First Published: Unite!, Vol. 6, No. 9, May 15, 1980.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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All of the nobility of Europe, the heads of state of the “Great Powers” and the chieftains of the revisionist world gathered in Yugoslavia to mourn the passing of the “communist who lived like a king.” The man who confessed that he believed “Marxism was hostile to the well-being of the common man.” The man who promised Winston Churchill that “communism would not be established in Yugoslavia after the war.” The man who vilified Joseph Stalin and plotted to enslave the Albanian people. The man who founded the “non-aligned” movement and developed the “brilliant” theory of worker “self-administration.”
Josip Broz Tito is dead, after a life dedicated to subverting the Yugoslav revolution, serving world imperialism and spreading opportunism within the international Marxist-Leninist and workers’ movement. All the bourgeois and revisionist heads of state mourn his passing for truly, they have lost one of their own.
Three decades ago the Yugoslav people fought heroically against Nazi fascism and liberated their homeland. But the revolution was not to proceed to the construction of socialism. The people’s democracy established after the war was to be short-lived. The road of socialism did not suit the aims of the Yugoslav landlords and bourgeoisie, nor did it suit the ambitions of Tito and company who came to power as a clique of revisionists within the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Tito was never for socialism, but instead wanted a capitalist state in which he could rule.
To conduct such treachery, Tito could not come out openly against the masses who had fought for national and social liberation. And so he devised a scheme to lull the masses by giving his capitalist and chauvinist ambitions a socialist mask. Socialism would be built in Yugoslavia, he said, but a “specific socialism”, a “more humane socialism”, a so-called socialism which rejected the lessons of the first workers’ state and the teachings of Lenin and Stalin.
Tito’s grand plan was not solely the fruits of his own efforts. It was coordinated under the direction of British and U.S. imperialism, with which he had been in league even during the anti-fascist war. U.S. imperialism had a very special purpose in mind for Tito’s Yugoslavia. In return for economic, political and military aid, Tito would play the Trojan Horse within the socialist camp.
Tito’s mission would be to break with the Soviet Union and Stalin, and work to separate the other countries of people’s democracy established after the war from the socialist camp, in order to isolate the Soviet Union, weaken the revolutionary movement and strengthen the position of U.S. imperialism.
This grand plan was an important part of U.S. imperialism’s tactics following World War II. In struggle against the revolution and the socialist camp which e-merged greatly strengthened from the war, U.S. imperialism used outright aggression and military intervention as needed, on the one hand, and ideological aggression and subversion, on the other. On this second front, Tito was U.S. imperialism’s chief agent.
In due time, Yugoslav theoreticians developed their “brilliant” theory on how to construct their “more humane socialism” and called it worker “self-administration.[1]
It was a theory entirely alien to Marxism-Leninism and led full-speed down the road of the consolidation of capitalist ownership, in a form disguised as “property administered by groups of workers.” Yugoslav revisionism abandoned the Marxist-Leninist program of socialized ownership of the means of production, administered in a planned and centralized way by the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Instead the Yugoslav misleader proclaimed in favor of small groups of workers “owning” a single factory or farm. This theory led the Yugoslav revisionists to pass laws guaranteeing the rights of citizens to “found enterprises” and to “hire labor”. The Yugoslav Constitution reads: “Private owners have the same socio-economic position, the same rights and obligations as the working people in the socio-economic organizations.” Today as a result of the abandonment of the program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, a new class of capitalist owners has arisen from the old landlord and new bureaucratic strata, to exploit the workers of Yugoslavia.
And thus, this “specific socialism” placed the Yugoslav workers and peasants in bondage, indebted the Yugoslav government $11 billion to foreign capital, perpetuated the brutal oppression of the different nations and nationalities within Yugoslavia, and created a decadent “westernized” culture complete with “girlie” magazines.
Others have followed in Tito’s footsteps – Khrushchev, Castro, and Teng Hsiao-ping, to name a few – who have either taken up wholesale or adopted for their own “specific socialism” the revisionist theories of Tito. Indeed, the Chinese revisionists have long been admirers of Tito’s worker “self-administration” and are today modelling their capitalist modernization upon the lessons of Yugoslavia.
Though their tactics may vary and their theories may appear contradictory, all modern revisionists from Browder to Tito to Khrushchev to Mao Tsetung share the aim of subverting the revolution and perpetuating the capitalist system. As comrade Enver Hoxha described it, Titoite revisionism is “a fire extinguisher to quell the flames of revolution.”
Tito is dead, but Titoism lives on. It is an evil poison, concocted in the secret intelligence kitchens of British and U.S. imperialism and prescribed as a tonic for the wounds inflicted on world imperialism by the blows of the people fighting for liberation and socialism.
Tito is dead, but there are others lined up to take his place. Others who will call themselves communists and yet live like kings off the alms begged from U.S. imperialism and the riches stolen from the sweat and toil of the working people of Yugoslavia. There are others, willing to play the role of Trojan Horse.
Walter Mondale did not represent the U.S. working class when he cried crocodile tears at Tito’s splendid funeral. Recognizing the renegade and reactionary for what he was, we do not mourn him. We mourn the Marxist-Leninists and revolutionaries of Yugoslavia butchered at Tito’s behest and the workers and peasants who have toiled and died building Tito’s “non-aligned, self-administered” capitalist paradise on the Adriatic Sea.
[1] For an all-round analysis, read Enver Hoxha’s book Yugoslav “Self-Administration”, A Capitalist Theory and Practice.