THE MACEDONIAN QUESTION AND THE RECENT WAR
IN FORMER YUGOSLAVIA IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
by Lacenaire

We see proof everywhere and almost on a daily basis that the
propaganda of the ruling class relies not only on the hired hands
of lackeys (like media scum and academics), but it is also propped
up by the confusing ideologies of their self declared enemies. The
power of the rulers lies in their skill in stuffing their slaves
with words to the point of making them the slaves of their words,
Vaneigem once said. And he was right.

For the past year there has been much political debate between the
Greek and (Slav) Macedonian bureacracies over the name, the
constitution and the symbols of the new Macedonian state. Two
large nationalist demonstrations were held by the major political
parties in Greece in order to put pressure on the EEC bureaucracy
to stop backing our neighbouring nation-state's claims on the name
"Macedonia". The first one took place in February 92 in
Thessaloniki and the second one in Athens last December. Over one
million people took part in them (that is one in ten Greeks) and
apart from the Trotskyists and some other leninists who opposed
the demonstrations, agitating for the right of (Slav) Macedonia to
self-determination - a bourgeois statist concept derived from
Lenin, which cost them harsh persecutions on the part of the Law -
few "anti-authoritarian" groups  managed to confront nationalist
propaganda, not even in theorectical terms. The majority of the
so-called anti-authoritarians and anarchists, never having made a
serious inquiry into the complex concrete interconnection between
representative democracy, nation-state, army and wage system,
found themselves agitating for anti-militarist and,
simultaneously, pro-nationalist ideas! The reason of this confused
state of mind is to be found in the fact that people
-"anti-authoritarians" being no exception - have constantly
determined themselves and arranged their relationships in line
with the ruling ideas of their epoch; ideas of God, normality,
nationality, etc.. To paraphase Marx and Gabel, the nationalist
ideology, which is an ideology of the ruling class, tends to build
on people's false consciousness of their actual life-process a
pseudo-history, which instead of explaining "Greeks" through
history, claims to explain history through the "Greeks". The
nationalist pseudo-historical method consists of theoretical
crystallizations that rest on the continuous repetition of
familiar, fixed signs and on the remembrance of historical events
interpreted metaphysically. We need to debunk this ideology whose
starting point is a certain form of consciousness taken as a
living individual.

HISTORY AS NIGHTMARE

According to the nationalist ideology there are no autochthonous
minority ethnic groups in Greece. Whenever one indignantly points
them out, this is what the lackeys answer back: "They are actually
Greeks who someone, somehow, sometime converted to another
religion or language or they are just peasants who are behind the
times, not yet completely intergrated into civilization." One of
these "non-existant" ethnic groups are the Slav-Macedonians who
live (or, according to the bureaucrats supposed to live) in
northern Greece. Their politically correct name is "bilingual
Greeks". According to official historiography they were among the
fighters that liberated Macedonia - that "sacred place of
Hellenism for over 3000 years" - from the domination of Turks and
Bulgarians. Contrary to what is generally believed, inventing
myths is an expensive hobby and some people, whether they like it
or not, will have to foot the bill. Slav-Macedonians became "our
compatriots" by anything but peaceful means. Even Evangelos Kofos,
a foreign policy representative of the Greek state, admitted
during the sixties that the dictatorial government in 1936, for
one, had adopted a policy of forced assimilation: "In a series of
administrative measures, the Slavophones were forbidden to speak
their Slavonic dialect in public, and deportations to the islands
carried out indiscriminantly."(1) Those "Slavophone" peasants
called themselves Makedontsi, a word with a regional rather than
national connotation.  Ethnologically speaking, they are kin to
the Slav-speakers of the former Yugoslav Macedonia.

Before being turned into a battleground for competing nationalist
scum, Macedonia was just a geographical entity, part of the
Ottoman Empire. This ethnologically mixed region, which included
Kosovo (see map 1), was mainly inhabited by Turkish and Albanian
Muslims and Orthodox Slavs, Greeks and Vlachs. According to Hilmi
Pasha's census (1904), the Orthodox Greek speakers of Macedonia
constituted 10% of the entire population, while in Aegean
Macedonia, which nowadays is part of the Greek state, 30% of the
population spoke Greek, 30% were Slavic speaking, 30% were Muslims
and 10% were Vlachs, Jews, Gypsies and others.(2) It's obvious
that prior to the nationalist wars for Macedonia in the early 20th
century, the identity of the inhabitants was determinedby
religion, and to a lesser degree, by language.

