We have to remind orthodox Trotskyism that it did not support the European movement for national liberation when the masses were in motion. Now it proposes to support the national state of Yugoslavia in the struggle for national independence against the Kremlin. This is the state which suppressed the mass movement, subordinated it to the movements of the Russian Army and kept it from making contact with the European mass movement. The policy stands on its head.
In reality it is the criterion of state-property which explains this consistently false policy. Unless it is a question of nationalized property vs. private property, orthodox Trotskyism cannot see and interpret the movement of the proletariat. The moment nationalized property is involved, it starts looking for the mass pressures and actions to explain this nationalization. Compare with this the policy of "Johnson-Forest". Whereas in 1943 the Shachtmanites plunged headlong into the liberation movement under the slogans of struggle for democracy and national independence, "Johnson-Forest" took the position that the proletariat and the party should enter the national liberation movement and struggle for proletarian power under the general slogan of the Socialist United States of Europe.* Thus, right from the beginning, we posed the struggle inside the Yugoslav movement against the national policy of Titoism.1 That is still the basis of our position today.
For orthodox Trotskyism, on the other hand, then as now, the Socialist United States of Europe remains an abstraction. The International is now busily debating when the revolution took place in Yugoslavia. Characteristically, it does not occur to the debaters to ask themselves how this highly exceptional, extremely silent revolution took place unnoticed by the leaders of the revolutionary movement. That would be bad enough. But in 1945 or 1946 or 1947 (etc., etc.) this revolution presumably took place unnoticed by the proletariat in the surrounding countries of Europe and the rest of the world.
However, what concerns us now is the situation in Yugoslavia.
Extensive documents have been published by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) itself. "Johnson-Forest" do not for one single moment take these documents as true representations of the history of Yugoslavia for the last ten years. As well accept the documents of Stalinist bureaucrats as the history of Russia. But they are the basis of the politics and discussion of all tendencies in the Fourth International today. We accept them therefore to the degree that in themselves, they represent, if not the history of Yugoslavia on the whole, a clear representation of the theory and politics of the Yugoslav leaders.
Titoism is pure conscious consistent Stalinism. Having a model in both the theory and practice of Russia already established, Titoism has been able to achieve in a few short years the counter-revolutionary climax which it took Stalin nearly two decades to accomplish. Stalin had to struggle against the traditions and remnants not of capitalism but of Leninism. Tito began as a finished Stalinist.
Stalinism in Russia provided the CPY with the model for disciplining the workers by transforming the trade unions from organs of struggle by the workers into organs of mobilization of the workers to speed up production. The CPY explains why it destroyed the trade unions as militant class organizations of the working class:
"Under the conditions in the new Yugoslavia, after the nationalization of industry, and as a result of the quick tempo of socialist building, the workers' class is no longer a class of bare-handed proletarians which must fight a daily political and economic struggle, which must fight for more bread. This class today - in alliance with the other working masses - holds the authority - holds the greater part of the means of production, and its future depends in the first place on itself, on its work, and on its unity with other toilers, on the mobilization of all toilers in socialist building".2
This is the exact opposite of Leninism. It is pure Stalinism. The independence of the working class, its struggles to protect its material and spiritual interests, its leadership of the other working masses, its determination of policy - all these are the mortal enemy of the one-party bureaucratic administrative state and in the sacred name of nationalized property, all these are to be destroyed.
To achieve this statification of the trade unions, the CPY "liquidated the old guild-like dispersion of the union organizations, united manual and intellectual workers into one organization, and mobilized them in the building of the country, in the building of socialism".3
This unity of manual and intellectual workers is a sure sign of the Labor Front of the "corporate state". It is a means of subordinating the workers to the petty-bourgeois intellectuals and administrators. Management spies, Stakhanovites, time-study men - the whole apparatus of supervision and domination is brought into the trade unions. They become the representatives of the state inside the unions. The trade unions then have the task to "develop the new relationship of the working class and the working masses in general toward work ... organize socialist competition and shockwork, rationalization and innovation ... fight for work discipline, to improve the quality of work, to guard the people's property, to struggle against damage, against absenteeism, against careless work and similar things".4
While carrying on these disciplinary functions the trade unions are "to explain to the working masses that such a struggle is in their own interests, in the interest of the working masses in general".5 Cripps and Attlee, in capitalist Britain, would consider three-fourths of their troubles solved if they could instruct the British labor unions, suitably poisoned with "socialist intelligentsia," to carry out the economic plans of the state. Tito, the Stalinist in the one-party bureaucratic administrative state, considers that it is his right to instruct the trade unions accordingly, and all because the property is state-owned.
The Titoists leave the workers in no uncertainty as to what all this means. It is resistance to speed up which is involved. "It is necessary to point out that in many trade union organizations there are still many remnants of social-democratic conceptions and opportunism which is manifested on the one hand in resistance to fulfilment of the plan and in resistance to realistic norms, to competition, and on the other hand in exaggerated demands in regard to pay".6
To these miserable elements no mercy will be shown. As in Stalinist Russia, the basis has been laid for war to the end against them by placing them in the realm of social-democratic, i.e., capitalist ideology, in opposition to socialist building. They are the enemy.
The organizers of increased production, on the other hand, are the cadres. These have caught on quickly because as the whole history of industry shows, that is not hard to learn. In fact (this was written by Kardelj in 1948), they had too "correctly grasped the organizing role of the trade unions in production". "In practice, in carrying out the economic-organizational tasks of the trade unions, our trade union cadres often go to extremes". They "forgot" certain "other equally important tasks". And what did they forget? They simply forgot "concern for the welfare of the workers, struggle for better living conditions for them and work on the political elevation of the working masses".7
And why is such forgetfulness harmful and why must it be corrected? Is it because only by this means will a new economy superior to capitalism be developed? Not at all. It is because not to be concerned about these things would weaken the respect of the proletariat for the state authority.
