THE SEVENTH CONGRESS OF THE LEAGUE OF JUGOSLAV COMMUNISTS
The VIIth Congress of the League of Jugoslav Communists will be held in Liubliana in the second half of April. It will be within two months of celebrating the tenth anniversary of the break with Stalin and the Kominform. What events have occurred since then! the blockade of Jugoslavia by the URSS, the Korean War, Stalin's death, Khrushchev's trip to Belgrade and Tito's to Moscow, the XXth Congress, the events in Poland and Hungary, the expulsion and arrest of Djilas, etc...
For the Congress the Central Committee has prepared a draft programme which has appeared abroad only in a succinct resumé in French. But, less than two months before this congress, the CC of the LJC has sent a "letter to all the organizations and leading organisms" of this league which casts a glaring light upon it :
Decentralization does not of itself exclude bureaucratism. [...] Many communists and even leaders hold technocratic views concerning social and politicàl questions. [...] In many plants
[...] decisions are made arbitrarily [...] criticism is stifled.
put forward criticisms are transferred from place to place or even fired. [...] Some of our leading comrades sometimes become indifferent to people's lives, to the workers' needs. [...] There must be noted a growth of the material privi.
leges of individuals in this last time. [...] It is generally thought that different affairs [..] can be more easily speeded up by means of "pull"
and protection. ... Grave irregularities have occurred in the distribution of bonuses, which have had harmful political repercussions. [..._
Strong particularist tendencies are appearing [...] often take on nationalist and even chauvinist forms as a result of the fact that communists and often also the leading members of the League of
Communists [...] sometimes fall under the influence of the remains of petty-bourgeois and thus themselves engage in the same nationalist and chauvinist excesses. [...] The trade-union leaderships keep their eye on what is above them. [...] The discipline and responsibility of certain communists and often also of leaders have lessened.
This letter appears on reading to be a genuine cry of alarm. It reveals advanced decomposition, reaching "certain communists and often leaders"_ everyone knows what that means. The phenomenon is not entirely recent. Already a few years ago, Djilas, at the moment when he was carrying out his break with the leading staff of Jugoslavia, had pointed out the same thing. Djilas, politically disoriented, sought the cause of this phenomenon in the "ideas" of Marx and Lenin. The very descriptive letter of the CC
8 concludes with organizational proposals (regular aud systematic work by the leading organisms," "constant consolidation of discipline and responsibility," "improvement in the activity of the trade unions". ...) but nowise seeks the deeper causes of this phenomenon. Now if this is not done, the words discipline, responsibility, activity, etc. have no magical value, and the phenomenon will continue and even grow accentuated.
There is no doubt but that ten years earlier the Jugoslav CP —and not only its leadership— showed a remarkable strength and cohesion in the face of the assault by Stalin and the Kominform. The leadership could hold on because it had behind it a party full of ardor, proud of the revolutionary fight and the victory that it had won over the former ruling classes. This party was nowise impressed by the floods of Stalinist calumnies, or by the difficulties generated by the blockade. For the Jugoslav communists, it was then a new battle which had as its goal the defense, against an unexpected assaillant, of those conquests that it had obtained by such great sacrifices.
How is it to be explained that this same party, ten vears later, is showing the manifestations of decomposition that the letter of the leadership reveals?
In a general way this party, like any party that has come to power, has undergone what Rakovsky called the "transformations of power." Nevertheless, Jugoslav experience was not the same as that of the CP of the USSR. The bureaucratic danger was explained and shown up by the very example of Stalinism. The Jugoslav leadership itself undertook decentralization as the best (it thought) method to fight against bureaucratism.
The danger of decomposition has objective sources, above all it the backwardness of the country; but, if it reached such a scope, it is because, to a great degree, the policy of the Jugoslav leadership contributed to it, even if against its will.
In fact, decentralization was only an organizational measure, just like the measures proposed today that we pointed out above. But what have we witnessed politically on the part of this leadership?
It has made great theoretical political zigzags, without really explaining things thoroughly, without engaging in criticism of its behavior in previous stages, acting in a completely pragmatic way, and showing itself all the more self-satisfied in that it has. in the question of relations with East and West, sucreeded in staying on the tightrope. Let us recall that for a certain time just after the break, it declared its attachment for the USSR, then it denounced the existence of "state capitalism" in the USSR, again it found that the USSR was a workers' state.
On the question of Hungary, after having had a courageous attitude that stood out in contrast to the leaderships of the other CPs, disoriented or accomplices of the Kremlin, it made a de facto alignment
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL with them to pass the eraser over everything. should also not be forgotten the way that it drew very close to the United States, to the extent that it was led to vote for United Nations intervention in Korea.
Furthermore, its proletarian internationalism has been limited to conversations at the top with leaders of CPs or of Socialist Parties, while the militants of the LJC were oriented only on the development of the Jugoslav economy.
Lastly, the leadership of the LJC, though it has had a less rigid attitude than the Stalinists on the question of the party, has been basically just as hostile as they to democratic centralism. A political discussion would have permitted beating Djilas without difficulty; but the Jugoslav leadership used state repression on him. Towards the party rank and file the leadership has shown itself to be paternalistic, and it continues to be so in this letter. It gives lessons in morality but dodges the political basis of everything. If it were necessary to show the way in which the leadership dodges its responsibilities, it is enough to mention its declaration that leading members are engaging in chauvinist excesses... under the influences of remains of petty-bourgeois and nationalist intellectuals: that is an "explanation" simply repeated from the Stalinists.
The objective situation of an economically backward country, and the everyday tasks, operate in a way favorable to bureaucratism and empiricism. Against that, it is possible to react only by an intense political
The attitude of the LJC leadership, subordinat. ing the life of the party to the higher interests of the state, not allowing party militants to discuss the policy of the party and the state, but only the tasks in a community or an enterprise —must have contributed considerably to demoralizing the rank and file. In the absence of broad political views, in the absence of great objectives democratically decided on, many become bureaucratized, grow concerned with their own positions, get morally degraded.
A broad political life is absolutely incompatible with the monopoly of a sole and monolithic party. The best organizational measures cannot replace socialist democracy, that which allows each worker to state his opinion not only on the immediate problems in his plant but on the general policy which determines the framework of the state and the economy. The Jugoslav leadership broke with the Stalinists and post-Stalinists on a series of important problems, but not on that decisive problem. And that is why there is needed, in Jugoslavia as in the other workers' states. a revolutionary Marxist left wing, to separate itself out in the struggle for a genuine workers' democracy, including the right to a plurality of workers' parties and tendencies. It is only in this way that it is possible to fight effectively against the phenomena of bureaucratization and decomposition generated by the effects of the seizure of power.