germany took advantage of a popular uprising and invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, creating a puppet fascist state out of Croatia and territory in Bosnia-Herzegovina, with the rest being parcelled between Germany, Italy, Bulgaria and Hungary.

Resistance groups soon emerged to confront the Nazis—the Serbian Chetniks under the leadership of Draza Mihailovic and Tito’s Communist Partisans. However, not only did many Croats support the Nazis, but many Chetniks collaborated against Tito’s partisans. By 1943, Tito had emerged as victor against Mihailovic and formed the Anti-Fascist National Liberation Council, which assumed power when the Nazis were finally driven out.

In November 1945, the provisional government abolished the monarchy and set up the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. Six months later the country adopted a constitution based upon that of the Soviet Union in 1936, and later nationalized transport, industry and banking, and brought agriculture under collectivization.

In 1971, after stating his intention of liberalizing the government. Tito established a 22-man collective presidency which he hoped would manage affairs after his death. This "liberalization" had the effect of sparking Croatian nationalism, culminating in mass demonstrations and widespread rioting. In 1981, Albanians in the autonomous province of Kosovo protested against ill-treatment by the Serbian administration. This was followed by further unrest in 1988 when Serbia moved to end provincial autonomy there.

Yugoslavia thrived during the Cold War, chiefly because both blocs paid handsomely to maintain Yugoslav non-alignment. The Serbian political leadership advocated a centralized state and tough authoritarian rule. This brought it into direct conflict with Slovenia and Croatia, both of whom favoured greater autonomy, more so in the wake of the break-up of the Yugoslav League of Communists in spring 1990.

The Yugoslav federal machinery wasn’t made to take the strain of political pluralism. The federal government, led by free-marketeer Ante Markovic, was paralysed by wrangling among the republics. No procedure could be agreed for federal elections.

In April 1990 both Croatia and Slovenia held free elections in which the centre-right Slovenian Democratic Community Party and the Croatian Democratic Union swept to power on nationalistic, pro-independence cards. When these two republics declared independence they were invaded by the Yugoslav Army. The same thing happened when on 1 March this year Bosnia-Herzegovina too declared its independence. All three republics have since been granted recognition by the EEC and the USA.

The history and politics of Yugoslavia are indeed complicated, and while it is true that the end of the Cold War hastened the break-up of the republics, this alone does not explain the conflict that has raged there for over a year. Indeed, few commentators can agree on the cause of the crisis, or why some republics want autonomy while others wish to stay within the federation.

The Croatian president Franjo Tudjman echoed Thatcher's views when he asserted that Serbs and Croats “were not just different people but different civilisations’’, and that the conflict was one of "democracy against communism” (European, 18 August 1991). Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president, claimed that the trouble was caused by the secessionist demands of other republics, adding that "all processes in the contemporary world tend toward integration” (Time International, 8 June).

Richard West, writing in the Guardian, sees the “difference between the Yugoslav people” as “one of religion” (17 September 1991), while Branka Magas (Marxism Today, November 1991) declared that “the war being waged against Croatia is . . . in reality little more than a war of territorial conquest”.

Few, if any, are putting forward a socialist analysis of the causes of the conflict and blaming the capitalist system for the crisis. It is true that nationalism is a factor, but it is only a banner used as a means to an end—profit.

Uneven development

The influence of the world market in recent years has accentuated economic disparity in the Yugoslav republics. Both Tudjman and Milan Kukan (respective leaders of Croatia and Slovenia) saw the economic advantages in independence, manipulating nationalist sentiments for financial ends.

The conflict was sparked by greed for profit. The north-west republics of Croatia and Slovenia, tired of subsidizing their southern neighbours chanelled economic indignation into a raw form of nationalism—the Croatian leadership digging up wartime fascist insignia—fearing that a more centralized Yugoslav federation would mean a greater redistribution of their wealth.

Croatia and Slovenia are by far the wealthiest of the republics. Heavy industry is concentrated in Croatia and production centred on iron ore is thriving in Slovenia. Croatia is Yugoslavia’s biggest producer of oil and in 1987 attracted 7.2 million tourists, boosting the economy by USS3 billion. Although Slovenia has only 7.8 percent of the population, it accounts for an estimated 25 percent of Yugoslavia’s GNP and 30 percent of exports.