The ecclesiastical dispute that broke out in the 1860s between the
Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Bulgarian
Exarchate was soon transformed into a nationalist confrontation
between Greeks and Bulgarians. On the one hand, Greek
nationalists, fearing that the neutral attitude of the Ecumenical
Patriarchate towards nationalist disputes could not serve their
goals, sought to Hellenize the institution of the Church in
Macedonia. On the other hand, by the early 1890s a "narodnik"
group, known as the IMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary
Organization) which advocated a peasant uprising against Ottoman
administrators and landowners, was founded by Slavic speaking
democrat federalist intellectuals. According to the Articles of
the organisation, its aim was to "bring all the discontented
elements in Macedonia and the area of the Aegean, regardless of
nationality, together in order to achieve, by means of revolution,
complete political autonomy for these areas" (3). From the very
beginning IMRO was in direct opposition to the Bulgarian Church
and the most chauvinist Bulgarians in Sofia who tried to bring
them under their control.

After the Ilinden peasant uprising organized by the Slav
revolutionaries in 1903 (4), the Greek state reacted to a possible
escalation of the Slav- Macedonian uprising and to Bulgarian
propaganda. They formed numerous armed gangs and sent them to
Macedonia where they cooperated with the Turkish army and the
great land owners against the Bulgarian and Slav-Macedonian bands
as well as the poor peasants who were mostly indifferent to
nationalist disputes.  During the "Macedonian Struggle" (1904-08),
the Bulgarian and Greek gangs tried to Hellenize to Bulgarize the
Christian population violently. According to Kofos, "terrorism in
Macedonia was the culmination of a quarter of a century of
conflicting nationalist propagandas in a region whose people had,
more or less, no formulated national consciousness, but were
guided by the expediency of the moment and the extinct for
self-preservation".(5)

We know from the memoirs of the fighters of the "Macedonian
Struggle" that a certain faction of the Patriarchal clergy
contributed largely to the nationalist struggles. Under duress or
under threat of ecclesiastical anathema, the Slav population was
changed from "Bulgarian" to "Greek" from one day to the next.
Greek nationalist ideology found itself in more favourable
conditions, since a large section of the Christian peasant
population of Macedonia, especially in the central and southern
areas, were loyal to the Ecumenical Patriarchate, a religious
institution of the Byzantine and the Ottoman Empires, which,
although a supranational organization, was under the control of a
Greek speaking hierarchy and had never ceased to be a vehicle of
the Greek language, which was the official language whereby
Christian ideology had been spread throughout the centuries.

Nationalist use of Christianity in Europe. It's always the same
old story!  "All the members of the clergy", Mirabeau declared in
the Assembly in August 1789, "are merely officials of the state.
The service of the clergy is a public function; just as the
official and the soldier, so also the priest is a servant of the
nation." Rudolf Rocker was right in regarding national
consciousness and national citizenship as a political confession
of faith.  "National states," he wrote in 1933, "are political
church organizations; the so-called national consciousness is not
born in man, but trained into him. It is a religious concept; one
is a German, a Frenchman, an Italian, just as one is a Catholic, a
Protestant, or a Jew". (6)

 * * *

"When the great war comes, Macedonia will become Greek or
Bulgarian according to who the winner is. If it is occupied by
Bulgarians, they will render the population into Slavs. If we
occupy it, we will Hellenize them all to Eastern Rumelia."

Harilaos Trikoupis, Prime Minister of Greece, quoted several times
between 1875 and 1893.

The fate of Macedonia was decided during the Balkan Wars
(1912-1913), when the concerted efforts of the Greek, Serbian and
Bulgarian armies managed to end Ottoman rule in the European
provinces of the Empire. Since there were no negotiations
behorehand concerning drawing the lines of their future
territorial settlements in Macedonia, the three powers were
determined to grab as much territory as they could and embrace any
opportunities resulting from the military or diplomatic situation.
By the end of the wars Serbia and Greece had hit the jackpot in
Macedonia since Bulgaria had paid more attention to the Thracian
Front where it beat the Turkish army almost completely, a fact
that turned the great European powers against it.

