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From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 23, 5 June 1950, p. 5,
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
In its issue of May 8, The Militant, speaking for the Socialist Workers Party, declared its virtually unqualified support for the Tito regime in Yugoslavia.
The ostensible occasion for this declaration by the SWP was the issuance of a Yugoslav May Day proclamation calling for world support to its struggle against the Kremlin. The tone of The Militant article reporting this event was set by its leading headline: Yugoslavs Issue Appeal for Return to Leninist Principles. The May Day proclamation, it went on to declare, “marks a great turning point in the history of the world working-class movement.” According to The Militant, it marked the culmination of a long development of the YCP and Tito regime, which it proceeded to eulogize in terms never before applied to a Stalinist police dictatorship, at least not by revolutionary socialists.
“For the first time since the Bolshevik revolution of October, 1917, a workers’ party [sic]) with state power outside of the Soviet Union has raised the banner of socialist internationalism. The proclamation summons the opponents of Stalinism to restore Lenin's program to its rightful place in the labor movement. This program represents the only real alternative to the grim choice of the cold war: imperialist atom-bomh conquest or Kremlin counter-revolution. It represents powerful vindication of the struggle begun by Leon Trotsky 27 years ago against Stalin’s destruction of the conquests of the first workers’ state ...”
Thus does The Militant identify the Titoist dictatorship – with its suppression of oppositional tendencies, its past history of physical elimination of Trotskyist militants, etc. – as that of “a workers’ party,” bearing Lenin’s program and vindicating Trotskx’s struggle. The Militant article goes on consistently to identify the Tito government with the Yugoslav people, calling it the product of a “living revolution," and referring to the “Yugoslav struggle for independence and socialism."
In order to lend this some semblance of consistency, it goes on to portray the Tito regime as being under some kind of political control of the masses. And to do this, it discovers, five years after the event, that a “social revolution” has taken place! But it manages to avoid the. ticklish question of the other Eastern satellites of Stalinist Russia, which as far as anyone can tell are identical in their economy, with that of Yugoslavia.
There is not a single word as to how this political control is exercised, through what organs it is expressed, or one single instance in which the masses have demonstrated such control, except for the explanation given for the break with the Kremlin. “The leaders,” they say, speaking of the Tito bureaucrats, “who had been lifted to power by the mighty tide of these events, could not have capitulated to the Russian would-be masters of the country without being swept aside by the revolutionary workers and peasants of Yugoslavia.” The Militant only forgets the alternative explanation that the leaders could not have capitulated or they would have lost the basis for exploiting the Yugoslav people in their own interests rather than those of their Russian cousins.
In embracing Titoism, The Militant has not only had to revise the basic tenet of its notorious Russian position, it has had to abandon the most basic tenet of the historical Trotskyist movement. Of Trotsky’s concept of the international character of the socialist revolution, The Militant says not a word. Neither does the Tito regime. What the latter does say, with evident approval (or at least lack of criticism) by The Militant, is a new version of the “theory of socialism in one country.” The Tito leaders, says The Militant, explain that “the privileges of the [Russian! bureaucracy were at the root of Stalinist degeneration and counter-revolution. They repeated over and over again that Yugoslavia would avoid the same fate only by the development of socialist democracy.”
That the SWP could have arrived at such a disgraceful position as to allow itsert to play the role of apologist for the GPU butcher who runs Yugoslavia today can only be attributed to its lack of any kind of understanding as to what is the nature of Stalinism and the Stalinist parties.
Forced by its theory – or rather, its refusal to revise its theory of Russia as a “degenerated workers’ state” – the SWP was rapidly developing along the road of becoming a left wing of Stalinism. The Tito break gave it the. possibility of taking the variant road of becoming the defender of the new “Titoist deviation” in the ranks of the world Stalinist movement.
As yet this relationship is entirely one-sided, as Tito has been entirely unimpressed with the desire of his SWP well-wishers to become his ideological agents.
There is no doubt that part of the SWP’s motivation for its new turn is the purely opportunistic desire to fish in the muddy waters of Stalinism and Wallaceism. That this is true does not change in the least the significance of its theoretical development in the direction of Stalinist-Titoist politics. With this new turn, the SWP has taken a big step in the direction of becoming a Stalinist appendage.
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