The trade unions are the "direct organizers of the struggle of the working class for the increase in production". But "the workers must feel that their trade union organization is concerned with their welfare".8 Imagine the denunciations that would fall from orthodox Trotskyism on the head of Reuther if he dared to say, as indeed he would not at this stage, that it is the business of Reutherite cadres to make the workers "feel" that the union is concerned with their welfare and working conditions. But transfer private property into state-property, and forthwith this becomes "proletarian policy". This is Stalinism and nothing else but Stalinism.
Lenin insisted on the need for the proletariat to protect itself against its own state. The CPY labels resistance by the proletariat to fulfilment of the plan as "incorrect," "unfriendly," "backward". This is typical Stalinist phraseology and in Russia is accompanied by keeping millions in the forced labor camps where these backward elements are "re-educated". The Titoists ask for "healthy criticism by the working masses through the mass organizations as regards the work of the state organs, economic and social institutions, etc". The phrasing is accurate and well-chosen. Individual workers and groups of workers must not complain. They can only criticize through the mass organizations, i.e., through the trade union cadres. Resistance to speed up, for example, leads to the conclusion that one "does not want to see where the real interests of the working class lie". It is obvious that criticism by such a worker would be unhealthy, unhealthy for the state and no doubt unhealthy for this "irresolute," "unfriendly" and "backward" worker.
Competition is the Titoist method for intensifying the speed of production. Again Stakhanovism in Stalinist Russia provided the model for the CPY.
On New Year's Eve in 1947 Marshall Tito boasted that "this spirit of competition has begun to penetrate into our state administration and other institutions as well". The bureaucracy introduced its own special type of incentive pay. By great activity in speed up and shockwork, a worker could get out of the proletariat altogether and join the bureaucracy. As the Titoists explain: "Factory and workshop department heads, and often directors of factories and enterprises are being culled from the ranks of shockworkers".9
The factory directors selected in this manner provided the nucleus for the stratification in production, formalized in the New Five-Year Plan of 1947. Again the administrative plan of Stalinist Russia provided the model. The CPY consciously organizes production according to the principle of the hierarchy in production which, as we have explained, Marx analyzed as the heart of capitalist authority. In introducing the Five-Year Plan it writes:
"Planned economy of itself imposes the need of a planned distribution of labor-power, the planned training and development of technical cadres".10
The creation of "our people's, our socialist intelligentsia," which Stalin had to wait until the 1936 Constitution to systematize, is organized by Tito after a few years of power.
Article 14 of the New Five-Year Plan of 1947 is entitled "Work and Cadres". It reads:
"1. To ensure a steady increase in the productivity of work by introducing the greatest possible mechanization, new methods of work, new technological processes and norms of work, by improving the qualifications of the workers, and by thoroughly utilizing working hours (Emphasis added).11
There must be no waste of time of the workers at work. The passage goes on to repeat the Stalinist theory with regard to the intensification of the rate of exploitation:
"... thus creating the conditions for an increase of wages and better remuneration for workers of all categories. In connection with this to perfect a system of progressive payments for work over and above the norm, as well as a system of premia for engineering and technical staffs, for the fulfilment of the plan" (Emphasis added).12
Not only the planning of incentive pay for the workers. Planning of incentive pay also to the bureaucracy in order to inspire them to intensify the exploitation of the workers.
The Plan calls for special training of an expanded administrative cadre:
"3. to ensure the increase of the cadres with secondary professional training from 65,000 in 1946 to 150,000 in 1951, effecting this by opening new technical secondary schools and enlarging existing ones...
"4. to ensure an increase in the number of experts with university qualifications to an average of 5,000 annually... To carry out a planned enrolment in all faculties and professional schools, thus providing the most important sectors with the necessary cadres".13
For Yugoslavia as for Stalinist Russia, this social inequality is not a question of enjoying cultural privileges over and above those of the workers. The purpose of the Plan is to "direct all technically trained intelligentsia toward creative work," i.e., to devise new methods for the administration of the proletariat against the very conditions of large-scale production. The Titoists, having enunciated the magic phrase, state-property, think they have no such problems.
The political economy of Titoism is the political economy of Stalinism.
Stalinist theory within the last decade, for reasons that we have explained, has developed the idea that the law of value also exists in socialism. The CPY follows this faithfully, claiming that the law of value is "fully under control" because there is "state control" and "market regulation". Like the Stalinists, they claim that there is "no surplus value in the socialist sector" because there is no private appropriation of surplus labor. Then comes a remarkable sentence. We are told: "Surplus labor has the odd property that it can be materialized in new instruments of labor which make for greater productivity in labor: hence a spiral tendency".14
The Marxist general law of capitalist accumulation consists precisely of the terrible effects upon the proletariat and ultimately upon production of this very "spiral tendency" of "surplus labor". The "oddity" of this surplus labor under capitalism, as distinguished from previous societies, is precisely its materialization into instruments of labor which dominate over the proletariat. Kidric's description of the process as "odd" merely highlights the obvious.15 The main aim of the bureaucracy is identical with that of the bourgeoisie under private property capitalism: the acceleration of this spiral tendency of materializing surplus labor into new instruments of labor for the intensification of the rate of exploitation.