Slovenia has for some time been the most wealthy and economically efficient of the Yugoslav republics. Average earnings are more than double those in Croatia and reputedly six times those of the southern province of Kosovo, where unemployment stands at 40 percent.

It is little wonder, then, that a centralized Yugoslav federation which pumped 55 percent of the federal budget into maintaining the armed forces, looked so unattractive to capitalists in the northern republics. And little wonder that Croatian and Slovenian capitalists object to shouldering the burden of subsidies—development aid, federal projects, natural disaster relief, etc—to the poorer south.

So the basic, economic cause of the conflict boils down to a clash of interests between those capitalists who wanted and those who opposed a redistribution of profits.

Just as Franjo Tudjman and Milan Kukan have sought to secure their republic’s economic futures, appealing to nationalistic sentiments, so too has Milosevic reawakened Serbian nationalism by rallying his people against the richer north-west with rash promises of raised standards of living and long-term economic security.

War in Bosnia

War is now raging in Bosnia-Herzegovina where 44 percent of the population are Muslims. The UN has imposed sanctions and a naval blockade on Serbia and there is talk of military intervention. Serbia, however, is nearly self-sufficient in food production and has stockpiled goods and fuel—although the latter could run short as Serbia produces only 20 percent of what she uses. So it is likely that Serbia will not be too badly affected by sanctions.

The recalcitrant Milosevic sees sanctions as “the price Serbians have to pay for supporting Serbs outside Serbia” (Independent, 1 June), but neglects to tell the workers who do his fighting that war is the price they must pay for the right to be exploited by Serbian capitalists. And Tudjman never tells Croats fighting for Croatian enclaves that they are really fighting to make bigger profits for their masters under German economic rule.

It is a great sadness that so many have died in what was Yugoslavia from the virus of nationalism, injected into them by leaders suffering from the disease of capitalism.

Enlightened workers will be aware that the only remedy for the present world malaise is socialism. Workers in reality have no nation, but hoodwinked by their leaders they seek sanctuary inside artificially-constructed borders. Workers bind themselves with the chains of regional and national identity, giving their masters the keys. They forget that there is only one country—planet Earth—on which all wealth and the means of living in comfort and security is produced by themselves. Workers must unite and break these chains. The world is theirs for the taking.

John Bissett

The Yugoslav Wars: Myths & Realities (1995)

From the September 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again the socialist assertion that nationalism can never serve the interests of the working class is being attested to daily amidst the horrors of the war in the former Yugoslavia. Despite claim and counter-claim of atrocities committed by one side or the other the simple fact is that worker is butchering worker — for the privilege of rearranging capitalist state borders!

Early August brought what could be a turning point in the Yugoslav wars with a major offensive by the Croatian army which recaptured almost the whole of the Krajina region including Knin, the capital of the so-called Republic of Serbian Krajina, and an offensive by the Bosnian Army’s 5th Corps who successfully broke out of the besieged Bihac enclave and linked up with the Croatian Army in Krajina. This has thrown into disarray not just the whole of the Serbian nationalist political apparatus but also the foreign policies of the great powers.

Not inevitable

Contrary to the ramblings of the “ancient hatreds” school of thought, war in Yugoslavia was not inevitable. Major constitutional changes were very much on the agenda and even though there was a tendency towards fragmentation, and with it a potential for violence. But full-scale war and genocidal carnage were not preordained.

Yugoslavia was a federation of six republics and two autonomous provinces each having its own regional government within the federal structure. The two richer republics of Slovenia and Croatia wanted free-market-type reforms akin to those being implemented in live former state-capitalist bloc, together with a looser confederal political structure and moves towards EC membership. For a time it looked as if this was the direction in which Yugoslavia would move, with Prime Minister Ante Markovic presenting a reform package that allowed for foreign ownership of Yugoslav industry and tied the Dinar to the Deutschmark. Such proposals met with the approval of the EC, who also made it clear that they were only interested in Yugoslavia as a single market and not as a number of smaller states. Similarly George Bush stated that the US would not recognise any breakaway republics from Yugoslavia (partly because Bush did not want to encourage secessionist tendencies in the Soviet Union).