After a series of treaties from 1913 to 1920, Bulgaria annexed 10%
of the Macedonian territory, while Serbia and Greece annexed 38%
and 52% respectively. The Greek state not only had the lion's
share, occupying rural territories where no Greek speaking
population could be found, but it also succeeded in conquering the
most advanced financial centers in Macedonia.

The compulsory exchange of the Greek speaking and Slav speaking
population of eastern Macedonia between Greece and Bulgaria in
1920, as well as the dramatic transfer of a million, mostly Greek
speaking, Christians from Turkey to Greece and 350,000 Muslims
from Macedonia to Turkey, under the treaty of Lausanne in 1923,
marked the final stages in the national bureaucracies' efforts to
organize ethnic-linguistic and cultural homogeneity in their newly
constructed cages.

So the notorious Eastern Question ended, in blood and tears...
Thousands of Greeks, Turks and Slavs died in the refugee shanty
towns away from their native lands. Nevertheless, every cloud has
a silver lining! Those of the refugees and the soldiers who had
survived the wars were given full citizenship and became small
land holders or a cheap labour force.  Once the nation-states in
the Balkans had, in one way or another, been formed and the
agrarian reforms and the new labor markets had come into
operation, one could have supposed that from then on capitalism
would start functioning "peacefully". However, this was not true,
since nationalist ambitions and lower class demands had in no way
been satisfied.  At least as far as Slav-Macedonians (or Croats)
were concerned.

During the inter-war period, the Yugoslav governments (composed
mainly of Serb bureaucrats) renamed their part of Macedonia to
Vardar Banovina and thousands of landless Serb peasants were
transfered to the region to assist in the assimilation of the
native Slavs. The official Serbo-Croat language became compulsory
in schools and public life. The situation was even worse in the
part of Macedonia under Greek occupation. The bulk of the Greek
speaking refugees were settled in Macedonia and this was a
"national scheme" far more systematic than the previously
mentioned Serbian one. It is of great importance to note that,
contrary to recent Greek propaganda, the Greek government of 1926
declared Slav-Macedonians a distinct ethnic minority which could
have schools in its own language.  However, since Bulgarians
demanded to use the Bulgarian language and Serbs the Serbo-Croat
one as the language of those schools, Greek bureaucrats started
treating this minority as non-existant and began changing the
names of the Slav inhabitants and their villages into Greek,
forbidding as we have already mentioned, any public use of their
language and deporting or imprisoning hundreds of dissidents - a
campaign that lasted until the late 50s. Today this assimilation
process has almost been completed.

In Bulgaria things worked out a different way. After the Balkan
Wars, the IMRO militants took refuge in Bulgaria and were soon
transformed into a political and financial racket supporting
whomever, from extreme right to the left, was willing to foward
their nationalist plans.(7)

NATIONALISM AND LENINISM

In the early twenties, after having crushed the proletarian
revolution in Russia, the Bolsheviks began employing the Comintern
as the main organ of their foreign policy. In such
"underdeveloped" countries as in the Balkans, where there was no
significant and politically organized workers' movement to be
utilized, they favoured collaborations between the "communist"
parties and the nationalist, allegedly national liberation
movements. IMRO was one of these movements. In 1924, the Bulgarian
"communist" party entered into an alliance with IMRO in order to
set the seizure of power in Bulgaria going.  In a few months the
alliance had broken up but the leftist faction of IMRO remained
loyal to the BCP's of a Balkan federation that would include a
"united and independent Macedonia". (8)