At the same time Kidric knows from his Russian model that "socialist accumulation" consists not only of exploitation, but also of the state "sharing" the workers' wages through taxation. Kidric states that "so long as there is surplus labor on the one hand . . . and forces of production on the other which are not so developed as to make it possible to raise the standard of living as we should like to, to build new factories, implements of labor, etc., to the extent and in the place where we should like to, there exists a possibility of incorrect usage, a possibility of incorrect distribution of surplus labor".16
This is not mere talk about economic theory. It is the justification for adding to the exploitation of the workers in the process of production, the most merciless method of taxation the modern world has known. In the New International of December, 1942, and January-February, 1943, Forest has made a study of the turnover tax in Stalinist Russia and has shown how this tax, levied chiefly on consumption goods of the poor, supplied 60% to 75% of the national budget.17 The tax was graduated, the highest tax was on bread, leading to a ten-fold increase in the sale price. One of the lowest taxes in the consumption goods field was on silk, and it was a mere one percent on means of production goods. It is upon this model that there was fastened upon the Yugoslav people in 1947 the turnover tax on goods, a "typically socialist form of socialist monetary accumulation tried out in practice in the Soviet Union". As a result of this turn-over tax, "state accumulation has grown in 1947 to 276% as compared with 1946".18
Speed up in production, planned organization of cadres to utilize thoroughly the working hours of the proletariat, accumulation of surplus value, domination of new instruments of labor over the proletariat - this is the mode of production in Yugoslavia; and from this is inseparable the one-party administrative state and the party of the bureaucracy.
The Yugoslav communist party leaders have known from the beginning that they have one "basic problem - the problem of authority".19
After the invasion of German Fascism, there never was such an opportunity in the world so far in which to establish a genuine Soviet State. But the CPY, faced with the destruction of the old bourgeois state and seeing further that it would face the revolutionary proletariat and the revolutionary masses, from the very beginning set out to establish the most powerful bourgeois state that it could. It established "a unified state authority" - "from top to bottom... firmly linked into one unified system on the basis of vertical ties between the various branches of state authority and administration and the lower organs, whose duty it is within the framework of the competence of the higher organs to carry out all the tasks which they put before them".20
This which Lenin feared is what the CPY sought. They were plotting this as far back as 1943. Over and over again they boast that they were the first of the Eastern European countries to achieve the formation of the state apparatus.
Marx on the commune and Lenin in every page of his writings on the Russian Revolution saw as the first task of the revolution the mobilization of the masses as the beginning of the destruction of all state authority. The strong centralized state was necessary only against the exploiters and against the enemy abroad. But in Yugoslavia the exploiters had been destroyed as never before. Yugoslavia was surrounded by friendly states and enjoyed the powerful protection of the Red Army. The powerful state authority was therefore directed against the mass movement and could have been directed against nothing else. It is not only that this state authority expressed the instinctive self-defense of the petty-bourgeoisie against the revolutionary proletariat, a lesson which Marxism has spent so many thousands of pages trying to teach. It is that the Titoists had a model. They knew what they wanted. They are Stalinists.
They modelled and still model themselves on the one-party state, the bureaucratic plan and the party of Stalin. They insist on the differences between the development of Yugoslavia and the Russian Revolution. But they give credit where credit is due and say that they have been "governed by the rich experiences from the development and work of the authorities of the U.S.S.R".21 Let orthodox Trotskyism explain this.
Any workers' state, particularly in a small peasant country, in sheer self-defense has to establish the independence of the proletariat as the first safeguard of the proletarian revolution and of the proletarian character of the party. Leninism established this by weighting the vote of the proletariat 5 to 1 against the vote of the peasantry. Titoism sought from the outset to dissolve the class independence of the workers in a People's Front. The Titoists tell us themselves how they sought to strengthen "the alliance of the working class with the working peasantry, the people's intelligentsia and other toilers, and with all patriotic forces within the country, an alliance which was given organizational form in the People's Front".22
Note now the characteristically Stalinist method of analysis which we have earlier explained as based upon the necessity to disguise the class nature of the bureaucracy and the state. The Titoists say that the only people excluded were "anti-people's elements", the category in which Stalinism has always lumped all those who disagreed with its policies. Coalition with political parties played no significant role in this People's Front because with the destruction of the old national bourgeois state apparatus, the objective framework of the old political parties had been destroyed. This facilitated the Titoist aim of extending the mass base of the movement beyond the working class. Bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements could enter into the People's Front on an equal basis, unidentified with their old political banners.
To destroy the class independence of the workers was to facilitate the control and authority over the workers by the party. The CPY boasts that "there was no other force outside the CPY which could unite the peoples of Yugoslavia and the working masses". The Titoists fought "determinedly against too sudden changes which might have narrowed the mass base of the National Liberation uprising". "The basic thing in the People's Front is that it is a broad form of political organization". This "eases the realization of the leading role of the party".23
From this broad base the Party could recruit the most active, militant and devoted fighters, regardless of class affiliation, to form the cadre and the executive apparatus of the state for the next stage of the counter-revolution. Once the objective basis for class differentiation is buried in the united mass movement, the only basis for differentiation of policy is subjective and opportunistic, behind which loyalty to the party and the bureaucratic apparatus can be disguised as devotion to the proletarian revolution. The type of "initiative," "activity," "devotion," "efficiency," "loyalty" required is that which enables the petty-bourgeoisie to rise to the top and administer the rest of the population. Instead of the working class and its vanguard leading the masses, the party cadres selected from the all-inclusive mass movement rule the working class. The party becomes the apparatus for the one-party bureaucratic-administrative state.