In purely economic terms total breakup of the federation was in no-one’s interests. Even for Slovenia and Croatia, the Yugoslav federation though a drain on their economies was also the biggest market for their goods. To secede would have meant not only losing that market but losing also the possibility of EC membership, while for the poorer republics secession would mean losing a source of funding for economic development. In terms of international politics the West (and Moscow) feared that the break-up of Yugoslavia would not only destabilise the Balkans but provide a model and source of legitimacy for the break-up of the Soviet Union into a number of smaller and less stable states, some with a nuclear capability. The continued existence of the Yugoslav Federation appeared to be agreed upon by all concerned.

Ancient hatreds?

According to John Major the Yugoslav wars are primarily the results of "the collapse of the Soviet Union and of the discipline that that exerted over the ancient hatreds in the old Yugoslavia. Once that discipline had disappeared, those ancient hatreds reappeared and we began to see their consequences when the fighting occurred” (Hansard, 23 June, col. 324). This view is repeated by many western politicians, partly to excuse their failure to have guided Yugoslavia peacefully into post-Cold War Europe (a not impossible task given the consensus noted above), and partly because it mirrors the racist propaganda of the nationalist regimes in Serbia and Croatia, the two regional imperia to emerge from the disintegration of Titoist Yugoslavia and behind whom the great powers are lining up against one another. It is, however, a view which bears no resemblance to historical reality.

The idea of ancient hatreds and longstanding ethnic feuds is wholly mythical. For centuries Serbs and Croats were barely aware of each other’s existence, being separated by the border dividing the Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires—the military frontier or Volna Krajina to use its Slavonic name. The Serbs who inhabited this region were descended from semi-nomadic Vlachs who were encouraged to settle along the frontier by the Austro-Hungarian authorities to function as a buffer against incursions by raiders from Bosnia. In return they were awarded certain privileges such as semi-autonomy and freedom of worship (the Vlachs were Orthodox Christians unlike the Catholic Hapsburgs). The idea that these Genzers, as they came to be known, were Serbs running from religious persecution by Muslims is a myth fabricated by Serbian nationalist intellectuals.

It was only in the latter half of the nineteenth century that Bosnia’s Orthodox Christians and Catholics began to regard themselves as Serbs and Croats, and again this was due to propaganda by nationalist intellectuals. The often bloody conflicts for which the Balkans are known, and which at times took on an ethno-religious dimension, were in essence economic and political conflicts—manifestations of the class struggle between the predominantly (but not exclusively) Christian peasantry and their predominantly (but not exclusively) Muslim overlords.

Only in World War II did Serbs and Croats finally confront each other directly, but even this is shrouded in mythology. The Ustase regime of Ante Pavelic which Serbian Nationalists claim illustrates the inherent fascism of all Croats was deeply unpopular and would not have lasted a day without the blessing of the Vatican and the support of the Nazis. Its victims were not just Serbs but Croats too. Many Croats, including the young Franjo Tudjman, fought with the Partisans led by Tito, another Croat. Serbs also fought Serbs in a three-way slaughter involving the pan-Yugoslav Partisans, the Nazi puppet regime in Belgrade and the Monarchist forces of Draza Mikailovic. Bosnian Muslims fought on both Partisan and Axis sides, and proportionally suffered more than either Serbs or Croats. The Yugoslav war of 1941-45, then, was not an ethnic conflict but ideological and political.

Similarly the Yugoslav wars of today have their origins in political struggles. Not in the political struggles of secessionist republics against the Federation as a whole, but in the political struggles occurring inside the Federation’s most powerful republic, Serbia.

The bones of Prince Lazar

Slobodan Milosevic was at one time hailed in the West as a Balkan Gorbachev, tire first Yugoslav to realise Tito was dead, as the phrase went. Inside Yugoslavia he was known as something else, as the Saviour and Protector of the Serbs who, the nationalists claimed, were oppressed in Tito-the-Croat’s Yugoslavia—despite the fact that Serbia dominated the political system, the army and was creaming off the profits from Slovenian industry and Croatian tourism.

In 1989 when tire rest of Europe was celebrating the fall of the state capitalist empire and extolling the virtues of civic nationalism, Milosevic was staging rallies commemorating the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo Polje and parading the bones of Prince Lazar around towns and villages across Serbia in a campaign calculated to whip up ethnic nationalist sentiment.

