[The following article appeared in the July 15, 1972, issue of Quatrième Internationale, published by the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
What kind of socialism do we want? The discussion that is going on in the French working-class movement between the CGT [Confédération Gé- nérale du Travail-General Confederation of Labor] and the CFDT [Confédération Française et Démocratique du Travail - French Democratie Confederation of Labor] is often carried on with reference to "models." Because of its experiment in self-management, Yugoslavia enters into this discussion in an important way. The Stalinists have an easy time arguing the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat and centralized planning as opposed to the "so-called decentralized democracy" of self-management. At the other extreme, the social-democratic reformists would extend the experiment in "participation" to include running factories within the framework of the capitalist system; they too have an easy time hiding their anticommunism and their fundamental opposition to the dictatorship of the proletariat by defending decentralized "self-management" and its "democracy" against the repellent Stalinist centralization.
For us, the problem (and the debate on the Yugoslav question) is not a matter of "models" but of program: the permanent extension of the proletarian revolution and its deepening in the construction of a socialism that is not a caricature oblige revolutionary Marxists to wage a struggle at one and the same time for the dietatorship of the proletariat and proletarian democracy on the broadest scale; these are two sides of the same problem. Theoretical analysis and experience confirm that this is the quickest, the most effective, and indeed the only road that leads to socialism without unnecessary historic "detours." This "rule" and this revolutionary Marxist program are not the product of utopian dreaming or moral dogmas. They command our attention in view of the tasks that confront us once the first step - the taking of power and the destruction of the bourgeois state-has been taken. These tasks of transforming society and mankind are too great to be carried out by a bureaucratic state. But these are also tasks that have to be carried out in a context that at the outset is so vulnerable as to necessitate the maintenance of a dictatorship of the proletariat for a whole historic period. This two-sided necessity - dictatorship of the proletariat together with a broad proletarian democracy - has such deep roots that it can easily be shown, on the basis of existing historical examples, that if either component is present, but not the other, it is necessarily very fragile and accompanied by defects and wastage that delay accordingly the day when new social relations of socialist production can be achieved.
Our analysis of Yugoslavia at one and the same time confirms and is based upon this revolutionary Marxist program. Thus it places no stock in the Stalinists' criticism of a regime that is slipping away from them, nor of the criticism of all those who do not at the outset clearly reject class collaboration within the framework of the capitalist system and who do not accept the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat after the taking of power.
Sad Aftermath of Decentralization
The Yugoslav regime began to decentralize on the economic plane following the break with Stalin at the beginning of the fifties. This decentralization went hand in hand with the introduction of self-management. But it remained closely controlled by the federal authorities - especially in the key area of investments -- until the 1965 reform. To be sure, the central means for intervening in the economy were more indirect and less and less effective as a result of the already disastrous effects of partial decentralization; but for a long time they retained enough importance for the regime's "liberal" ideologues to be able to attribute every failure to the retention of these central powers. Thus it was in the name of self-management, of deepening it, and of freeing it from bureaucratic shackles that the 1965 reform was introduced: If self-management is to be effective, it was said, decision-making would have to be the prerogative of "work units." These units would have to enjoy greater "freedom" and no longer be subject to the central restrictions and heavy taxes that always limited the choices they could make. From this point on, the reform was based on all the classical "liberal" formulas: Objective economic laws must be allowed to take effect because they lead to the best equilibrium within the economy and to a profitability that is indispensable for a healthy economy. In other words, it must be left up to self-management (in reality, the market) to set prices and determine investments; the road to corpetition between Yugoslav concerns must be opened up; and in the face of competition from the capitalist companies the government must therefore stop intervening to favor this or that region or factory through a price or subsidy policy that "distorts the facts," just as it must stop protecting the Yugoslav economy, since doing so keeps "nonprofitable" activities going.
Once this reform began to be carried out, its effects were disastrous: a considerable increase in the cost of living, which compelled the government once again, in 1971, to "freeze" all prices (in spite of its intentions to liberalize) and to devalue the dinar several times (in spite of the plans for convertibility); a heightening of the inequalities in wages between factories and from region to region; an increase in unemployment (more than 300,000 unemployed, not to mention the more than 1,000,000 working abroad). But perhaps the most striking political and social problem that the reform has aggravated is the increase in social cleavages and differentiation brought on by decentralization. In this connection, the reform has had the effect of painfully revealing all the problems that the ruling Yugoslav bureaucracy has not been able to solve.