During the trade union discussion and afterwards, Lenin directed the most violent internal polemic of the whole October Revolution against the bureaucracy and the militarism which had grown up as a result of the need for mobilizing the whole country as a war machine. This played a great role in the destruction of proletarian power in the Russian Revolution. Precisely these war experiences had obviously assisted the CPY in its frantic attempt to establish the state and the centralized power. The Titoists themselves boast that with the end of the war "the new authority then already had a firm skeleton, the new state apparatus, grown and tried in the fires of war, with new tested cadres which had already attained quite a wealth of experience during the war from the work of the people's authorities on the liberated territory".24 This powerful state was the means whereby they would rule the economy.
If we want a demonstration of Lenin's thesis that even confiscation without the power of the proletariat means tyranny for the proletariat, we have an example in Yugoslavia. The statification of production was carried out from beginning to end by the bureaucratic-administrative one-party state. Even before the final defeat of Nazi Germany, the property of the collaborators was confiscated by the "unified people's authority" at the III Session of the Anti-Fascist Council of the national Liberation of Yugoslavia in 1944. The steady strengthening of the state apparatus made it possible to complete nationalization formally in December, 1946, by the same means. The workers remained at their benches. The Titoists announce this triumphantly:
"nationalization was well prepared organizationally and was carried out in such a way that sabotage and damage were made impossible. All enterprises in the entire country were taken over on the same day and almost at the same time without the stopping of production" (Emphasis added).25
The Titoists first suppressed the mass movement and then liquidated the bourgeoisie.
Following their model, Stalinism, in theory and in practice, the Titoists declare that this nationalization is socialism. They say: "The confiscation of property. . . possessed in essence the character of a socialist measure. Why? Firstly, because it was carried out by the people's authority as the authority of the revolutionary working people headed by the working class. Secondly, because confiscated property passed into the hands of the people in general, into the hands of the working people's state as the manager of this property, and therefore it was clear from the outset that it would crystallize into property of a purely socialist type".26 Note here the careful substitution of the people in general for the revolutionary workers and the immediate substitution of the state for the people in general.
As in Stalinist Russia, every measure against the workers is justified in the name of socialism, because where the working class - that is to say, the people in general; that is to say, the working people's state; that is to say, the manager of the property - owns the means of production, the workers have no interest separate and apart from those of the state, which is in reality the manager of the property, which is to say, the people in general, etc., etc.
The Fourth International believes that when the Titoists broke with Stalin, Tito thereby began to move to the Left. We stand absolutely bewildered before this kind of Marxism. How could Tito or anyone in his situation move "to the Left"? The Titoist state was modelled upon the Russian Stalinist state. Tito had now lost his international connections. It was now Yugoslavia pursuing the identical methods of the one-party bureaucratic-administrative state of Plan in a very single, very small, very backward country, confronted by Western imperialism on the one hand, and with the hostility of the whole of Stalinist-controlled Eastern Europe facing it on the other. The theory of Trotskyism from the beginning had been that it was precisely such circumstances which had driven Stalinist Russia to degeneration. What belief in miracles is it to think that at this time, Tito, professed and practicing Stalinist, would move "to the Left"? The only policy the Titoists could follow was the strengthening of the dictatorship of the one-party, bureaucratic-administrative state of the Plan; increase in discipline over the workers in order to atone for the difficulties of isolation in the only way that the bureaucracy can; the accelerated spiral tendency of accumulation to maintain some place of some kind for Yugoslavia on the world market.
The Titoists were compelled to accelerate all tendencies they had hitherto followed. But in characteristic Stalinist fashion, they combined this with the most extravagant demagogy.*** It is precisely the break with Stalin which has made the Titoist state more Stalinist than ever.
In 1949 a New Law on People's Committees was elaborated. Behind all the phrases on increased participation of the people, one theme dominated. It was the need for "legality and discipline within the state administrative apparatus� these are the two powerful means for strengthening the state system as a whole".27
"Legality and discipline" - legality for the state, discipline for the workers.
The growth of the Soviet state terrified Lenin. Kardelj's report on the New Law reaffirms the counter-revolutionary Stalinist thesis that in a socialist state "the administrative apparatus is greatly expanded and becomes more complicated".28 Precisely because the problem is not only regulation and control but economic management, the report repeats without equivocation the prerogatives in production of the state authority. "It is necessary to combine the administrative sectors as firmly as possible along vertical lines, not only in the sense of subordinating the lower organs to the higher, and seeing to it that the directives of the higher organs are carried out, but also in the sense of making the higher organs more helpful to the lower".29
The vertical line - that is to say, domination of the people's committees by the centralized state.
The bureaucracy sought - not like Lenin for new sources of strength among the deep masses of the workers - in its crisis, it sought to strengthen the state authority by new recruitments from those who have shown readiness in the factories to exceed the norms in production.
Having now piled up bureaucracy upon bureaucracy in the very vitals of production and politics, the Titoists indulge in the characteristic Stalinist "self-criticism" of bureaucratic tendencies as rudeness, inefficiency, red-tape, etc. A report by Tito in December, 1946, had already defined bureaucratism as "different incorrectnesses," among them, "The incorrect attitude toward peoples, often toward the best workers, both manual and intellectual," "incorrectnesses toward national property, squandering, etc.".30
Kardelj in 1949 chides the cadres for bureaucratism in the characteristic Stalinist manner. "It is necessary to declare war to the bitter end" against "a bureaucratic soulless and rude attitude toward the citizenry; absence of efforts ... to improve the appearance of the buildings and premises of the people's committees, etc.".31
Against "bureaucratically minded persons" the criticism and self-criticism of the CPY is wearisomely resolute. It issues decrees for "decentralization". As long as the bureaucracy has its cadres at the core and head of every factory administration and people's committee, decentralization means the exact opposite of increased democracy and control by the workers. The ground is laid for the competition of factory against factory, as we have described it for Stalinist Russia. The Titoists issue decrees for workers' control of production. On the basis of "socialist competition," the Stalinist-Titoist mode of labor, workers control of production is shockworkers control of production. For the mass of workers, the perspective is intensified domination by the one-party bureaucratic-administrative state of the Plan.
