During last spring’s brutal U.S./NATO airborne assault on Yugoslavia conducted in the name of democracy and human rights, some critics on the Left pointed to the likelihood that oil and other exploitable resources in Kosovo, or closeby, may have had much more to do with the war’s actual motivation. The argument went roughly as follows: Yugoslavia – or the Serbian-Montenegrin rump that was left of it after years of Western-sponsored destabilization and dismantlement – however enfeebled still remains as a somewhat independent outpost in the region, following in the Third World tradition which Yugoslavia under Marshall Tito had helped to initiate. To the eastward of the Balkans lie the vast reservoirs of petroleum around the Caspian Sea, increasingly subject, since the break-up of the Soviet Union, to the exploitation of Western oil companies. These companies want security for their capital investments, specifically, for the pipeline routes westward they are planning to build to pump out the oil. Yugoslavia was a possible roadblock to those plans that had to be eliminated. Hence, the vilification of the Serbs and the Milosevic regime. (Nothing ever said, needless to say, about the blatant human rights violations or the near-total lack of democracy in Western-compliant oil states such as Indonesia, Saudi Arabia or Kuwait.) Hence, bombs had to start falling from the skies despite the fact that thousands of ordinary people might be maimed and killed -- and they were.

     A rather simple, straightforward argument. Marxists are sometimes accused of being “economic reductionists”. There are always complicating factors, of course. But often this type of explanation turns out to work, precisely because capitalists and capitalist-run states themselves are economic reductionists, i.e., their behavior is determined largely by the dictates of profit-seeking to which all other values and interests ar