MIA > Archive > Draper > Titoism
From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 2, 9 January 1950, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
We have been considering, in the latest articles in this series, various forms of pro-Titoist whitewash. That is only one side of the question of Titoism. The positive side of Titoism, for us, lies in the objective effect of the Yugoslav heresy upon the edifice of Stalinism. We began the series with that and return to it now: Titoism as “the beginning of the end of Stalinism.”
The effect of the break in shaking up the whole Stalinist empire has already been emphasized. Its objective effect in shaking up the structure of Stalinist IDEOLOGY deserves to be mentioned separately under the same general head.
What has to be stressed here is that it has such an effect in spite of the fact that the official ideology of the Titoists is thoroughly Stalinist, not because of any fancied tendencies within the Titoist bureaucracy to return to pristine Leninism. The identity between Titoist and other Stalinist ideology holds in all basic respects; the Titoists’ appeal to Lenin against Stalin is only on such question as the Stalinist attempt to make out that “Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism” requires the subordination of all other “socialist” countries to Mother Russia – that is, only where such differences are required by the national-Stalinism of the Belgrade theoreticians (primarily Moshe Piyade and Djilas).
Otherwise, the Titoists claim not without justice to be better Stalinists than Stalin in their manhandling of Leninism. Thus Djilas wrote in Borba in September, arguing against the idea that a world, socialist state is possible rather than separate national socialist states:
“Today it is common knowledge that there can be no simultaneous world revolution, and so there can be no world socialist state either, no world dictatorship of the proletariat, and no world Soviet Federated Republic. To assert the contrary means to cull quotations from Lenin at will, tearing them from their context, for it was exactly Lenin who replaced the older Marxist theory of world revolution, as outdated in the imperialist stage of capitalism, by the theory and practice of the feasibility of the development of socialism in one country.”
Even when arguing on the grounds of democracy for the right of self-determination, the reader will notice Djilas’ basically Stalinist thinking: the idea of self-determination of the nation is explicitly made identical with that of the ruling party which is also the sole existing party. After emphasizing that relations between countries must be voluntary, Djilas writes:
“The attitude of the working class on the question of self-determination has very great importance. That is clear because the workers must follow the party leadership, and if the party is not equal, self-determination is not the expression of the free will of the workers. According to that, if a party is not really equal in rights, its policy will inevitably be subordinated to another party, that is, to another country. A voluntary agreement between the parties in power is one of the main conditions for the reaching of a real equality of the peoples in the development of socialism.” (Our emphasis – H.D.)
Again, a better statement of totalitarian gleichschaltung in all aspects of social life could not be found in Russian sources to beat the following from Tito’s Macedonian organ, Flaka Vallaznimit (an editorial in September):
“The economic, cultural and social life of the people is thus systematized and being regulated. Under the leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party headed by Comrade Tito the economic and social life of the people is developing similarly throughout our Fatherland, not only in working-class and industrial centers, but in the most backward parts of the country.”
Today, as I write, the New York Times reports the decree of the Yugoslav CP Central Committee for the wholesale rewriting of all textbooks (undertaken, says the Central Committee with its full share of the amazing Stalinist penchant for 1984-type doublethink, to combat “standardized ideas”!).
It is not from this direction that the Titoist impact on Stalinist ideology comes. It comes from a simple source that even Tito’s standardized textbooks cannot eliminate: the mere fact that ALL Stalinist ideas are called into question as soon as ANY one of them is called into question. This is true of any totalitarian ideological structure, which must either be swallowed whole or be rejected if tasted mouthful by mouthful.
The power break forced the Tito-Stalinists first to question and then to reject the infallibility of their Pope in the Kremlin. Their need is immediately for a new orthodoxy and a new Pope (therefore the new standardized textbooks, for one thing) but this is simply impossible of achievement in one blow, on the heels of a rejection of the old.
Thus, for example, the Rajk trial in Budapest, where the confessions “proved” that Tito is an agent of American imperialism, must be rejected as a frameup; this is not a matter of ideology. But if the Budapest confessions were a staged farce, extorted by the GPU, the question is inevitably raised of other confession trials. It did not take the Budapest trial to raise this question in the mind of Tito or his leading bureaucratic henchman; they knew and know the truth of the Moscow Trials as well as we.
But in the mind of a Yugoslav Stalinist worker, who has been educated by Tito to revile the Trotskyist-Bukharinist-mad-dog-saboteurs with references to the Moscow Trials, the mind-wrench is bound to be painful. As was widely publicized, Moshe Piyade was forced to make the connection himself. Down in the ranks, how great must be the questioning about the old Bolsheviks who were “proved” to be traitors, about the generation which made the Russian Revolution and which was slaughtered by Stalin in the course of purges which (it is now revealed to them in a passing paragraph in Borba) were based on Budapest-type confessions?
Tito himself was forced to make a speech in which he explicitly cautioned that, in spite of all, Russia must still be considered a socialist country and stressed that its treatment of Yugoslavia, while bad, could not affect the “building of socialism” in Russia itself. He was saying: Don’t carry our criticisms too far!
But they cannot help being carried further. The official editorial writer in Flaka Vallaznimit gets carried away in August and indites: “The intervention of the Cominform is comparable to the action of the Pope of Rome against the Communists of the Catholic world. It is a backward step, an anti-revolutionary and mercenary act.” Djilas wrote: “The unprovoked blockade of Yugoslavia is like nothing the USSR has undertaken even against capitalist states, and is a rare phenomenon even in the history of capitalism.” What ideas do these heated denunciations stir in the minds of the ranks who want to be Leninist communists and not merely Stalinists?
This may serve to concretize one way in which the inevitable objective effect of the break takes form. Especially in totalitarian structures, any split at the top creates a break in the dyke through which an opportunity is afforded willy-nilly for the surge from below to pour through, and this in turn tears at both sides of the break as it rushes through. This is as true in the ideological sphere as in the case of mass-action movements.
In January, 1905, the priest Gapon led a mob of St. Petersburg workmen to the czar’s palace to petition the beloved Father of His People for reforms, preceded by an ikon. The troops filed upon the demonstrators, a thousand dead bodies covered the square on that “Bloody Sunday,” and all Russia rose in fury. The masses learned more than the priest Gapon wanted to teach them.
The reader will be able to make all the necessary abstractions from this analogy, since Tito is not simply an edition of Gapon, but the Yugoslav people will also learn more from their experience than their present leader wants to teach them. The same is even more true of the pro-Tito Stalinists outside the Russian empire, who are not under the physical constraint of the Tito dictatorship.
Gapon himself disappeared in the whirlwind: “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.”
(Next week: The defense of Yugoslavia)
Last updated on 25 February 2023