The Yugoslav state was formed, not because of the European revolution but because of the power of the Red army. Backing up the CPY was the counter-revolutionary army which went through Europe, destroying the proletarian revolution, and above all, the very national liberation movement in Europe which was headed for a proletarian revolution, the Polish movement. The Warsaw insurrectionists were beheaded by Stalin and the Red Army. The Yugoslav state was formed with the assistance of Stalin and the Red Army. The Yugoslav leaders say so. They say so again and again:
"The increasingly strong international role of the USSR opened a perspective to small peoples also of not only being able to liberate themselves from the imperialist chain but of being able to preserve and develop further the revolutionary achievements of the National Liberation War".32
They cannot minimize the blanket of protection given by the Soviet Union:
"The new historic condition in the construction of our socialist economy consists in this - in view of the great victory of the Soviet Union over German fascism and its efforts to gain world domination, and in view of the inception of the new people's democracies, made possible by the victory of the Soviet Union, our revolution could not be encircled by capitalist neighbors, to the same threatening extent as was the case of the October Revolution".33
This is exactly the mentality of Stalinists all over the world. They cannot place the solution of the economic and political problems in the creative power of the proletariat. They are afraid of rival imperialisms. They do not depend on the proletarian revolution on an international scale. They seize the power when the Red army is at their backs.
The break with Stalin made it necessary for the CPY to find another international base to strengthen its hand against the Yugoslav proletariat. "Socialism in a single country" is only secondarily nationalist. Its class essence which it cannot abandon is bureaucratic domination over the proletariat. In this epoch all states must combine defense of their rule over their own proletariat with an international appeal to sections of the population in other countries. Yesterday Stalin combined collective security maneuvers with imperialist powers (League of nations, Fascist Germany, Churchill) with manipulations of the parties of the Comintern. Today, Tito combines his national security deals with American imperialism, participation in the UN and expansionist designs in the neighboring countries, with the call for a new internationalism. Every manipulation of the Third International by Stalin serves one purpose, defense of the one-party state and bureaucratic-administrative Plan of the Russian centralization of capital. Tito's present maneuvers in internationalism are a model of imitation. The theory of internationalism is the same in both cases: rally whatever forces are available on an international scale to support "socialist building" in Russia or very backward Yugoslavia and identify this with the advance of the world revolution. The defense of Yugoslavia attracts particularly those seeking an escape from the stranglehold of the two great masses of capital, without the world revolutionary perspective of revolutionary class struggle against the bureaucracy in each country.
As we wrote in October, 1949:
"The essence of the struggle can be seen by its effects upon the world working class movement. Whereas the labor lackeys of the Second International carefully refrained from any assistance to Ethiopia or Republican Spain, they are ready to support the bourgeoisie in stimulation of Tito's opposition to Stalin. The past and present of the Titoist party, in the present world crisis, make Tito a pole of attraction far more to the supporters of Western imperialism than to the genuinely revolutionary masses". ("No Support to Tito", Internal Bulletin, October, 1949).34
Stalinism has lived and can live only by the perpetual purging of elements in the bureaucracy, particularly those who occupy any prominence. Tito understood quite clearly that carrying out the policy of the Kremlin ends inevitably in one's own neck being in jeopardy. He knew this from his whole past association with the frame-ups and assassinations of the Kremlin, and the events in post-war Eastern Europe were bringing this home to him with a very intimate urgency.
This was the position that confronted the Titoist bureaucracy. Does any orthodox Trotskyist deny this? Objectively, the Titoist bureaucracy was caught between the Kremlin and the Yugoslav masses. The native bourgeoisie had been so thoroughly destroyed that the CPY had no buffer between it and the masses. It therefore faced this situation. Either to try to impose the Kremlin's demands upon the Yugoslav masses, which meant inevitably whether the demands were carried out or not, the sacrificing of substantial elements in the bureaucracy. (The more it imposed these demands on the Yugoslav masses, the less would it be able to use its mass base to defend itself against the inevitable purge.) Or to attempt to defy the Kremlin and lean for support on the masses in Yugoslavia and the rival imperialism, taking advantage of shifts in the world situation.
Tito was able to break with the Kremlin because he had a mass base. But precisely this situation poses the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary alternatives with extreme sharpness.
It is one thing to say that "Stalin's most pliant and devoted agents" were "forced into a struggle with the Kremlin in order to preserve their influence and leadership over the masses" (Fourth International, October, 1949, emphasis added).35 This leaves the door open to revolutionary struggle against the Titoist bureaucracy.
It is quite another to identify the revolutionary struggles of the Yugoslav masses with Tito 's attacks against the Kremlin and his break with Stalin. This opens the door to ever more uncritical support of Tito. It drives the Yugoslav masses in to national unity with the CPY bureaucracy in state power, encourages illusions regarding the mythical national independence of Yugoslavia, and bars the way to the only escape from Stalinist domination, the joint revolutionary struggles of the masses in Eastern Europe and Russia, against the Stalinist bureaucracy in all its forms and for the Socialist United States of Europe.
