[R-P] (1 de 4) (Inglés) Acumulación global de capital y desastres complejos: el caso de Europa Sudoriental

[Néstor Gorojovsky]

Envío en cuatro partes un excelente documento sobre el papel de la
acumulación global de capital en el desastre de Europa Sudoriental. La
autora, Vera Vratusa-Zunjic, es una finísima socióloga servia con quien tuve
el gusto de discutir éstas y otras cuestiones un tiempo atrás.

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(1ra. de cuatro partes)

Vera Vratusa (-Zunjic)
FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY, Department of Sociology
Cika Ljubina 18-20, 11OOO Beograd, Yugoslavia
fax: + 38111 - 639-356
phone: + 38111 - 3282-141
e-mail: vvratusa en f.bg.ac.yu


GLOBAL ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL AND COMPLEX DISASTERS –
THE CASE OF SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE

Summary
Focusing on  the NATO aggression on Yugoslavia, the paper
examines the extent to which global profit-seeking by
transnational capital can be considered as a factor  in the
aetiology of social crises and complex disasters in South-
Eastern Europe.

The main finding of the paper is that there is a strong
positive correlation between the  interest of oligopolistic
corporate and financial capital concentrated in  NATO member
states  on the one hand and  the break-up of former
Yugoslavia on the other.  The interests of the NATO States
to control material and human resources along the corridor
leading to the Middle Eastern, Russian and Central Asian raw
materials, cheap labour force, market outlets and industrial
waste dumping grounds  provided the impetus for  the violent
break-up of  former Yugoslavia with all its catastrophic
attendant consequences (e.g. sharp fall in production,
upsurge in unemployment, poverty, disease, increase in death
rate, long-term pollution of air, ground and water of the
entire Balkan region after the NATO bombing).

The paper also demonstrates how transnational corporate
interests and NATO Member States leaders used various
pressure mechanisms (e.g. economic blockade, debt interest
elevation, "liberalisation" of neighbourhood economics,
exploitation of compradore, separatist, terrorist and
illicit drug-traffickers, cluster bombs and depleted uranium
coated shells, to achieve their war objectives and at the
same time precipitate a complex disaster situation  with
ramifications beyond the initial target group,  beyond
former Yugoslavia and beyond the present generations.

Goals, theoretical and methodological framework
of the study

The principal goal of the study is to examine the main
social factors in the aetiology, functioning and
consequences of complex disasters in general, and the decade
long and still ongoing war in the Balkans or South-Eastern
Europe, as the most catastrophic form of complex disaster,
in particular.

The key concept of disaster is used here in the meaning of
the situation of mass emergency depriving a great number of
people and entire communities of the essential needs of life
and of life itself. The addition of the adjective complex
points out to the simultaneous appearance of multiple
aspects of this deprivation, affecting diverse spheres of
social and individual existence. The adjective “complex”
also suggests that multidimensional deprivation is provoked
not only by natural causes, like in the case of hailing,
avalanche, floods, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, but that
they are produced as well, or even primarily, by socially
structured forces. It must be reminded, however, that the
distinction between social and natural causes of disasters
is ever harder to make due to expansion of the so-called
second nature transformed by human intervention.

In order to better understand and explain the complex
disaster phenomenon and the war in South-Eastern Europe, the
theoretical perspective of totality is adopted. Since
ancient times, theoreticians have elaborated this
perspective in two main directions, depending on the
positivist or critical way they interpreted the totality or
the comprehensive whole of reality. In the case of
positivist interpretation, the totality is envisaged as
abstract, timeless and essentially unchanging, including
numerous variants of Hegelian dialectics of the self-
identical whole of absolute idea, coming to self-
consciousness by passing through the consecutive phases of
thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The advocates of the
positivist functionalist variant of the totality perspective
in social sciences focus primarily on the situations of
stable equilibrium of the social system and external sources
of its disequilibration. In the case of critical
interpretation, including here numerous variants of
historical and dialectical materialism, the totality is
conceived as a concrete unity of historically specific
contradictions, simultaneously determined by the given state
of the development of material forces of production and
corresponding relations of production, and determining
objectively possible qualitative transformation of this real
world whole. The partisans of the critical variant of the
totality perspective in social sciences concentrate on the
internal sources of potentially transformative situations of
strife and disequilibrium.

There exists, however, the least common denominator shared
by proponents of both versions of the totality perspective.
It consists, first of all, of  the tenet that the whole
exerts the determining domination over its component parts
as they interact through time between  themselves and with
the rest of the comprehensive systems of lower or higher
complexity to which they belong, bringing about often
unexpected coincidence of different longitudinal and
contemporary causal chains. The second idea is that all
aspects of examined phenomena should be taken into account
in order to avoid reductionist explanations.