Milosevic began his rise to power in 1987 when he opportunistically latched on to the issue of the Serb minority in the province of Kosovo. The situation of these Serbs, though poor, was no worse and probably better than Kosovo’s Albanian majority; but in taking on the issue Milosevic was able to establish a power base among the nationalist intellectuals of the Serbian Academy of Sciences from which to launch an assault on the ailing Titoist political system. The Kosovo issue, which eventually led to the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina being swallowed up by Serbia, showed that the post-Cold War Yugoslavia was to be a Serbian-dominated centralised unitary state; thus further provoking confederalist tendencies in tire other republics.

The Chetniks

The Yugoslav wars began in June 1991 when the Yugoslav Army entered the breakaway republic of Slovenia under the pretext of securing Yugoslavia’s borders. The Slovenian war lasted ten days, left less than seventy dead and ended with the army’s withdrawal. This allowing of Slovenia—which had no sizeable Serb population—to secede indicated that the Serbian Nationalists in the Yugoslav Army had won their power struggle with the “Yugoslavists” who wanted to retain Yugoslavia within its previously existing frontiers, and that Greater Serbia would be exactly that: a single state that incorporated all areas of the former Yugoslavia populated by Serbs.

Croatia and Bosnia did have sizeable Serb populations. As securing of borders could no longer be used as a front for Yugoslav Army intervention, the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia were induced to turn on their neighbours through a combination of propaganda and terror. When the army was deployed it was usually under the pretext of “peace-keeping” or protecting the Serb minority from attacks they themselves had provoked by actions instigated by Belgrade.

For the most part Serbian intervention came in the form of the Chetniks, volunteer units recruited from the underworld and far-right groups often commanded by gangsters and neo-fascist politicians. The Arkanovci, for example, were responsible for many of the atrocities committed at Vukovar and around Banja Luka in Bosnia. This unit take their name from Arkan, nom de guerre of Željko Ražnatović, a Belgrade mafia boss, wanted by Interpol for murder who became an MP in Milosevic’s Serbia.

Arkan was last sighted around Srebrenica in the company of General Mladić prior to the town’s fall. Another unit, the Dusan Silni, forced elderly Croats to walk through a minefield in Slavonia, while the Seseljovci were responsible for the first documented incidence of mass rape in the Bosnian war after rampaging through Zvomik, a defenceless town on the banks of the Drina. This latter group are the paramilitary' wing of the Serbian Radical Party headed by the rabid nationalist Vojislav Seselj.

Workers are always the victims

Needless to say, in this as in all wars it is the working class who suffer most. They do the fighting and the dying, they are raped and “ethnically cleansed", and it is their lives and homes that count for most of the “collateral damage”—whether or not they swallow the nationalist filth of their leaders. The people of Tuzla, for instance, an industrial town where Serbs, Croats, Muslims and others have lived and worked together for generations, didn’t even vote for Bosnian secession. Yet now they find themselves fighting and dying together for what will be, if Bosnia survives, a capitalist state that exploits them as surely as any other, for to lay down their arms will mean certain extermination at the hands of the Chetniks. The story is much the same throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The Yugoslav experience shows us what can happen when structural changes in the capitalist economy result in power struggles that spiral out of control. These wars are not the results of ancient hatreds or a peculiar Balkan mentality, they are the result of capitalism and can therefore happen anywhere in the world, even here. The choice, as ever, is simple: Socialism or Barbarism.

Ian Simpson

Voice From The Back: The farce must go on (1998)

The Voice From The Back Column from the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The farce must go on

Executions continue while work is in progress at Huntsville Prison, Texas, in renovating the spectators’ salon in front of the execution chamber. For reasons of economy, the prison authorities are having the work done by the inmates, who are engaged in making seating more comfortable and spacious for the spectators, and enhancing visibility. Le Monde, 19 September (translated).

Melt-down

Azerbaijan is a former Soviet republic located in a disagreeable spot just south of Russia and just north of Iran. It is know for nothing except oil . . . Scholars who believe that history ended with the collapse of Communism should visit Baku, because in Baku, nothing is settled. Who could predict the future of a country that many in Moscow—volatile, feverish Moscow—believe shouldn’t be a country at all, but instead a province of a reanimated Russian empire. In Teheran, Azerbaijan is seen as an unforgivable contradiction: a secular Shiite sate, a country ripe for Islamization. In ten years’ time Azerbaijan could be an Islamic state, or a new-Communist state, or a capitalist democracy, or a capitalist autocracy, or even part of Russia. New York Times, 4 October.

