Tito is the last living representative of that first generation of Stalinist leaders who came out of the pre-Stalinist Communist movement. That was the generation that lived through the movement's transformation from a Communist International encompassing the program and hope for the world socialist revolution to Communist parties reduced to the role of tools of the Kremlin's diplomacy. Tito expressed and incorporated all the agonizing contradictions of that generation.
He was genuinely attached to the cause of communism, as he understood it. He wanted to win political power in his coun try by overthrowing the power of the bourgeoisie. But at the same time he was fanatically faithful to the leadership of the Soviet Union, which he identified with international communism. This insoluble contradiction led to duplicity and cynicism.
When Stalin murdered the leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party, which was characterized by factional struggles, Tito accepted the leadership offered to him by Stalin in order to rebuild the Communist Party. He payed for this gift by tacitly approving the murder of several of his closest comrades in the Soviet Union, some of the most prestigious figures of Yugoslav communism such as Milan Gorkic, former general secretary of the Yugoslav CP.
The Yugoslav Resistance Movement
But Tito became neither a servile lackey nor a simple executor of orders received from the Kremlin. When Yugoslavia was invaded by the German and Italian imperialist armies in 1941, Tito took advantage of the advanced state of decay of the royal bourgeois state, the political confusion of the petty bourgeoisie, and the desire of the vanguard workers and students to get rid of the torturers who had introduced barbaric superexploitation into their country. He launched a massive, anti-imperialist insurrection that developed into a true saga.
What began as armed resistance by several thousand communists became, after years of heroic battles against the most powerful army in the world, an uprising of more than 300,000 partisans. The entire mass of working people were involved. Despite the undeniable bureaucratic manipulation and demagogic use of unbridled nationalism, the class character of this war of liberation became increasingly clear.
The anti-imperialist uprising was at the same time a civil war that divided every city and village into two irreconcilable camps: the camp of the exploiting class and the camp of the exploited.
Thus, Tito and the Yugoslav Communist Party were the only ones in all of occupied Europe to accomplish what should have been the task of all communists and revolutionary Marxists: to transform a mass resistance movement against the oppression and superexploitation introduced by the imperialist occupiers into a real socialist revolution, destroying the bourgeoisie's class power, private property, and state.
Stalin did not miss this fact. He sharply criticized the creation of proletarian brigades in the Yugoslav partisan army. He criticized that army's massive recruitment of Italian, German, Bulgarian, and Hungarian prisoners of war and deserters. He reproached Tito for endangering the solidity of the alliance with the British and U.S. imperialists through his "extremist" policies.
Stalin reduced material aid to the Yugo. slav partisans to a minimum. He tried to bolster the opposition within the Yugoslav leadership that was most loyal to the Kremlin.
To help Roosevelt and Churchill, Stalin forced Tito to accept a temporary political compromise, with the presence of bourgeois ministers in a coalition government. Stalin also forced Tito to agree to a referendum on the question of the monarchy.
Nothing worked. The civil war was too deep, the mass mobilizations too broad, and the revolutionary dynamism of the partisans too solid, to allow restoration of the bourgeois order. After the 1945 referendum, what was left of the bourgeois state was swept aside. Capitalist property was quickly eliminated. The socialist revolution triumphed in Yugoslavia. A bureaucratically deformed workers state was established in that country.
The Victorious Opposition to Stalin
For this reason, conflict with the Soviet bureaucracy became inevitable. Stalin, as was his manner, had only one way of thinking. A Communist Party that escaped from the control of the Kremlin, even if it were Stalinized in its ideology and methods, was an open breach in the whole bureaucratic fortress. It was a breach through which all sorts of "monsters" would infiltrate. Thus, the heretic had to be dealt with and eliminated. The Cominform* was created for this purpose. And in 1948 the excommunication took place.
But having state power themselves, Tito and the Yugoslav Communists had a material base that enabled them to successfully resist. They became the first opponents to successfully take on Stalin, not only in the realm of ideas, but also at the level of power.
Despite the economic blockade, despite attempts to incite insurrectional movements and even assassination attempts, and despite the massing of Soviet troops on the Yugoslav border, the second Yugoslav resistance, like the first, was crowned with success.
In 1955 when Khrushchev landed at the Belgrade airport and publicly apologized for the seven-year campaign of insults and slanders against Tito orchestrated by the incredible propaganda machine in Moscow, he provided the old Yugoslav Communist leader with a degree of vindication and political triumph that was unprecedented in Soviet history.
In order to successfully organize their resistance against Stalin-which was eminently progressive and which in a way officially opened the crisis of Stalinism- Tito and his companions had to simultane. ously develop the largest possible popular base and a theoretical and political basis for the resistance that went beyond the conjunctural situation. To this end, they reversed their previous forced collectivization of agriculture and they adopted a system of workers self-management.
Yugoslav Communism was identified by the slogan: "The factories to the workers, the land to the peasants."