The application of the critical variant of the totality
perspective to the study of the phenomenon of war through
history, revealed so far that it is an intrinsic
potentiality of all class societies. One of its main
functions is to achieve the maintenance of a historically
given dominant class in a ruling social position. Specific
for war since the prolonged fifteenth century and the advent
of capitalist mode of production,  is its use for a speeded
up destruction of pre-capitalist and non-capitalist social
relationships. In this prolonged process of the so called
primary accumulation of capital, war has the function to
separate producers from the means of production and their
commodification, as the necessary social condition for the
expanded reproduction of capital accumulation on the world
scale. Such reproduction is permeated by intrinsic
contradiction between social production and private
appropriation,  leading to cyclical crises (Vratusa(-
Zunjic), Vera, 1995a).

The main hypothesis of this study is that the main social
factors of the ongoing war complex disaster in the Balkans
are imbedded in the antagonistic process of profit seeking
by financial capital. It attempts to overcome the actual
hyper-accumulation of the capital systemic crisis through
the violent elimination of the elements of collective
ownership,  social production relationships and restoration
of predominantly private ones.

Global social context of the war complex disaster
in South-Eastern Europe

Comprehensive examination of the historic genesis and
factors of the present war complex disaster situation in
South Eastern Europe, due to space limitation, will not go
further back in this paper than the brief reconstruction of
two pivotal dimensions of the entire post World War II
social context: hyper-accumulation of the capital systemic
crisis and the fall of the  Berlin wall as a crucial turning
point.

Post World War II Accumulation of Capital Systemic Crisis
and neoliberal reaction of financial capital

Due to inherent contradiction between potentially unlimited
possibilities of use values’ social production, and social
limits imposed on it by private appropriation of its results
in the capitalist mode of expanded commodity reproduction,
at the end of sixties began the new medium term downward
trend in the profit rate. At that time were being exhausted
impulses created in the preceeding period for the upward
trend in the profit rate. These stimuli included the Second
World War destruction of “surplus” capital and workers.

Representatives of the supranational and transnational
corporate and financial capital have found the temporary
instrument for “externalisation” of the systemic crisis’
costs at the expense of the direct producers,  through neo-
liberal dismantling of the post World War II welfare
national state reconstruction and development of
redistributive interventionism in the West, and a centrally
planned command economy with a dense net of state budget
financed social services in the East. Both right and left
parties that came to power in the West since the eighties
promising tax cuts, and in the East since the nineties
promising inflow of fresh capital, systematically applied
the neoliberal economic policies demanded by the owners and
managers of majority share packages in  trans-national
industrial corporations, financial institutions and mass
media establishments  (hereinafter TNC and financial
oligarchy). They privatised public enterprises and service,
pension, health and education funds, that deprived at least
80% of population from the results of their decades’ long
work (Vratusa, Vera, 2001)

TNC and financial oligarchy concentrated in former colonial
and present neo-colonial Western powers, already in 1971
transformed the  international monetary and financial system
of fixed currency exchange rates based on gold-reserve  US
dollar and low interest rates on long term predominantly
public credits. Fluctuating exchange rates were introduced
and since 1980 sharply increased interest rates on
predominantly private shorter term credits, derived from
recycling of OPEC “petro-dollars” that Arab ruling classes
deposited in Western banks. “Seven sisters” or seven largest
transnational oil companies contributed to the deepening of
economic recession through their speculative rising of oil
prices. In this unfavourable economic situation,
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB),
transnational financial institutions in whose paid-in
capital the US Treasury has the largest share, conditioned
the extension of new credits to already indebted countries
of Latin America, Asia and Africa and increasingly of
Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, by implementation of
imposed macro-economic “structural adjustment programs”.
Beside forced privatisation of public enterprises,
infrastructure and services, freezing of state budgets,
wages and extreme reduction of social subsidies, debtor
countries are forced by official and commercial creditors to
lift tariff protection of domestic industry and other
strategic assets and deregulate capital flows. At the same
time TNC and financial capital retained protectionist
measures in the creditor countries, in which their
headquarters are seated, from industrial imports from debtor
countries. They also retained strong financial and other
support from their own governments, contrary to neo-liberal
recipes they were imposing to governments of weaker states.
In fact, economic history of all contemporary industrially
most developed countries, confirm that a favourable
regulatory environment provided by the national state,
including trade barriers, where  crucial for protection of
infant industry from cheaper imports in the early phase of
industrialization (Chomsky, Noam, 1998).

