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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Dec. 19, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Editorial: Workers and the Yugoslavia protests

The imperialist media can't help but show their disappointment. They had been building up excitement over the opposition demonstrations in Yugoslavia, portraying them as a tide for "democracy" that would sweep away what is left of socialist state structures there.

What the West wanted to see most of all was some worker participation in the demonstrations, like in Poland in the 1980s. The media reported that workers in "independent" trade unions would walk out of the plants.

But it didn't happen. In one big plant with thousands of workers, a score milled around the gates but didn't even come outside. That was the full extent of it.

Western reporters questioned some workers. Why didn't they join the demonstrations? The answer: because we don't want to be used for someone else's political agenda.

It's a full decade since the forces of counter-revolution-which included U.S. agencies, the Catholic Church and other reactionaries-were able to manipulate "Solidarity" in Poland into a large force that masked the anti-worker character of events. The Polish workers who joined it got nothing but capitalist restructuring-layoffs, higher prices and the end of a great many social benefits. Its leader, Lech Walesa, is now despised by most of his former followers.

The Polish government had long pursued a contradictory policy. It tried to placate a bourgeois opposition at home and abroad by opening up to Western banks. Its debt to the International Monetary Fund grew and grew, until the bankers demanded in the early 1980s that Warsaw raise food prices and cut wages in order to service the debt. When the government implemented this bankers' program, the workers were dismayed and quickly fell prey to being swept into the counter-revolution.

Can this scenario be replayed in Yugoslavia? Certainly that has been the imperialists' intent. They helped inflame nationalist passions and the secession of several republics. Then they impoverished what was left of Yugoslavia with sanctions. They hope that by now the workers are so unhappy with the steep decline in their living standards that they will join whoever opposes the regime.

But so far the workers have not done this. Even the media here admit that the demonstrators have been mostly students and professionals. It's a hopeful sign. Because this movement is led by elements whose interests are opposed to those of the working class. The Yugoslav workers don't need U.S. or German transnational companies and banks running their country-and that's what they'll get unless the counter-revolutionary tide is turned around.

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