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Labor Action, 5 June 1950

‘4th International’ Goes Whole-Hog

Titoland Is Now a “Workers State” but They’re Not Sure
When the Revolution Happened

From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 23, 5 June 1950, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

For whoever may be interested, we report that the leadership of the Fourth International (self-styled “orthodox Trotskyists”) have at last screwed up their courage to the sticking point in order to go whole hog for Titoism. Tito’s Yugoslavia, they have now decided, is a “workers’ state” and a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

The international leading committee of this group, at a plenary meeting in April, adopted a resolution to this effect for the first time. A discussion on the question has been going on in the ranks of its affiliated “parties.” The vote in the leading committee was 8–3.

The short resolution passed is a complete whitewash of the Tito bureaucracy’s past and present. It reads:

“Whereas there have been different views on the stages of development of the Yugoslav resolution, the eighth plenum [of the international committee] considers that, as a consequence of the victory of the proletarian revolution in Yugoslavia, there exists in that country a workers’ state and a regime of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It observes that, in the particular conditions of the Yugoslav revolution, bureaucratic deformations subsist in that state; it affirms that a serious struggle is carried on by the Yugoslav Communists against these deformations. The International’s campaign for the defense of Yugoslavia must be determined in this sense. The discussion will go on in the International on the estimation of the stages of the Yugoslav revolution, including the present stage.”
 

Some Notes

1. The “bureaucratic deformations” – a phrase which Lenin used to point to such aspects of the revolutionary regime of his day – is here applied to the totalitarian one-party police regime of Tito & Co.! Their reason for existence, says the resolution, is due (presumably solely) to “the particular conditions of the Yugoslav revolution” – without a single reference to the fact that the regime has come straight out of the GPU-Stalinist machine, of which Tito was a trusted agent not so long ago. While the whole resolution whitewashes Tito’s present, this formulation even whitewashes his past.
    
2. he pitiable want of theory behind this resolution is startlingly highlighted by the next question which the brains of the international committee bent to.

A “proletarian revolution” took place in Yugoslavia. WHEN?

Proving that it is considering undoubtedly the most curious proletarian revolution in the history of the world, the committee could not decide definitively. (In the first place, they had not recognized it while it was going on, obviously being tbo involved in astutely working out the details of the Russian question to notice that the first successful proletarian revolution in over three decades was taking place behind their backs.)

Five of the majority dated the revolution at 1946–48. This, however, was opposed by the writing- [missing text] est theoretician of the group, Ernest Germain, who assigned it to the break with the Cominform.

We do not know how these aspirants to building a Trotsky-Titoist International (while the Titoists themselves denounce these fishers in their private waters as fascists) are planning to walk around the question of whether their decision does or does not make workers’ states out of the satellite countries in the Russian empire. It appears that various revisions of Trotsky’s own “workers’ state” theory are aborning in order to cram present-day reality (and the twists of the line) into consonance with their standard quotations.

 
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