These IMF and WB imposed “economic reforms” led in many
former planned economies, to wrecking of national banking
system, to collapse of the economy and to acquisition of
public assets by the Mafiosi, a new property owning class
committed to the “free market”. Foreign investors and
creditors contributed to the criminalisation and corruption
of recipient state’s institutions by bribing state officials
to lobby for them during selling and concession giving
tenders. They often condition new financial injections into
debtor countries by appointment of former IMF  and WB
officials to cabinet posts. Government officials that are
accountable more to foreign investors than to local
institutions of electoral democracy, formulate and execute
institutional and legal reforms within deadlines set by the
loan arrangements with IMF. Local parliaments just rubber
stamp the laws drafted with the “financial and technical
assistance” of the institutions like “The Centre for
International Private Enterprise” (CIPE) and US Agency for
International Development (USAID) (Chossudovsky, M., 2001a;
Poznañski, Kazimierz, 2000).

The ongoing global financial and monetary crisis that is
according to the relevant parameters going to be more
disastrous than the one that started in the late 1920’s,
confirms that neo-liberal reforms imposed by IMF and WB did
not solve the systemic crisis of capital accumulation,
manifested in the combination of excess output, unused
capacity and  massive unemployment. On the contrary, they
made it possible for the  “institutional investors” like
privatised pension and social security funds privately
holding great money reserves, to speculate on the
electronically globalised stock exchange. From this resulted
fictitious blowing up of the nominal value of extant
financial claims several times above the present levels of
the world’s combined domestic product estimated in terms of
valuation of really produced and traded goods and services
in the last decade of the XX century. (LaRouche, Jr.,
Lyndon, 2000). Financial-speculative “bubbling” and
deliberate “financial manipulation” of market forces,  led
to the 1997 depletion of hard currency reserves and to a
plunge in Asia’s currency markets, followed by spectacular
devaluation of currencies in Russia, Latin America and
Turkey, but also in Australia, Canada, even Japan, and
equally spectacular rise in dollar denominated debts.
According to World Bank report, total debt of Latin
American, African and Asian debtor countries in 1980 was
$645 billion. After paying $1,613 billion of cumulative
interest, the foreign debt of these countries grew to $4,137
billion by 1999. Following speculative assaults on national
currencies, forced devaluations and unfavorable terms of
trade, that provoked a fall in industrial production and
bankruptcies in targeted economies, IMF “rescue” or bailout
plans  enabled Western banks to take-over local financial
systems and Western corporations to appropriate local
productive assets at low prices. They demanded immediate
disposal of bad bank loans and breaking up of prominent
industrial complexes to be auctioned off at distress prices
to foreign private speculating creditors. On top of cheap
new acquisitions, creditors were reimbursed also through
newly contracted credits. The money for them came from the
treasuries of G17 countries and heightened public debt. The
guarantors became the very same private banks who had
precipitated the financial crisis and exacerbated it through
speculation in the first place, but will benefit from the
IMF imposed bail out program. The end result is “conquering”
of the foreign countries without an invading army
(Chossudovsky, Michel, 1999a).

Due to continued speculative derivative trade on the major
bourses, financial crisis in 2001 led to dramatic meltdown
of “paper profits” on major world stock markets. This was
accompanied by hyperinflationary rise in primary
commodities’ prices, mass layoffs and to  impoverishment of
population of disastrous proportions in both developing and
developed countries.

The fall of the Berlin Wall  as a crucial turning point.

The acceleration and expansion of the application of the
major shift from Keynesian to Friedmanian economic policy
reaction to accumulation of capital crisis  was made
possible with the rise of Gorbachev to power in the Soviet
Union. He was the first communist president who opted
together with his cabinet not to claim the right and attempt
to defend USSR,  the Organisation for Mutual Economic Co-
operation of Eastern European “real socialist” countries, as
these countries were named by their leaders during their
Moscow 1976 Conference, and their Warsaw military pact,
from disintegration. The centrally planned class mode of
production of use values was in crisis in these countries.
Well developed infrastructure, industry and especially
ramified social services sector, were becoming ever harder
to maintain, because of the deepening stagnation. In the
Eastern command economies, in contrast to the crisis in the
West that manifests itself as hyper-production,  the crisis
in the East manifested itself as insufficient  production of
consumer goods. It is due to the bureaucratized system of
production relations and high defence expenditures.