What is important in all these political manoeuvres is that from
the twenties onwards the Balkan leninists had become a significant
vehicle for nation-building projects in the area. In the forties,
Marshall Tito's stalinist party, which had beat the nazis and won
the Yugoslav civil war leading the anti-fascist struggle of the
multi-ethnic peasantry, would re-interpret the federalist ideology
of the twenties. It created a federal state and recognized,
theorectically at least, the right of each of the nations of
Yugoslavia to "self-determination, including the right to
secession". Besides Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Serbia
and Montenegro, a "state of the Macedonian people and the Albanian
and objectives were to create a Macedonian republic that would
include Pirin (Bulgarian) Macedonia as well as a part of Greek
Macedonia and also form a South-Slav federation that would include
Bulgaria and Albania under their hegemony. Stalin's conflict with
Tito in 1948 brought an end to such ambitious plans. The Greek and
Bulgarian stalinists sided with the Cominform and Tito stopped
supporting the Greek guerillas, delivering the fatal blow to the
stalinist-led rebellion in July 1949. 35.000 Slav- Macedonian
partisans were forced to emigrate from Greece and many of them
took refuge in Yugoslav Macedonia.(9)

CITIZENSHIP AND THE INCORPORATION OF THE PEASANTS AND THE WORKERS
INTO THE NATION-STATE

"Political emanicipation is certainly a big step foward. It may
not be the last form of general human emancipation, but it is the
last form of human emancipation within the present world order.
Needless to say, we are speaking here of real, practical
emancipation."

Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question
Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question

The new Macedonian state, whose first premier was Dimitar Vlahov,
the old leader of the leftist faction of the IMRO, was the
political outcome of the anti-fascist and anti-imperialist
struggle of its inhabitants against Nazi/Bulgarian occupation and
Great Serb chauvinism. It was on this basis, as well as on the
material concessions to peasants that the Macedonian bureaucracy
traced a route to nation-building. The creation of the new nation
was patterned on the schemes concocted by all previous Balkan
bureaucracies during the social and political struggles of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The new state class declared
themselves liberators of the people, turned a regional name
(Makedontsi) into a national; transformed the Slav- Macedonian
idiom (on which the Bulgarian language is based as well) into a
"pure" literary language, set up an autocephalous Macedonian
Orthodox Church, invented a unique Macedonian history and a
distinct Macedonian tradition, put foward an unredeemist ideology
of "our brothers who are still in bondage" and, here you are, a
new nation in the Balkans was born in the same way that the Greek,
Serbian and Bulgarian imagined communities had been created.

The nationalization of the European peoples was the main political
and social consequence of the class struggles of the last two
centuries. These class struggles were mainly peasant struggles
against the landowners and the foreign conquerors and were given
voice through the nationalist-democratic ideology, the people's
army and its leadership. They led up to the formation of the
modern bureaucratic class which was shaped by the collaboration of
old and new rulers (politicians, democratic intellectuals,
administrators, the military etc.). Their greatest preoccupation
was to organize the nationalist indoctrination of the younger
generations, disintergrate the peasant communities and the guilds
and legitimize the civil society, which was already under
formation, through legal regulations; a society where a person
sacrifices her/himself to the abstract notion of the citizen, i.e.
the private individual, a mere member of the multitude. Thus the
bureaucrats paved the way for the merchants, industrialists and
the bankers, who themselves had taken part in the social
struggles, at least as financial supporters, and who managed to
reorganize human work into "free" labour, that is, wage labour,
cutting the communities into separate households, adaptable to
changes in space and time and suitable for overt exploitation.
The myth of the nation, enveloped in sentiments and memories of
the "liberation" struggles, unites these separate parts. Equality
in the heaven of the nation-state's universality counteracts
inequality in the earthly, real life. The state that poses as a
guardian/representative of an allegedly undifferentiated society
is the universal power that unifies the competitive private
interests. The contradiction of the plitical nation-state lies in
the the fact that it unifies the separate parts through
separation, since it is simultaneously the mediator that
safeguards and guarantees the perpetuation of private interests
and the continuation of the dissociation of private and public
life.(10)

