Yugoslavia: victory for workers
(editorial)
The general political strike and revolt in Yugoslavia that brought down the Slobodan Milosevic regime is a victory won by working people. The downfall of the bureaucratic regime--which claimed to speak for workers but was the opposite of socialism--is one less obstacle for the toilers in Yugoslavia. They have won greater political space to organize struggles for their demands and to link up with working people around the world.
The ouster of Milosevic is the result neither of the middle-class opposition headed by Vojislav Kostunica, the new president, nor of a CIA plot, as alleged by Stalinist defenders of the old regime. What determined the victory was the decisive entry onto the scene of the working class by the hundreds of thousands, especially industrial workers such as the coal miners.
These events take place a decade after the shattering of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The best explanation of those developments is contained in issue 11 of New International, titled "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War." It is important to study it and get it into the hands of fellow workers, farmers, and young people as a tool that can be used to understand and respond to the events today.
The efforts by the imperialist powers since World War II to pressure the bureaucratic castes to police workers and farmers in their own countries, where capitalism had been overthrown, failed. In 1989-91, what broke was the regimes, not the working class. The workers states, however deformed, proved stronger than the bureaucratic apparatuses.
Imperialism now has to confront the working class directly throughout the region in its goal of reimposing a capitalist order. This can only be accomplished by force. That is why Washington and other NATO powers waged a savage bombing campaign and continue to deploy occupation troops in Kosova, Bosnia, and elsewhere in the Balkans.
Workers are now taking initial steps to defend their social gains, sweeping out managers and other cronies of the old regime in factories and workplaces throughout the country. They are acting on the fact that the state is theirs. The fact that workers and farmers in Yugoslavia made a deep-going socialist revolution coming out of World War II shapes the class confidence and social attitudes of millions of working people there today. Their resistance to capitalist forms of exploitation and its social relations remains a big obstacle to imperialism's aims.
Washington's immediate response has been to issue a list of demands on the new government. The Clinton administration has announced it will remove some trade restrictions, but it is keeping many economic sanctions to use as a club against Yugoslavia.
U.S. capitalist politicians are demanding Milosevic be turned over to the imperialist powers, who would use a show trial to justify imperialist prerogatives to intervene in countries around the world under the "humanitarian" flag. But only the Yugoslav working people have the sovereign right to judge and sanction Milosevic.
Imperialist spokespeople are demanding the Yugoslav government privatize all state-owned industries, welcome foreign capitalist investment, and other measures to integrate Yugoslavia into the capitalist world.
Working people in the United States and elsewhere should demand that all trade and diplomatic sanctions against Yugoslavia be lifted immediately and unconditionally. All U.S. and other foreign troops should get out of the Balkans now.
Related articles:
Strikes, street actions topple Yugoslav regime
Eyewitness in Belgrade: workers lead revolt
Document sheds light on Yugoslav upsurge
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