The tearing down of  the Berlin wall in 1989 symbolised to
many the end of the Cold War, which itself started after the
socialist October revolution and was intensified after the
ending of the “hot”  Second World War. The hopefully
announced and eagerly wished for dawning of the era of
peace, unity of entire Europe and democratic participation
of the world population in a sustainable development, did
not materialise in the “post-Cold War World”. The TNC and
financial oligarchy financially organised in IMF and
militarily organised in North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
(hereinafter NATO), decided that extreme weakening of the
rival Eastern super power offered favourable conditions to
return to the classic strategies for the reversal of the
declining manufacturing sector profit rate. There was no
more deterrence to their option to triggering of an
imperialist war campaign in order to secure control of cheap
raw materials, working force, market outlets and industrial
waste dumping grounds.

Their targets this time are not primarily material and human
resources of the overseas colonies, but the ones much
closer. They are located in the territories of former “real
socialist” European countries that were largely inaccessible
to financial capital behind the Iron Curtain until 1989.
This time the TNC capital controlled by Vatican and reunited
Germany, joined forces with the rest of the Western capital
under the domination of the U.S. big capital while
exercising “der Drang nach dem Osten”. This domination
enables the USA military-industrial-financial complex to
profit the most from aggression and joint rule in different
parts of the world, exerted in alliance with militarily
weaker Western European powers within NATO. Common interest
in eastward expansion of allies having unequal power for the
time being is stronger than disintegrative effects of their
conflicting interests. One of the most important strategists
of the U.S. foreign policy, Zbignieuw Brzezinski, summed up
the essence of the conflict between EU and US oligarchy by
asserting that it is imperative for the US to maintain its
world dominance by preventing any unification of Eurasia
(Brzezinski, Zbignieuw, 1997).

Social factors of war complex disaster in Yugoslavia

The totality perspective calls for the examination of the
interaction of both internal and external social factors
within this wider context of the latest cycle of the world-
wide accumulation of capital crisis and disintegration of
the Eastern Block, while attempting to answer why the rise
in unemployment, fall in living standard and violent
destruction of  life and property through armed conflict,
acquired catastrophic proportions in the multiethnic and
multiconfessional Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

a) Internal factors
Among the internal factors, the most important were the
unresolved contradictions inherent to Yugoslav hybrid
planned and market “worker’s self-management” economy
operating under a unique social ownership structure.  These
factors are examined  in detail in other papers (Vratusa(-
Zunjic) Vera, 1993; 1995b), so that here will be resumed
just the most important findings relevant for the subject of
this paper. Contradictions of the social property which is
neither state nor private, having elements of group co-
operative ownership,  led to multidimensional crisis,
sharpened by geographic concentration of specific ethnic
groups in regions with different levels of historically
inherited and attained industrial development. The crisis
escalated into a civil war that acquired the form of ethnic
and confessional  armed confrontation. This escalation was
the result of the option of the most “entrepreneurial”
technocrats and bureaucrats of the collective owners' class
in all six Yugoslav Republics to re-privatise social
ownership that was nationalised after the World War II, and
to build internationally recognised nation states with
violent means. The new-old ruling class set out to deprive
the great majority of the social property’s “co-owners” of
their at least formal constitutional right, still existing
in 2002, to the control of the conditions of their
reproduction. It hoped through such primary accumulation of
big capital, to secure for itself  and for its descendants
the safer self-reproduction source than it was in the past
the mechanism of nomination to commanding positions in state
economic, political and cultural apparatus, from the side of
higher functionaries of the state-party nomenclature. The
violent nature of this process can not be basically altered
even through the “more just” but “snail-slow” method of
privatisation through vouchers free distribution to all
adult citizens. The voucher method could have allowed,
however, if other protective measures were
institutionalised, that greater part of national wealth
remains in the hands of the national bourgeoisie. This is
important since national bourgeoisie aspiring to creation of
the national market basis for the accumulation of capital is
systemically induced to implement some kind of social
programs.

A significant part of both technocratic and bureaucratic
fraction of the former “nomenclature” as well as the nouveau
riche new private businesspersons, are not developing into
national bourgeoisie. They are predominantly oriented
towards trade and speculative capital. They are ready to
play in essence compradore role of mediation in the process
of sell-off of national wealth and cheap local work forces’
and raw materials’ exploitation in the interests of
multinational corporate and bank capital. The fact that
compradore bourgeoisie facilitates transfer of national
public wealth and resources to foreign investors, justifies
Argentinean Nestor Gorojovsky in calling the “compradore”
(Spanish: buying)  bourgeoisie, the “vendadore” (Spanish:
selling) bourgeoisie.

b) External factors
Among the external factors, the most important is the
already mentioned option of the ruling classes of the only
military block remaining from the Cold War era, NATO, to
seek the way out from the falling rates of profit crisis
through implementation of overtly offensive strategy of
expanding their sphere of resources’ control toward the
European East.