The importance of this is not only in relation to Yugoslavia. The contradictions of Stalinism are immense, and as the world crisis develops, will appear in a multitude of forms. Titoism is only one. It is the substitution of national unity against foreign domination with the bureaucracy in state power, for class struggle against that bureaucracy. The danger of support to Titoism is that it presupposes and fortifies the conception that the breakup of Stalinism will come from competing elements in the bureaucracy, and particularly from the national bureaucracies in state power, rather than from the mass revolutionary struggle against the bureaucracy as such.
The proletarian revolution against Stalinism will be of necessity from its very beginnings concretely international. The concretely nationalist and abstractly Internationalist orientation of Titoism, on the other hand, is not at all accidental and has its own logic. The CPY's efforts to maintain a mythical independence will land it either in the camp of Western imperialism or back in the Kremlin camp, even if to achieve this latter alternative, the bureaucratic cadre must rid itself of Tito, Kardelj, etc.
This is not abstract theory, speculation, or psychoanalysis of the CPY. In their own documents, published for all the world to see, since the split with Stalin, the Titoists themselves have proclaimed their aims, methods, and fundamental economic theories. They are Stalinist to the core: the one-party state, the bureaucratically administered plan, the export of petty-bourgeois liberalism for international consumption. Every step that they ask the world proletariat to take in their defense is for one purpose and one purpose only - to strengthen the position of the Yugoslav national capital on the world-market and the Yugoslav unified state authority over and against the Yugoslav masses. At the same time, every defense of its national capital, in the present struggle for world mastery between the two great masses of capital, only centralizes it further for attraction into one orbit when it is repelled from the other.
Such is the "Johnson-Forest" analysis of Yugoslavia. On reading The Invading Socialist Society some critics shrugged their shoulders and said that it had little connection with practical politics.36 We point out to them without malice that it is precisely from this analysis that we are able to give a strictly materialistic account of the economic, social and political development of Yugoslavia. On the other hand, the presumed practical politics of orthodox Trotskyism has resulted in this: that its whole analysis can be summed up in the question whether the leaders of the CPY are sincere or insincere in their protestations about democracy.
The debate now going on in the Fourth International as to when the revolution took place in Yugoslavia obviously does not involve us directly, since we do not believe that any revolution took place in Yugoslavia at all. However, to assist the debate, we would remind the comrades of the following accounts of the events in Yugoslavia. At the time these accounts were written, we accepted them, and contrary to the other tendencies in the Fourth International, still accept them.
How was the revolution in Yugoslavia crushed? At the time that the Titoist bureaucracy strangled the mass movement in Yugoslavia, everybody knew it. It was described in the Fourth International in careful detail. The Titoist bureaucracy was singled out as an example of a police dictatorship on the Stalinist model:
"During the War, Stalinist bureaucratization and suppression must have proceeded apace along with the growth of the popular movement and the promulgation of the social revolutionary measures. For no sooner was the present government installed than it began to emulate all the other East European police regimes in its savagery and terror. The correspondents reported that an atmosphere of fear pervaded the Capital and that the dreaded secret police, the OZNA, were operating everywhere. Tito is imitating Stalinist Russia even to copying the elegantly cut uniforms of the Kremlin bureaucrats and weighting down his military tunic with countless shining medals. The black reactionary character of Stalinism is exposed by its need of a police dictatorship in Yugoslavia - a country where it enjoyed tremendous popularity and support. This development cannot be explained solely on the grounds of the horrible economic dislocations. It was unquestionably bred by Tito's twin needs of not only suppressing the old counter-revolutionary classes but at the same time keeping an iron hand on the working class and preventing their emergence as an independent - non-bureaucratized - and therefore anti-Stalinist force" (Fourth International, November, 1946).37
It would be hard to duplicate this account for accuracy. This was in 1946 when orthodox Trotskyism considered Yugoslavia a capitalist state.
Since the break with the Kremlin, the writer has evolved the position that Yugoslavia is a workers' state, but he has not lost his eye for accurate detail. We read in the Discussion Bulletin of April, 1950, this account of Yugoslavian events:
"Attempting to fight their way out of their economic cul-de-sac by 'building socialism in one country', they embarked on vastly ambitious plans of industrialization. Since they lacked the machinery, resources, productive capacities or trained personnel, they began taking it out of the hides of the workers. Piecework and speed up were introduced in the plants, hours of work lengthened, the authority of management made absolute. The desperate nature of the difficulties was highlighted recently when in Yugoslavia, where there exists, in contradistinction to the satellite states, some enthusiasm for the plan, the regime was forced to give up the 'voluntary labor brigade' system and institute a new system of contract labor which freezes the worker to his job".38
There is no room for disagreement. And here we ask our trade union comrades particularly to define the system so well described by the Yugoslavs themselves and by Comrade E. R. Frank. Do they think that this is a workers' state? Do they think that this is a transitional economy? How is it distinguished from the conditions of labor in the factories of the rest of the capitalist world?
Recognition that the Tito regime had suppressed the mass movement was not confined to individual writers. An official statement, appearing in the Fourth International as late as October, 1949, was brutal in its accuracy.