The internationalist proletarian movement of the 19th century, the
only social movement that could put an end to the extension of the
nationalist- democratic ideology, because it was seeking a real,
practical emancipation beyond  the present world order (11),
gradually degenerated after the promising period of the First
International and the federative Commune of 1871, and split into
national parliamentary "workers" parties. Those parties identified
socialism with the "nationalization of the means of production" as
well as the seizure of political power and led the proletariat to
the leninist-stalinist tragedy. After World War II, the second
proletarain assault on class society, culminating in the struggles
of the late sixties and strengthened by a large scale revolt of
the middle class youth of the "developed" capitalist countries,
brought the internationalist perspective to the fore again and
provoked the western bureaucrats and capitalists to act
accordingly. In the Eastern Bloc events took a dramatic course.
After the events in Hungary in 1956, the stalinists could not
impede the spreading of class struggles, in other words they could
not organize scarcity and silence effectively anymore. The
successive struggles, especially those in Poland during the 70s
and 80s, exposed the counter- revolutionary nature of the
non-market, industrial based variation of the Oriental despotism
of the Russian empire. Besides that, the non-soviet empire as well
as the Yugoslav federation to some extent, were prison houses of
nations and various ethnic groups. The eastern proletariat being
unable to act against the bureaucrats as a class seeking for its
self-suppression, stood against the emperor as if he were a mere
conqueror, that is on a national basis, hence they climbed the
chariot of the nationalist-democratic ideology of their leaders
(Walesa, Yeltsin, Tudjman, Milosevic...).(12) Wherever these
leaders (mostly former members of the disintergrated bureaucracy
and now ambitious "national heroes" have been involved in
free-for-all wars, the proletariat at worst has become cannon
fodder and at best mere defenders of their lives.

THE WAR OFFICERS TURN TO PEACE-MAKERS (AND VICE VERSA)

There are three methods of approaching the war in the former
Yugoslavia that certainly lead to false considerations of the
social and political situation there. The first and most popular
of them is dominated by humanitarian-pacifist beliefs and ir
assumes that the war is simply the product of evil-minded
politicians and thugs and rests its hope for a cease-fire on the
military intervention of the United Nations of Amerika. The second
one is based on leninst ideology and sees the war as a struggle of
oppressed nations for "national independence". The third holds
that behind the so-called civil war, the various nationalist
factions are serving the divergent interests of the great western
powers. It reminds us of the one-sided estimation of Rosa
Luxemberg who, during the Balkan Wars and the First World War,
supported the view that "Serbia itself is only a pawn in the great
game of world politics".(13) The first method and especially the
last one are the most absurd of all since they bring out a police
concept of history. The events in Yugoslavia cannot be understood
in terms of good or evil individual action; neither can it be
explained as the result of an external action.  As far as the
Trotskyist illusions are concerned, the "heroic" era of the
so-called national liberation struggles has long passed. One has
to turn one's attention to the history of class antagonisms in the
former Yugoslavia after World War II.

Wedged between Western capitalist and Stalinist regimes, the
Yugoslav "communist" bureaucracy managed to survive thanks to its
longstanding reconciliation with the proletariat and the
peasantry. (See the law on workers' self-management in 1950 and
the re-distribution of land after the war.) The reconciliation
drew to an end in the sixties when the disputes between the
centralists, the local state officials and the enterprise managers
over matters of development policy led to the 1965 economic
reform. According to Neil Fernandez, the liberal-conservative
strife was "a confrontation between on the one hand rulers who
stressed a degree of Croat and Slovene independence along with
economic efficiency, and on the other hand those who were
concerned with the preservation of the machinery of centrally
directed investment, the all-round development of national capital
and the pre-eminence of Belgrade and the largely Serb
administrative apparatus". (14) So the reforms not only
legitimized capitalism in Yugoslavia by decentralizing investment
policy, reducing wages and jobs (especially in the so-called
"political" factories) and liberalizing foreign trade, they also
revealed that conflicting economic and political interests were
rapidly being transformed into North-South nationalist
confrontations.

The failure of the internationalist radical wing of the Belgrade
student movement in 1968 to unite themselves with workers fighting
against wage freezes and income inequality (15), and vice versa,
and thus create continous autonomous struggles for a truly
self-managed society, was followed by a large-scale demonstration
in Pristina in November 1968 calling for Kosovo's autonomy and,
most remarkably, nationalist demonstrations in Croatia in 1971-2
that eventually led to the establishment of a new constitution in
1974.  The constitution turned Kosovo and Vojvodina into
autonomous provinces and made Yugoslavia into a confederation of
semi-sovereign states with independent economic policy, their own
police force and the right to put veto on any new federal laws.

