Talking about a revolution
With all due respect, your perspectives on the Yugoslavia election and toppling of Milosevic ("Don't expect much from Kostunica," Oct. 8, Page 8) appears epistemologically outdated, confused and lacking in any acute criticism or insight into the sordid state of affairs.
While our instincts do cry out for an understanding beyond the Western powers' propaganda of "democracy's triumph," the formulation of the question in terms of Marxist dogma forces us to cry "so what!" Russia, WWII, May 1968 and the host of French intellectuals brandishing the label of postmodernism have done well enough to discredit the ideology, whether it is deserving of the criticism or not. So perhaps it would be more useful to drop the names when scratching beneath the surface of this political upheaval and let historical analysis speak for itself.
The media has done a fair job of cataloging the recent events in Yugoslavia as a revolution. In the strict sense of a revolution -- the replacement of one government by another -- no oversight committed. But really, are we to call Clinton's victory over Bush in 1992 a revolution, or Blair's over Major? Of course Taiwan's presidential elections this year got labeled a "peaceful democratic revolution" in the US congressional records as Chen "ousted" (TIME magazine) the KMT, and Indonesia too had a "democratic revolution" (CNN).
And that is exactly the point. It hasn't taken us too long to discover that Chen doesn't head a revolutionary government but is rather the successor of bureaucratic rule. Just ask Tseng Mao-hsing
Yugoslavia had a successful transfer of power from an authoritative dictator saw authoritarianism as fit for his war torn country, enabling him to retain power under heavy political bombardment from the Western powers (call them imperialist if you want), to a dogmatic nationalist who repeats Clinton's platitudinous verses on democracy.
Who is being represented here anyway? Are the striking coal miners who led off the general strike? Or the demonstrators who protected them against police violence? How long will it be before Kostunica decides he has to use the police to protect himself? It didn't take Wahid too long.
In Russia in 1917, the spontaneity of the protests of women factory workers led to the February revolution, effectively ousting the Tsar and putting the liberal bourgeois Kerensky -- who represented those with property and vested interest in capital -- in power. But over the course of seven months the illusion was clear; workers and peasants were no better off and Russia's involvement in WWI only continued in spite of the understanding that the new government would pull out. In October, the workers Soviet, composed of elected industrial workers, took control of the country under Lenin and Trotsky and their Bolshevik party. The insurrection was achieved without firing a shot. Kerensky, having already lost support of the people, hung on only through the support of the military which quickly abandoned him under the ideology of the Soviet.
For Russia, the military was the last step to the rise to power of the Soviet which had already constructed its own government apart from Kerensky. This was the case in Yugoslavia, where Milosevic held on to power during his last days under the support of the police. But when they abandoned him he too fell. The biggest weakness in our modern day example here is the lack of strength in the unions and lack of the formation of soviets or some type of body consisting of workers representatives that can give a voice to the people a government is supposed to represent.
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