"The revolutionary origins of the present regime in Yugoslavia offer a strange contrast to its bureaucratic and monolithic form of rule. What is the reason for this contradictory development? At first glance it would appear that the vast movement of the masses set in motion during the war should have produced a flowering of workers' democracy. But just the contrary occurred. The regime is dominated by a monolithic Stalinist party which imitates the Russian leader cult, boasts of its ruthless suppression of factions and prohibits all vital criticism and opposition to its basic policies".39
The statement was equally remorseless in tracing the Stalinist roots of the CPY leadership:
"This development has its roots in the history of the communist party of Yugoslavia. Beginning as a mass party after the October Revolution, it was stultified by the imposition of false policies and bureaucratic methods from the Stalinized Comintern. In 1937, on orders from the Kremlin, the entire central committee of the party with the exception of Tito was purged. The new leadership was trained in Moscow or in the GPU school in Spain. Taking advantage of the conditions of illegality and official repression, it consolidated its bureaucratic grip on the organization by the suppression of all other tendencies and by framing up and expelling its opponents and critics".40
The Titoists, the statement continues, were ruthlessly bureaucratic, particularly against independent revolutionary expressions from the left:
"It was this Stalinized party which succeeded in gaining the leadership of the partisan insurrection. Despite the participation of masses of workers in revolutionary action, bureaucratic methods were favored by the conditions of foreign occupation and civil war which prevailed in the country. Military discipline and rule-by-command became the accepted mode of procedure and were utilized by the Stalinist leadership to stifle any tendency for greater democracy in the ranks of the party and the mass movement. It appears from a study of the events that while a certain latitude was granted to bourgeois groups and parties, independent revolutionary expressions from the left were mercilessly crushed".41
Is this the way that Marxism treats what for it is the greatest event in history, the successful proletarian revolution? Surely "Johnson-Forest" are justified in asking for the re-examination of a theory which imposes such humiliating self-stultification upon those who follow it.
Orthodox Trotskyism in all its tendencies is opposed to our analysis. Its own theory has led it to its present attitude toward the closest association possible to the CPY. This is an action, the majority against us is overwhelming, and Bolshevism demands unity in action. The Fourth International will have to make its experiences. We do not therefore propose to carry on any active discussion on the question, but it is of sufficient importance that all should know exactly what are our political views.
a. The rulers of Yugoslavia may make gestures, overtures, and even sympathetically consider Trotskyism. It is possible that they may even go to the lengths of organizing around them a Fourth International and acting as its center in the same way as Stalinist Russia has for years acted as the organizing center of the Third International Every success gained along these lines by orthodox Trotskyism makes only more certain the ultimate price that will be paid. The CPY seeks not the world revolution but the defense of "Communism in a single country, Yugoslavia". At the moment when Yugoslavia's mythical independence will be seen as the hollow fiction that it is, i.e., at the moment of the outbreak of war, the CPY will declare policy in terms of the interests of the particular mass of capital to which it is attached. If it should be on the side of Stalinist Russia, it will call upon the workers inside Russia and all over the world to support the Stalinist regime for the purpose of winning victory. If it is on the side of American imperialism, it will summon the proletariat of the United States to work and fight with all its soul for American democracy. At that time it will be able to hit the Fourth International a mighty blow. The Fourth International in return will be able to call the CPY traitors. To have to do that will harm the Fourth International, especially if the present course is continued. It will not harm Titoism in any way.
b. The past record of the CPY is a record of unwavering support of Stalinist Russia and the communist International. It has supported Stalinism in its persecution of the Russian workers, its slave labor camps, its Moscow Trials, its monumental lies, its betrayal of proletarian revolution, its sacrificing of the proletariat of whole nations, its assassinations, its incalculable contributions to the barbarism which is now eating away at human society.
The conception that "Johnson-Forest" have of the Fourth International does not include collaboration with these elements but has always seen them as the worst enemies of the proletariat and the organic foes of everything for which the Fourth International must stand.
We do not say that all who have supported Stalinism in the past are unfit for membership in our organization. Members of the GPU have in the past broken with Stalinism and joined the Fourth International. However, as we wrote in 1949:
"As with self-determination, the evaluation of Tito's defiance of Stalinism is rooted in the sociological conditions. Mobilization of a mass communist Party even by Togliatti or Thorez in defiance of the Cominform or the Russian regime would be an event of world-wide significance for the revolutionary movement, however empirical, limited or halting might be the ideological basis on which such a defiance might begin.
"The defiance by the Yugoslav Communist Party is of a fundamentally different character. It is and cannot be seen otherwise than as a defense of the possession of the state property, control of the surplus-labor and other bureaucratic privileges, on the one hand, and on the other, fear of being submitted to the ruthless purges of the GPU".42
The Titoists are a privileged section of society, exploiting millions of workers and peasants, masters of a state. Their Leninism is neither more nor less than the "Leninism" of Stalinism. Our hostility to them is more implacable than to those Stalinist leaders who are at the head of the proletariat in a country where the proletariat is free to act.^*
c. It is our opinion that the whole past of our movement and our whole experience with our opposition to Stalinism should teach us to train our membership and those who listen to us in a spirit of critical hostility, reserve, distrust of all such elements. If their orientation is toward breaking with Stalinist theory and Stalinist practice in deeds and not only in words, that will not be diverted by the harshest criticism from the Trotskyist movement. Undoubtedly Tito's break with Stalin has deeply affected many rank and file elements in the Stalinist parties all over the world. Our intervention should have been our principles, our ideas, in irreconcilable opposition to Titoism. This would have given revolutionary clarification to the dissidents. We are opposed to the defense of Yugoslavia against Stalinist Russia for reasons which we shall explain in the next section. But it was quite possible to combine the defense of the national independence of Yugoslavia against Stalinist Russia with the most critical attitude to the falsity and hypocrisy of Titoist theory and practice. The idea that Tito's declaration in favor of Leninism - and these are nothing to the declarations of Stalin in favor of Leninism - to declare that this is the greatest event in the history of Trotskyism so far, and the hope of our movement for the future, is to strike a terrible blow at all that we have stood for in the past. The future of the Fourth International rests, as it has always rested, upon the progress we have made with the revolutionary proletariat in irreconcilable struggle with bureaucracies of all and every kind.
d. The reports of capable people who have gone to Yugoslavia and returned say that there is "democracy". We can fill notebooks with the views of those who went to Russia and saw the same when the Left Opposition was being hooted down in party meetings. It is possible that everyone discusses Trotskyism freely when the leaders are discussing Trotskyism freely. But Tito has himself given his definition of democratic centralism in his report to the party in 1948. It is that "... almost every factionalist is not far from being a provocateur or similar enemy of the working class".43
"Johnson-Forest" know that this "democratic centralism" can serve only to protect the interests of rulers. If that is wrong, then everything we have been taught and learned is wrong, and we have to begin all over again, However great our differences with Trotsky, we see nothing in his writings to make us believe that he would not have known the difference between an orientation to the bureaucracy of Yugoslavia and an orientation toward the proletarian masses and poor peasants of that country.