Relentless pressure (1)

Stress at work is on the increase, with three quarters of health and safety officers saying it is the biggest workplace hazard, according to a TUC survey published today. Guardian, 23 September.

Relentless pressure (2)

On Tuesday the Environment Agency will consider an application from BNFL to increase its emissions of radioactive gases. Mail on Sunday, 18 October.

Be happy!

Revolutionary anti-suicide glass screens are to be introduced for the first time in Britain on London Underground’s £2.7 billion Jubilee Line extension from central to east London. Suicide attempts on the Underground currently average almost three a week. Guardian, 15 October.

Breakdown

“The challenge to the international community is immediate. We can’t wait around. This isn’t going to go away. It’s here, it’s now and it’s urgent.” It was the Prime Minister’s strongest admission so far that the capitalist system may be on the verge of collapse. Sun, 8 October.

Blasphemy!

A top Manchester lawyer is to complain to the advertising watchdog over posters that “encourage people to skive off work,” Paul Nicolls, head of employment law at Dibb Lupton Alsop, is increased by the campaign by the outdoor clothing firm Karrimor. It’s bright blue posters, plastered on the back of some buses in Greater Manchester say: “Phone in sick—Karrimor, the great British mountains company.” Mr Nicolls said: “This is irresponsible marketing, encouraging people to take time off work on the pretext of illness at a time when British businesses are losing the equivalent of £13 billion a year through sickness absenteeism.” Manchester Evening News, 31 August.

Religion + nationalism = murder

Marija Bistrica, Croatia—Pope John Paul II over the weekend beatified the 1940s archbishop of Zagreb as a martyr to “the atrocities of the Communist system”. Beatification is the final step before canonization as a saint. By paying such homage to Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, who was imprisoned by the Tito government as a Nazi collaborator, the Pope stepped into one of the bitterest disputes that linger between Croats and Serbs . . . They [Serbs] have long viewed Cardinal Stepinac as a wartime sympathiser with the pro-Nazi government of Croatia, which killed tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies—a regime that many here see as the precursor of today’s independent state. New York Herald Tribune, 5 October.

And persecution

[With independence] “Everyone from the former USSR was considered hostile,” recalls Janis Kahanovics, vice director of the Naturalisation Council. The Riga authorities only accorded citizenship to those already in the country between the wars, and to their descendants. From one day to the next, more than 700,000 immigrants who had arrived during the Soviet occupation found themselves stateless. Referring to a “violation of human rights” in Latvia, Russia refuses to normalise relations and has enforced economic sanctions. The dispersal by force of a demonstration by the elderly, for the most part Russian speakers, and a parade of Latvian Waffen-SS veterans through Riga in March, have contributed to the straining of bilateral relations. Le Monde, 3 October (translated).

Nice little earner

The government is to press on with controversial plans to privatise the state agency that owns Porton Down biological warfare unit. Despite opposition from UK arms manufacturers, the Ministry of Defence is about to appoint financial advisers to review how best to handle a sell-off. Financial Mail on Sunday, 18 October.

'What are your views on?' (2018)

From the June 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Answers to questions put by a website in Croatia, 'Il grido del popolo'.

1.         What does your political experience say about the future of socialism?

Because we had always said that it was state capitalism and had nothing to do with socialism, when the USSR collapsed in 1991 perhaps we expected people to say 'Yes, you were right, it did have nothing to do with socialism'. Then the way would be clear to put the case for real socialism as a system based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, with production to directly meet people's needs not for profit, and distribution on the principle of 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs'. But what happened was that people said 'socialism has been tried and failed, it is now irrelevant'. Supporters of capitalism proclaimed the definitive victory of their system and ideology and that capitalism was now the only game in town. This lasted for nearly twenty years. Then came the Great Crash of 2008 and the ensuing slump. 'Capitalism' became a dirty word once more and socialism (however defined) was discussed seriously again. This is still the position today.

2.         Your thoughts on European trade unions? Are they here to help the workers or have they sold out to corporations?