Clash of Nationalities
At the very outset, and quite apart from the defects of the bureaucracy, the problem of the various national minorities is a very complex one to solve in a mosaic-like country like Yugoslavia. Unlike the Stalinist parties of Eastern Europe, the League of Communists had an effective approach toward the national question at the time of the struggle for liberation from the fascist invader and Great Serbian oppression. The first years of the regime were, moreover, marked by an effort of considerable scope to develop the poorest regions by applying the program of the League of Communists to the effect that equality exists in form only unless it is accompanied by real economic equality.
Nevertheless, decentralization, accompanied by the maintenance of a bureaucratic political regime, was to bring about the failure of this policy and a resurgence of the problem of the nationalities during the sixties: indeed, decentralization was to weaken the very means for centrally intervening in the economy that made it possible to reduce inequalities between republics, which often include national minorities. At the same time, the bureaucratic nature of the governmental powers and of the decisionmaking process could only serve to reinforce the kind of egotistical behavior on the part of regions, factories, and individuals that was be- Lent encour ted by the bea ing encouraged by the "liberal," de-
Finally, the clash between the nationalities was marked by the fact that the central bureaucratic powers were by and large dominated by the Great-Serbian nationality (it has, moreover, been dominant on the political level in the ranks of the party since the struggle for liberation), both in the army and in the government service. As a result of this, as well as of the pressure of conflicting traditions among the various nations, antibureaucratic aspirations could also seek to express themselves through the form of nationalist demands and movements. But these considerations are not sufficient September 18, 1972
to describe the recent hostility between Croats and Serbs: For if confused, antibureaucratic (and to that extent progressive) aspirations were present, this conflict has by and large been dominated on the Croatian side by reactionary tendencies objectively favorable to a restoration of capitalism (even though they were not necessarily the direct agents of such a restoration).
With roots in the petty-bourgeois and bourgeois layers of Croatia (craftsmen, peasants, hotel bourgeoisie along the Dalmatian coast, students in the schools of business administration, who are supported by the church), the Croatian nationalists attempted to pit the workers against each other along national lines. This is the first and most revealing aspect of the reactionary character of this current. Wage differentiations along the lines of national origin have, in fact, begun to be introduced in the big industrial centers. The main demands that were raised were the following: complete autonomy with regard to the federation (identified with the Great-Serbian oppressor); that is, pushing economic and political decentralization all the way; and also the elimination of any centralized intervention, which was regarded as "usurping" the rightful fruit of Croatian labor in order to distribute it elsewhere; in other words, de facto opposition to any planned redistribution of income on behalf of the less developed regions; and finally, a glorification of bourgeois criteria for organizing the economy. When one realizes that Croatia, along with Slovakia, is one of the most developed republies and the one that benefits the most from foreign trade and the expansion of tourism, one can understand why the demands crystallized around the problem of currency. With most of the currency going to the federation, the Croatians wanted to increase their slice of the pie. The "Croatians"? No, indeed-rather the technocrats and the Croatian petty bourgeoisie who are making money out of their dealing in currency while strikes by workers against wage inequalities and unemployment spread throughout Croatia. For on the other side of this conflict between "nationalities" - and even within the conflict itself-a deeper and more complex social antagonism is developing that calls into question the relations of selfmanagement and, in a more general sense, the relations of production and property installed by the revolution.
Whither Self Management?
It is still difficult in Yugoslavia not to be for self-management. Yet no one in Yugoslavia today any longer believes that it has been fully achieved. No one, moreover, could claim that it has been, in view of the considerable increase in strikes (more than 2,000 since 19581), which, in one form or another, have most often pressed for a more effective application of self-management-to the point that the last self-management congress (May 1971 in Sarajevo) at length publicly denounced the various forces holding back self-management. This means that today if centralization often continues, in a confused way, to be counterposed to self-management, currents will develop-in particular within the unions -that will see in decentralization the most dangerous source for the breaking up of any possible self-management. Indeed, decentralization and "economic liberalization" favor the development of the main social agents of this policy. "profitability" in
Competition and terms of the criteria of the market require, if they are to hold unreserved sway, that they be taken charge of by the social layers that reap the benefits of these laws — the bourgeoisie, but also managers and technocrats. The workers are both judge and plantiff: Can they agree to fire workers, and to hold down wages in order "to be more competitive" the way a factory manager does? To be sure, differentiations are appearing among the workers thanks to the laws of competition. The more one "rises" in the system of delegating power, and the more the workers are directly connected with the running of the factory and are removed from production, the more easily they will accept the rules of this "game." In this connection, conflicts arise between the workers' committee and the administrative council it elects, which is more directly subject to the influence of the manager and of the various technocrats.