The league of "communist" bureaucrats tried to preserve their
central unifying role as the "representatives of the workers" by
reinforcing the only two all-Yugoslav institutions, the army and
the so-called workers' self-management. In the years that
followed, both attempts to militarize social realtions to some
extent and cast the "workers' councils" for the part of a
reformist political party in the Yugoslavery comedy failed
completely. By the mid 80s the technocratic leadership cadres and
the local bureaucrats had prevailed over the centralist
ideologues. The Yugoslav "People's" Army could not offer a bond to
hold the country together because it was the armed hand of the
Party and as long as the Party was rapidly disintergrating, it
merely became the armed hand of the most powerful nationalist
faction in the Party: the "Great Serb" nationalists.

The petition the Belgrade intellectuals handed the authorities in
January 1986 to act against the alleged "genocide" of the Serb
minority in Kosovo was the kick-off for the regeneration of Serb
nationalism. The constitutional changes and the Serb military rule
which incorporated Kosovo into the body of the Serbian state
gradually prompted the rest of the local bureaucracies to start
moving towards total independence. But the very root of the
resurgence of nationalism is to be found in the class struggles of
the second half of the eighties.

During 1986-9 the federal government, with the general consent of
every local leadership, tried to totally intergrate the Yugoslav
economy into the restructuring world capitalism. Their first move,
in February 1987, under the guidlines of the IMF - their main
foreign creditor - was to cut wages and increase unemployment and
was soon followed in 1988-9 by the change of the legal framework
of the cpaitalist relationship: the abolition of
pseudo-self-management, the liberalization of the labor market,
decentralization of the banking system, etc.. The strike wave that
broke out in early 1987 against the bureaucrats, the trade unions
and the workerist cadres in the mines and the factories of Croatia
and Serbia was astonishing and the government threatened to send
troops and tanks against the workers. The struggle continued
without a break: 1623 strikes and 365,000 strikers in 2987; 1360
strikes in the first 9 months of 1988.  Among their demands was a
100% increase in wages! The local bureaucrats were obliged to play
their last card: nationalist ideology.

The nationalism that had already been used in previous decades to
regiment social contradictions by convincing workers in one
republic that their poverty is due to the inefficiency of the
workers and the leaders in the other republics, reached its
explosive point in the late 80s. Social control could no longer be
exerted by discredited "socialist" ideologues. A renewed
legitimation of bureaucracy and capitalism could only be achieved
through the creation of nation-states which would manage to
divide, police and recompose the proletariat on the basis of a new
reconciliation between state and civil society. the leaders
clearly saw that in order to maintain and extend their power they
had to create new social cages by inventing a new form of
citizenship, a new type of "general interest". By 1989 the mass
demonstrations had already become nationalist parades. Things were
headed the right way... And they still are... (16)

Making war against real or factitious "external enemies" is part
and parcel of the making of the nation-state. The members of the
western ruling class are well aware of this, the nationalization
of peoples in their states having been completed long ago.
Professor John Mirishimer, for example, wrote in the "New York
Times" two months ago that the creation of homogenous states in
the former Yugoslavia calls for the mapping out of new borders and
the transfer of populations. On March 25,1991 Tudjman and
Milosevic met secretly in Karadjordevo and agreed to partition
Bosnia between them (17), thus forcing a non-nationalist, non
religion-fanatical population to take sides through war. The
partition was backed up by the great powers in London conference
in August 1992. Ethnic cleansing was carried out not only by the
Serbian and Croat armies and gangs, but by UN convoys as well.
They organized the evacuation of Muslim refugees from Srebrenica
and other places and the exchange of a hundred thousand prisoners.
Now the Serbian army has occupied 70% of the territory of Bosnia
and 20% is in Croatian possession. (see map 2) "Peace" is just
going to bring  whatever war has left incomplete to an end.  (18)
We can't say whether the proletarians and the peasants, regardless
of nationality, will resist all "peace makers", like they did
against all war officers in Vukovar and during the first months of
the war in Bosnia and whether their reactions will continue to be
mainly defensive.