* Resolution on the National and Colonial Struggle for Freedom, July 20th, 1943. Published in part in the New International, December, 1943, as 'The National Question and the European Socialist Revolution." See also "The Way Out for Europe," New International, April and May, 1943.44
** For every CPY statement about the need to struggle against bureaucracy and for democracy, it is possible to find 20 in the Stalinist documents written at precisely the moment when they were massacring revolutionists.
^* Here, regretfully, for it is painful to have to repeat elementary principles of revolutionary practice, we have to recall another aspect of Leninism for those sowers of confusion regarding "Johnson-Forest" critical support to workers' parties which are "agents of a capitalist-Fascist power". We remind these comrades that Lenin's analysis of the Social-Democracy as capitalist parties based on monopoly capitalism, agents of the capitalist national state, did not prevent him from critical support to these parties under certain concrete circumstances where the proletariat was free to act.
1 Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980)
2 The editor has been unable to identify the source of the quote. The MIA has a subject section and a historical documents section, which include links to texts by Titoists, Trotskyists and others on Yugoslavia.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Edvard Kardelj (1910-1979) was a Yugoslav politician and economist. He was a leading member of the Communist Party of Slovenia before World War II. After the war, he held leading positions in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He was one of the architects of the Yugoslav system of workers' self-management.
The editor has been unable to identify the source of the quote.
8 The editor has been unable to identify the source of this quote.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Government of the Federative People's Republic of Yugoslavia, The Law on the Five Year Plan for the Development of the National Economy of the Federative People's Republic of Yugoslavia in the Period from 1947 to 1951, Office of Information: Belgrade (1947), p. 115.
12 Ibid., p. 116.
13 Ibid., pp. 116-7.
14 The editor has been unable to identify the source of this quote.
15 Boris Kidric (1912-1953) was a leading figure in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. He was one of the architects of the 1950 "Basic Law on the Management of State Economic Enterprises", the key document of Yugoslav-style 'worker self-management'.
16 The editor has been unable to identify the source of this quote.
17 Raya Dunayevskaya's An Analysis of the Russian Economy, (1942/3).
18 The editor has been unable to identify the source of this quote.
19 The editor has been unable to identify the source of this quote.
20 The editor has been unable to identify the source of this quote.
21 The editor has been unable to identify the source of this quote.
22 The editor has been unable to identify the source of this quote.
23 The editor has been unable to identify the source of this quote.
24 The editor has been unable to identify the source of this quote.
25 The editor has been unable to identify the source of this quote.
26 The editor has been unable to identify the source of this quote.
27 The editor has been unable to identify the source of this quote.
28 The editor has been unable to identify the source of this quote.
29 The editor has been unable to identify the source of this quote.
30 The editor has been unable to identify the source of this quote.
31 The editor has been unable to identify the source of this quote.
32 The editor has been unable to identify the source of this quote.
33 The editor has been unable to identify the source of this quote.
34 J.R. [CLR James] "No Support for Tito", in SWP Internal Bulletin, Vol. 11, No. 5, October, 1949.
35 The quote is from Section 5: 'Crisis of Stalinism', of: National Committee of Socialist Workers Party, 'The Tito-Stalin Conflict', Fourth International, Vol.10 No.9, October 1949, pp.259-264.
36 CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee The Invading Socialist Society, (1947).
37 The quote is from the section 'The Polish Regime', of: E. R. Frank, 'The Kremlin in Eastern Europe', Fourth International, Vol.7 No.11, November 1946, pp. 330-345. E. R. Frank was a pseudonym used by Bert Cochran (1913-1984) was a founding member of the SWP, and served on its National Committee for many years. He was also a union organiser.
38 E. R. Frank, 'The Kremlin's Satellite States in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, Marxist Theory, and Our Perspectives', in SWP Discussion Bulletin, No. 1, April, 1950.
39 The quote is from the section 'Question of Workers Democracy', of: National Committee of Socialist Workers Party, 'The Tito-Stalin Conflict', Fourth International, Vol.10 No.9, October 1949, pp.259-264.
40 Ibid..
41 Ibid..
42 J.R. [CLR James] "No Support for Tito", in SWP Internal Bulletin, Vol. 11, No. 5, October, 1949.
43 The editor has been unable to find the source of the quote. The same quote, however, is cited in the section 'Basic Errors Remain', of: National Committee of Socialist Workers Party, 'The Tito-Stalin Conflict', Fourth International, Vol.10 No.9, October 1949, pp.259-264.
44 J.R. Johnson [CLR James], Harry Allen [Martin Abern] and Tom Brown 'The National Question and the European Socialist Revolution', New International, Vol. 9, No. 11, December 1943, pp. 341-344. J.R. Johnson [CLR James], 'The Way Out for Europe', New International, Vol. 9, No. 4, April 1943, pp. 116-119 and Vol. 9, No. 5, May 1943, pp. 149-154.
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