But most often it is self-management itself that the bureaucrats in the factory try to call into question for it hinders the reintroduction of capitalist relations of production into the factory, and these relations are the best adapted to the "spirit of initiative" required by the competitive struggle for profit. This tendency is most explicit in the factories with mixed capital (part foreign investments and part Yugoslav social funds2) where the capitalists are attempting to legalize the "mixed" committees (we all know what this bourgeois-worker "mixture" is worth), to which the selfmanagement committee would then delegate most of its powers. Elsewhere, the manager tries to get himself hired "on the basis of a long-term program" and in this very way to limit the control of the workers over his policy (in Yugoslavia, managers are elected and can be recalled by the workers' councils). An even more common method is to attempt to stress a certain "division of labor" that reinforces the hierarchy inside the factory to the advantage of the technocrats who are considered "competent" to make the most important economic and budgetary decisions. Thus the self-management committee is reduced to dealing with problems relating to wages and working conditions.
As an instrument of workers' democracy, self-management cannot have any substance if the workers are subject to centralized, bureaucratic constraints. Nor, however, can it avoid the constraints of the market either. By atomizing the factories and pitting them against each other, the market also atomizes and opposes the workers to each other; strengthens the petty-bourgeois social layers that are making money from trade; solidifies the position of the bureaucrats in the factory; and undermines the weight of the working class and the relations of self-management-however limited they may be in the Yugoslav regime. It also simultaneously heightens antagonisms and social differentiation.
Widening Social Differences
1. Differentiations within the bureaucracy. The "red bourgeoisie."
The conflict between nationalities makes it possible to outline certain key axes of this differentiation:
a. On the most superficial level, this differentiation extends to the various nationalities. The greater autonomy granted to the republics and the economic decentralization are in part the product of pressures (that they also help to encourage) from leading elements who seek to increase their own influence by defending the interests of their various republics when it comes to the apportionment of power (a corollary of decentralization being an increase in the influence of the richest republics).
b. In a more profound way, the policy of economic "liberalization" and the introduction of self-management (which has been in effect for a long time) have favored the development of technocratic layers who head up the "labor organizations." But here, too, certain distinctions must be made:
• On the one hand, between these layers in the developed republics (and, within these republics, the layers in the most dynamic factories, mainly those oriented toward foreign trade) and the same layers in the less developed regions and factories. It is not in the interests of the latter to press for an expansion of the laws of the market, which for them would involve a "colonization" even more real than what the Croatian technocrats are complaining about.
As for the technocrats in factories that are undergoing expansion, their interests link up with those of pettybourgeois and bourgeois layers in that they call for allowing free course to the laws of the market on all levels at the same time as they demonstrate hostility to self-management (which offers too much resistance to the freeplay and to the "sacrifices" of competition). What these bourgeois aspirants want is to also be able to make their "idle" wealth bear fruit and to protect it with a right to own property.
The technocrats in the poor factories are more in a situation of being a workers' aristocracy that attempts to take advantage of its role in the division of labor in order to increase its privileges but without for all that having any interest in calling either the system or planning into question.
• But on the other hand, the recent Serbo-Croatian conflict revealed another possible differentiation within the most reactionary technocratic layers themselves: that of the technocrats with links to financial and trade organizations in opposition to the technocrats in the factories.
Given the present serious economic and financial situation, but given too the more direct importance of the bored hom working class in the factories, it is quite likely that the most dangerous forces from the point of view of socialism are the ones that are developing with the aid of the decentralized banking system. The links between these forces and international capitalism in the context of the recent creation of an "Investment Company for Yugoslavia"; the objective interests of these layers, their convergence with those of the bourgeoisie, their position of strength in the present situation- all these are weighty factors in moving them in a reactionary direction.
• In this context, the ruling bureaucracy and its apparatus occupy a specific position: the policy of the bureaucracy objectively favors the development of centrifugal forces at the same time that it checks them. While basing itself on these forces in the vain hope that they will straighten out the economic situation, the bureaucracy nevertheless does not intend either to turn power over to them or to lose its privileges and the system from which it derives them. And in the present situation, the only forces that make it possible for it to struggle against the growing weight of the technocratic layers are the following: on the one hand, state power, on which it retains a firm grip (during the recent conflict, Tito alluded to the possibility of civil war and moved the army into the foreground; the concept of the state as a "body of armed men" is apt to take on a striking immediacy during a period of sharpening conflict); and, on the other hand, its appearance as the defender of the working class, of the gains of the revolution, and of self-managemerit. Demagogy? Of course! But for demagogy to work, the masses have to be taken in by it. Whatever the socialist consciousness of the leaders amounts to, therefore, they are prisoners of the social system that enthroned them. What is characteristic of them is a centrist policy, one that is both anticapitalist and opposed to workers' democracy at the same time.