IF YOU WANT PEACE, PREPARE FOR CLASS WAR

None of the bureaucracies of the Balkan states is out of the
nationalist game.  The Greek bureaucrats and capitalists that
antagonized the new Macedonian ruling class, blocking the
international recognition of their state, trying to keep them in
the worst possible place in the new hierarchical inter-state
system in the Balkans - even making plans to turn that former
Yugoslav republic into a protectorate of theirs - have made a lot
of concessions in the last months. But the results of the intense
nationalist propaganda of 1992 are still largely observable. All
the pseudo-antagonisms (left wing/right wing parties, trade
unions/bosses, etc.) have collapsed into a nationalist united
front against the strikers and high school students and managed,
with the help of the media scum, to push their struggles out of
the limelight. What is worse is that we saw most of our friends,
comrades and people we work with fall victims of the deceptive
pro-Serb Greek government propaganda. We will deal extensively
with the very root of this despicable stance elsewhere. Moreover,
the future looks bleak. When Milosevic, Greece's best ally in the
Balkans, sooner or later, finds himself in need of a new war in
the south, when the oppressed Albanians in Kosovo and Macedonia
(see map 3) take to the streets again, the Greek proletariat,
being indoctrinated for so long by racist ideas against Albanians,
and their neighbours in general, will probably continue not to be
able to turn against war, that is to turn against Greek leaders,
who are equally responsible for all the war crimes committed up to
now as well as for those yet to come.

The failure of the workers' movement in Serbia and Greece to
radically oppose nationalism and war testifies that fighting
against the results of the hierarchical capitalist relationship is
not enough. Unless wage labourers understand that any form of
political emancipation or permanent reform is impracticable
nowadays, unless they understand that this war is a reaction
gainst their own struggles, however modest they may be, that
national governemnts are as one against the proletariat; and
unless they start fighting for the abolition of wage labour and
representative democracy, the future transformation of our
countries into local units of the EEC will surely be preceded by
even darker years of nationalism.  The Balkan societies have been
caught in a dangerous trap. The bureaucrats on the one hand look
foward to a supranational European capitalism and on the other
hand they need nationalism to regiment working class reactions
against austerity measures. The wage-laborers falter from
defensive struggles to privatization, from conservatism to
contestation. These are times for the best or the worst. A real
transitory period - but to what?

May 1993

First published in a Greek-language magazine "Ta Paidia Tis
Galarias", no.3
NOTES

(1) E. Kofos, Nationalism and Communism in Macedonia
(Thessaloniki, 1964), p.50.  (2) "Assessing population figures is
problematic due to the tendency to exaggerate the number of the
Greek or the Slav populations, depending on which side is making
the assessment." H. Poulton, The Balkans (London, 1991), p.175. As
it is the case in Bosnia, centuries of mixed marriages in
Macedonia has resulted in bilingual or even polyglot families.
(3) E. Kofos, op.cit., p.25.  (4) Thousands of peasants took part
in the revolution. The town of Krusovo, near Monastir (see map 1),
inhabited by Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs, was seized by the rebels
and the "Krusovo Republic" was proclaimed. They put a kind of
propertional representative democray into practice and made an
appeal for unity to all ethnic groups in Macedonia, even inviting
Muslim workers to join the common struggle against the Ottoman
landowners. It was an infantile disorder of the early

t and, after it was crushed by the Ottoman army, it never
reappeared in this area.  (5) E. Kofos, op.cit., p.35 (6) R.
Rocker, Nationalism and Culture (Minnesota, 1978), pp.174, 202.
(7) Elizabeth Barker, Macedonia; Its Place in Balkan Power
Politics (London, 1950), p.37. See also, Joseph Rothschild, The
Communist Party of Bulgaria; Origins and Foundations (New York,
1959).  (8) In 1925 in Vienna, Victor Serge had met the editors of
"La Federation Balkanique", the "communist" backed, multi-lingual
review published there from 1924. "Around the great conception of
the Balkan Federation," he wrote in his memoirs (Oxford, 1978,
pp.180-1), "there swarmed hordes of secret agents, impressarios of
irredentism, pedlars of the influential word, night-walking
politicians engaged in six intrigues at a time; and all these
smart gentlemen, with their over-gau