Trade unions were formed by workers to bargain with employers over the price of their labour-power and the conditions under which it is exercised. Over the years they have become huge bureaucratic organisations but still, by and large, continue to be defensive organisations for the working class. They should not just be dismissed as sell-outs. Workers should still join them and work to make them more accountable to their memberships.

3.         What is the UK future after Brexit?

Most of the UK capitalist class want to stay in the EU but their political representatives let them down by organising a referendum that resulted in a 52-48 majority for Brexit. They are probably right to think that the UK outside the EU will not be as good for them as staying in, because they won't be able to get better trade deals than they have been getting as a member. But that's their problem, not ours as socialists and workers. In or out of the EU, and whatever the Brexit terms negotiated, there will still be capitalism and the problems it generates for the majority class of wage and salary worker.

 4.         Your comment on UK foreign policy towards Russia?

That the antagonism between the West and Russia has continued despite the end of 'communism' (in reality, state capitalism) in Russia shows that the conflicts of the Cold War period were not, as presented, based on ideology but were clashes of material interests, mainly over spheres of influence (who dominates Eastern Europe, Russian access to the Mediterranean, etc).

5.         What do you think, is Corbyn a good example for the left?

The Labour Party under Corbyn represents something of a return to what the Labour Party was like in the 1960s, 70s and early 80s – proposing reforms aimed at making capitalism work for 'the many, not the few.' The Labour governments in these periods failed to do this (as it can't be done) and ended up presiding over, and even encouraging, the operation of the capitalist economic system in the only way that it can exist – giving priority to profits and conditions for profit-making over satisfying people's needs. A Corbyn Labour government would fail, and for the same reason that there is no way in which capitalism can be reformed to work in the interest of the majority. So, no, Corbyn is not a good example of what to do.

6.         How can modern left politics answer the challenges of the 21st century, when there is no mainstream socialism as in the 20th century?

It is true that for most of the 20th century the existence of a major country calling itself socialist (even if it wasn't) made socialism a subject of current political debate and that this is no longer the case. On the other hand, not having a state-capitalist regime calling itself socialist is an advantage as socialists no longer have to deal with this as a regular objection to socialism. Socialism can be presented positively as a society of common ownership, democratic control, production directly to meet people's needs and not for profit.

7.         Is socialism today important or has it lost all its 'weight' in political arenas in Europe?

Of course socialism is still relevant and important today – capitalism will never be able to solve the multiple problems it generates by its very nature for humanity in general and the wage and salary working class in particular – even if the word 'socialism' meaning an alternative social system is not a subject of political discussions. Socialism will be relevant as long as capitalism exists as, objectively and not just as a matter of opinion, it is the only framework within which the problems capitalism generates can be solved.

8.         Can you make short comments on political parties like the Communist Party of Great Britain Marxist-Leninist and the New Communist Party?

Neither of them is any good, if only because they both support the North Korean government and defend the state-capitalist system there as somehow socialist or pro working class. Another similar organisation, the CPBML, is as nationalistic over Brexit as the UK Independence Party. 'Marxism-Leninism' is a contradiction in terms as Leninism is a distortion of Marxism, mainly through its theory that the working class on its own can only develop a trade union consciousness and so needs to be led by a self-appointed vanguard party. This was not Marx's view; he favoured the democratic self-organisation of the working class in a mass workers' party.

9.         How to educate today's working class when more and more positions in factories and elsewhere are becoming controlled by technology?

The working class is not composed just of factory workers but of everyone who is forced by economic necessity to try to sell their mental and physical energies to an employer in order to live. This is irrespective of the job they do, whether in a factory, an office, a hospital or an educational institution. Most of the so-called 'middle class' are in fact members of the majority class of wage and salary workers. Artificial Intelligence is now threatening their jobs too.

10.       How do British trade unions today work to protect workers, after all that happened with Thatcher in 80s?

The effectiveness of trade unions is largely governed by the overall economic situation, much more than by legislation. In times of capitalist expansion they can work with the labour market to increase wages; in times of slump the most they can do is slow down the decrease in real wages. The type of trade union has changed since the Thatcher years. Today the coal mines and the once powerful miners' union have gone. The big trade unions today are those in the public sector, in national and local government, the health service and education. Given the unfavourable economic situation they don't do too badly.