Because we are not dealing with social classes with a firm base in the relations of production, the existing differentiations cannot be defined in terms of neat categories. It is more a matter of describing a process than a well-defined reality. As a result, the entrance of other social layers onto the scene and the transformation of the relationship of forces will play a big role in such a process: In the context of an open conflict between the working class and the bourgeoisie, the fissures will deepen, turning the differentiations into full-scale divisions along class lines.
2. The Rise of Workers' Struggles.
The year 1968 marked an important stage in the reaction of the working class and the students (especially in Belgrade) against the effects of the reform, 3 and against the government's policy in general. During the mobilizations at that time, the tendencies in the economy toward private ownership, the ineffectiveness of self-management, and the bureaucratic system were criticized on a broad scale-to the point where Tito had to try to look and sound as he did in the old days. Measures were taken to protect self-management somewhat from its bourgeois detractors and to limit the spread of private property. (Essentially, it exists in the agricultural and handicraft sectors of the economy, and, since the reform, in the tourist sector.) But the most insidious forms of capitalist relations of production were denounced in the new types of factories called "G. G. P."4 "Selfmanagement from the bottom up!" This was the slogan of the Belgrade this was the slogan or the belgrade students, who were expressing the idea that the only genuine workers' democracy, antibureaucratic power, and struggle against the capitalist restorationist tendencies in Yugoslavia lies not in a decentralization of a selfmanagement limited to the factories and consequently subject to all the centrifugal forces, but on the contrary, in the working class playing a central, and therefore stronger role by directly participating in the exercise of power.
The year 1972 will mark new stages. Following the self-management congress, following the recognition of the right to strike, and in view of the worsening of the economic and social situation, the aggressiveness of the working class can only continue to mount. The working class will be encouraged to move in this direction by a new factor that could be of decisive importance on the Yugoslav political and social scene: the unions as an opposition force to the regime. Indeed, with the weakening of the central powers and of the cohesiveness of the League of Communists, and in the context of an important social crisis, the Yugoslav trade unions appear to be shedding their role as a mere cog in the state apparatus. For the first time, at the beginning of 1972, open opposition to the government's policy reached such a point that Tito alluded in a recent speech to those "who say that the unions are enemies of the government who put forward their own program." The main stumbling block will at first be the government's attempt to freeze wages. But to do this in Yugoslavia is to deal a blow to a sacrosanct self-management, which, to the extent that it exists, takes shape around this very question of wages - especially since the reform, when greater freedom was granted for decision-making at the factory level. It is also, quite simply, to attack the standard of living of the working class. To "solve" problems in this manner in a country that calls itself socialist is once more to demonstrate the contradiction between actions and sugar-coated words. But at a time when social struggles are intensifying and when the Marshal's uniform is no longer worshiped as it used to be, things may not blow over so easily.
There is no doubt that the bureaucracy is trying to extricate itself from all this for the time being by stepping up repression. It embarked on this path by censuring Student (the newspaper. of the students at the school of philosophy in Belgrade) and Praxis (the discussion organ of the Yugoslav left-wing intelligentsia). It also began to imprison those whom it designates as "Trotskyists," without succeeding in investing this term with the highly insulting content that the Stalinists gave it in the "good old days."5 But the Yugoslav bureaucracy, which is caught in the contradictions of its "original" system, will not let this stop it from suppressing all those who today attempt to propose an antibureaucratic solution to the present crisis. It is these people who, out of the failure of the regime, will draw the lessons that will lead to a victory for socialism in Yugoslavia.
movement. The latest issue of Praxis was devoted to him.
Notes
1. Cf. Quatrieme Internationale, February 1971.
2. Cf. the article by C. Samary in Cri tiques de l'Economie Politique, No. 7-8, and the article by F. Charlier on "A Program for a Transition to Capitalism" in this issue.
3. Cf. the article from Critiques de l'Economie Politique.
4. Grupnogradjansko preduzece (factories of groups of citizens). The 1965 reform law gave private individuals the right to band together to form such factories, which are nevertheless not considered to be privately owned. - IP September 18, 1972
5. Some writings by Trotsky have been officially published in Yugoslavia. He is considered part of the workers'