Yugoslav Workers Self-Management
The Yugoslav system of workers self-management is a striking demonstration of the socialist revolution's tendency on a historical scale to carry out long-term selfcriticism. This tendency was prophetically predicted by Marx in his preface to the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The Yugoslav system represents a correction of the system of bureaucratic management consolidated in the Soviet Union since the Stalinist dictatorship. But it represents only a partial correction.
First of all, it was bestowed from above, by a wing of the bureaucracy itself. The successive changes and transformations in the system were basically the result of initiatives from above, even though there was an increasingly pronounced interaction between these initiatives and movements within the working class.
Furthermore, the system contained a fundamental contradiction. Self-management that is limited solely to the economic sphere, and is still basically limited to single enterprises, loses most of its potential because the monopoly of political power still remains in the hands of the Yugoslav Communist Party. Weakened on the economic level, the bureaucracy can thus get its revenge on the political level.
According to the thesis of Edvard Kardelj, the number one Titoist theoretician, political parties are "at bottom" incompatible with a system of self-management. This is nothing more than an apologetic sophism to justify the existence of a "single party" regime even if it is called the gle party" regime, even if it is called the League of Yugoslav Communists rather than a Party.
The Yugoslav experience confirms, by negative example, the programmatic thesis of the Fourth International. Without real political power in the hands of democratically elected workers councils, there can be no real exercise of economic or political power by the working class. Without a multiparty system and without real democratic rights for all working people, the workers councils can have no real power.
The Gains and the Limits
Even on the economic level, the limitations of Yugoslav self-management become quickly apparent. There is an inescapable need to centralize economic decisions given the present level of development of the productive forces. But the Yugoslav leaders reject democratic and conscious centralization by a congress of workers councils that could effectively exercise supreme power. That is, they reject self-management being expressed on the level where decisions can be effectively and validly made.
They reject it, not on the grounds of doctrinal consistency, but because as a faction of the bureaucracy they want to prevent, at all costs, decisive power from being placed in the hands of the working class. The fragmentation and division of the working class remains the precondition for maintaining power in the hands of the bureaucracy.
Because of this, the centralization that they prevent at the top reasserts itself more or less spontaneously at the bottomthrough the market and competition. Yugoslav self-management increasingly incorporated the myth of "market socialism," with all its flagrant economic, political, and social contradictions. The crisis of 1968-1972 brought these contradictions to a head for a time, particularly in a real "explosion" of mass unemployment and social inequality, and a return to the primitive accumulation of capital in the pores of the socialized economy.
Despite the fact that Yugoslav self-management is a product of the bureaucracy and is caught up in a thousand imperfections and contradictions, it is nonetheless a step forward with regard to the system of bureaucratic management installed in the Soviet Union under Stalin and transplanted from there to most of the workers states.
Its principal merit is that it provides the working class with a qualitatively greater margin of self-defense. The number of strikes, demonstrations of working-class opposition, and the extent of workers democracy are qualitatively greater in Yugoslavia than in all the other workers states.
Of course, this margin is far from sufficient. Political repression continues to be leveled against opposition tendencies, including those that are Marxist and Communist. It is often used to cynically deny the very same principles of self-management, as was the case with the repression against the Marxist philosophy professors at Belgrade University.
But the margin is real. Yugoslav workers often say with pride that their country is the only country in the world where the managers cannot fire the workers but the workers can fire the managers. This is not yet socialism, nor even socialist democracy. But, even so, this is no small attainment.
Yugoslavia After Tito
Tito's death will leave a Yugoslav CP government that is deeply shaken precisely because of the contradictions of Yugoslavia's self-management system.
Many forces are in motion, acting with relative autonomy. Many contradictory social and political appetites are manifesting themselves almost overtly.
In this country with many nationalities, the deepening of social inequalities had led to worsening conflicts among the nationalities. The party leadership as well as the bureaucracy appeared to be divided along lines of national cleavage. Only the army was relatively united under Tito's bonapartist authority.
With Tito gone, the temptation for some forces to stress the autonomist course and the risk that others would respond by trying to deepen the centralism, could give rise to foreign intervention. And the Soviet bureaucracy, and American imperialism (especially with its NATO troops in Italy), could try to take advantage of a crisis in the Yugoslav regime to change the relationship of forces in the Mediterranean.
Moreover, the disappearance of the supreme arbiter will sharpen the conflict between the working class and the forces in the bureaucracy who question the maintenance of planning and full employment (forces who ultimately would give rise to tendencies to restore capitalism).
Yugoslav Marxists, as well as the international revolutionary movement, must understand the stakes in the coming battles. We must relentlessly defend the gains, and defend the workers state and self-management against all their enemies. But, we must defend them through the proletariat's independent class methods, as part of a resolute battle for direct political and economic power by democratically centralized workers councils, and as part of a battle for the full and complete flowering of proletarian democracy.
Notes
*The Comintern-the Communist (or Third) International-was organized under Lenin's leadership as the revolutionary successor to the Second International. Stalin dissolved the Comintern in 1943 as a gesture of goodwill to his imperialist allies in World War II. The Cominform-Communist Information Bureau-was set up in September 1947.-IP/I