s the unbridled energy of the Comitajis [Slav-Macedonian and
Bulgarian gangs] and sell it to and fro to any buyer. There was
the Italian wing, the Bulgarian wing, the Yugoslav wing, two Greek
tendencies, one monarchist sonal cliques and vendettas. We knew
the cafes in which the revolvers of any given group lay in wait,
watched from the cafe opposite by those of another." (9) "A
continous legacy of civil war has been the numbers of people who
fled from Greece, including some 25-30,000, according to the
Association of Refugee Children from Greek Macedonia and Red Cross
estimates, of children aged between two and 14... The property of
the refugees was confiscated by the Greek government by Decree
2536/53 which also deprived them of their Greek citizenship. The
Greek goverment later [in the 80s!] enacted a law so that the
property would be retu

k by birth" i.e. those who renounce their Macedonian nationality
and adopt Greek names. Greece also has consistently denied entry
visas to these refugees except in a few cases to attend funerals
but even then with difficu
 Evacuation of whole villages and confiscation of property were
 essential parts of the Serbs' and Croats' final solution in
 Bosnia. Concentration camps were used to systematically put
 pressure on the Muslims to make statements that they surrender
 their p

roperty to "the authorities" ie. Serbs.  (10) "Tagore called the
nation "organized selfishness". The term is well chosen, but we
must not forget that we are always dealing with the organized
selfishness of priveledged minorities which hide behind the skirts
of the nation, hide behind the credulity of the masses." R.
Rocker, op.cit., pp.250-1.  (11) "It is one of the great purposes
of the Association to make the workmen of different countries not
only feel but act as brethren and comrades in the army of
emancipation." Documents of the First International, 1864-70 in
K.Marx, The First International and After (London, 1974), p.86
(12) "Any action "that could raise the danger of a threat to the
freedom and statehood of the fatherland must be avoided", [Walesa
said on December 16, 1980] and on the 17th, he really went
overboard: "The time has come for a concerted effort to surrender
the strike weapon and negotiate a return to economic security and
social peace... Society needs order at this time." The dedication
of the memorial to the Gdansk martyrs of 1970-71 on December 16
was an appropriate symbol of

history" that the Gdansk accords represented. It was a touching and
ominous demonstration of national unity: oppressors and workers,
gunmen and their prey, executioners and widows of victims, all
carefully surrounded by the new rom the shipyard union), all
intoning the national anthem and all blessed by the Church, by
Solidarity and by the Party. A workers' defeat was enacted here."
Henri Simon, Poland 1980-82 (Detroit, 1985), p.38-9 (13) See the
Junius Pamphlet, in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (New York, 1970).  (14)
"Yugoslavia: Capitalism and Class Struggle 1918-1967" in
Yugoslavery (BM BLOB London WC1N 3XX), p.15.  (15) "A survey of
work stoppages in 1964-66 found that 165 of the 231 stoppages in
1965 were due to "incorrect distribution of personal incomes".
Duncan Blackie, "The Road to Hell", International Socialism 53,
p.34 (16) "I remember how police officers during informational
discussions wanted me to become a nationalist (informational
discussion is when they arrest you without a warrant; there is
absolutely no public record of such an arrest; it can last anytime
between one hour and a few days; the longest I was held was 12
hours). Obviously there was a plot behind it. It didn't work with
me. But it worked with millions of others... With clever use of
historical statehood and ethnic

ens already tired of great ideas and philosophy and political
experiments on their side. With even smarter flirting with the
terms "freedom" and 'independence" they got
non-statist-nationalist soccer hooligan youth as their c Union, a
ruling Croatian nationalist party, even uses Bakunin in their
review to explain their struggle for independence as an opposition
to Bolshevik enforced Yugoslav unity... Even anarchists found
shelter in the ethnic-thing that almost swallowed ev
erybody in all of Eastern Europe." Ivo Skoric, "Yugoslavery", Love
and Rage, August 1991, p.6,12.  (17) Financial Times, 27 June
1991. At that time, 700,000 workers were on strike.  (18) It is
awful to notice how history repears itself. Before the Balkan
Wars, Serbs and Greeks took advantage of British plans about a new
administrative division of Macedonia according to nationality, in
order to propose their territorial claims in the area. It's always
a Vance-Owen plan that paves the way to partitions.