Within this wider context it must be explained why was
Yugoslavia attacked the most violently of all former
socialist European countries. The answer is contained in the
fact that after the fall of the Berlin wall the ruling
classes of the Western winners and losers of W.W.II reunited
under the domination of USA in NATO, and did not need
Yugoslavia  anymore  as the “window” of the West in the
East. Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia comprising
six federal units used to be the only country outside the
big powers’ blocks in the South Eastern Europe. Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia constituted in 1992 as the state of
continuity of a founding member of UN and as a community-
union of the republics of Serbia and Montenegro,  became
also the only country in which a socialist party came to
power after the historic turning point of the Berlin wall
fall. It preserved the social ownership inherited from the
self-management period a constitutional category on the same
footing with the private, state and other forms of
collective property. In spite of wide discrepancy between
normatively proclaimed socialist principles of social
justice and democracy and real tendency of oligarchic
distribution of social wealth and power, the ruling
Socialist Party’s legislation still guaranteed workers voice
in the management of social enterprises. It also provided
for preservation of certain advantages and empowerment of
the employed in the process of “ownership transformation” or
privatisation, much greater in comparison to legislation in
former “real socialist” states of Europe.

The sovereign non-aligned Yugoslavia,  with a strong social
sector, widespread social safety network and considerable
rights of its citizens to participate in determination of
the direction of their economy,  became an obstacle on the
path of the eastward expansion of TNC and financial
oligarchy’s hegemony for the third time just in the twenties
century. The embroil of an authentic alternative model of
social organisation of production had to be eliminated to
make the way free for uniform imposition of the IMF
neoliberal model. Expansionist forces had to conquer the
control of Yugoslavia’s important geostrategic position of a
natural and fertile Eurasian Land Bridge containing
important water traffic arteries and mineral riches.


Social instruments of eastward expansion of western capital

The financial oligarchy organised around  NATO seeks to
realise the main aims of its eastward expansion applying the
age old imperial technique: divide et impera.  Unchallenged
control of material and human resources of a given region by
external powers is made easy after they succeed to intensify
social conflicts between internal social groups. Formerly
united and sovereign states thus become fractured into
little dependent and destitute (neo)colonies that can not
support themselves. Pre-existing co-operation in the region
is destroyed, in order that the new “partnership” for
“peace” and “stability” be imposed by the US dominated
imperialist powers and in their interest, causing a complex
disaster of catastrophic proportions in the entire region
and beyond.

The main instruments employed during this protracted
destructive process of external intervention and choosing
sides in internal social crisis and conflicts, include
economic, covert military, overt diplomatic, mass media,
(il)legal and other forms of aggression. The instrument of
overt military aggression is resorted to if the preceding
means prove to be insufficient for the realisation of the
financial oligarchy’s goals.

Economic instruments

The TNC and financial oligarchy first resorted to various
economic instruments of aggression against Yugoslavia, like
in the case of attack on all weaker states. In this phase,
the primary aim is to obtain their “opening” to foreign
capital and adaptation of local social relations and
institutions to the needs of  its accumulation. Concrete
U.S. objectives towards Yugoslavia were stated in the 1984
National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 133,  that
mainly elaborated a two years older NSDD 64 on Eastern
Europe directive,  calling for "expanded efforts to promote
'quiet revolution' to overthrow Communist governments and
parties" while integrating the countries of Eastern Europe
into a “market-oriented economy” (Gervasi, Sean, 1992-93:
"Germany, US and the Yugoslav Crisis", Covert Action
Quarterly, No. 43, Winter).

The culmination of the macroeconomic reforms imposed by IMF
from 1980 that exacerbated the stagnation crisis and
instigated the fracturing of the Yugoslav Federation, was
reached in 1989/1990, under the government of the Prime
Minister Ante Markovic. The IMF experts urged his government
to redirect all federal state revenues to meet the demands
of creditors for payment of much increased debt interest
rates.  Conditions for reprogramming of the debt included a
currency devaluation, wage freeze, sharp cuts in government
spending, liberalisation of foreign investment and trade.
Simultaneously, the World Bank strongly suggested the
passing of the bankruptcy law that provoked the closing down
of more than 1000 socially owned industrial companies and a
half of the socially owned banking sector in a matter of
months,  leaving some 600,000 people without a job and
threatening another million workers to be declared
“redundant”. These “shock therapy” measures produced 21%
fall in industrial production and 41% fall in real wages
(World Bank, 1991).

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