MIA > Archive > Draper > Titoism
From Labor Action, Vol. 13 No. 49, 5 December 1949, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Almost the day after the Cominform blast against Tito last year, Independent Socialists hailed the break as “the beginning- of the end of Stalinism.” This did not mean, we made clear, that Stalinism was crashing in flames tomorrow or the next day. It was only the beginning of the end – that is, it opened up to view the internal disintegrative forces destined to tear the Stalinist world apart.
Even so, it was quite a mouthful, especially when so many “experts” were astutely analyzing the new development as merely a clique fight between two dictators with different uniforms; or not less shrewdly as a staged affair designed solely to bring Russian troops to the Adriatic and the Italian border. Even today, this latter view is lusty enough to justify a New York Times headline when former Ambassador Cavendish Cannon comes home with the news that the Yugoslav-Russian break is “just as genuine as it could be” – this after a year and a half!
But the tremendous significance of the Titoist split is not much of a moot point today. The disintegrative effect of Titoism is being acted out in life, and even those who scorn the power of theory (except when wild guesses based on rumors of reports are given this name) cannot miss an accumulation of newspaper headlines. And the tremendous significance of the Titoist split will be here with us even if Yugoslavia is militarily or otherwise beaten down by Moscow – because Titoism in its most general sense cannot be beaten down by Moscow.
Yet, with the clarification of so many things about Titoism by the course of events, there is not a lightening but a deepening of the fog which hangs in the mind of so many of the “experts” – in and out of the socialist movement – like the cloud over the altar in Solomon’s temple. Having become convinced that there IS such a thing as Titoism which is anti-Moscow, the cobwebs are spun around the question: What is Titoism? And here the wish performs its paternal duties in siring the thought, with sheer fantasy in the role of the dam in most cases.
The offspring of this wish-fantasy is the idea that “Titoism has to come in our direction.” To indicate the spread in popularity of the notion: it is shared equally by such diverse people as some circles of the State Department and the leadership of the Fourth International-Trotskyists. While the former has the advantage of at least being a going concern, the latter excels in reducing the idea to its most grotesque forms. Bourgeois circles are heartened by the illusion that Tito has to accept Western capitalism, and the official Trotskyists fell each other to be of good cheer: Tito is becoming a Leninist.
We Independent Socialists are also cheered by the spread of Titoism, but it is not because of such stuff as dreams are made on, or the idea that he is “coming in our direction” – that is, toward real socialism, or “democratic communism,” or Leninism, or however it be put.
Titoism is having a disintegrative effect on the Russian empire today, not because it is ceasing to be Stalinist, but precisely BECAUSE it is a form of Stalinism.
If, at the same time, it means the beginning of the end of Stalinism – including Tito’s Stalinism – it is not because of any tendency toward the pro-Leninist transformation of Titoism.
Ninety per cent of the stupidities that are uttered (worse, printed) about Titoism flow from one thing: lack of understanding of the nature of Stalinism. And ninety per cent of the misunderstanding of Stalinism flows from a second thing: lack of understanding of the fact that it is not today simply a depraved ideology but that it is a social system. How this lies at the heart of the matter will appear in the course of this discussion.
Stalinism is a social system, as unrestricted to particular national boundaries (Russia’s, for example) as is the system of capitalism. It is not merely a certain peculiar “form of government” existing in Russia, but a social system now ruling a good part of Europe and soon of Asia. It is the social system of Yugoslavia, as it is that of Russia or Poland or Bulgaria. Titoism arises within this social system.
What is this social system? We have written extensively enough on its analysis; here is only that much of a summary as is needed for our problem.
For that very small number of people who have even raised the question of the nature of Russian Stalinist society – and that largely in and about the socialist movement – there are two theories which have had fatal difficulty in surviving the test of post-war events – the very fact of the expansion of the Russian empire which itself gave rise to Titoism.
For those who analyzed Stalinism ps a kind of state capitalism – in the sense of a capitalist system advanced to the pinnacle of centralization – the spread of Stalinism to Eastern Europe presented a bewildering problem. Everywhere it entered, the last remnants of capitalism were uprooted and, more important, also the last remnants of the capitalist class.
This Stalinist “state capitalist” class showed itself to be so alien to capitalism that it could not permit the smallest shred of the old ruling class to exist in life, let alone in good health. It has acted more hostilely and irreconcilably against the old capitalist classes in the conquered countries than the capitalist class has ever acted against its own rivals – except perhaps in the case of the relatively clean sweep made by the Great French Revolution of 1789. With the greatest haste, even where the wisdom of that haste from its own purely tactical point of view may have been in doubt, it has nationalized (statified) industry. The bourgeoisie has been expropriated not only politically but economically – even where the bourgeois elements were quite willing to play a pro-Russian role, as in Czechoslovakia.
A queer sort of capitalism – a queer sort of capitalism no matter what modifier is put in front of the term! Queer enough to justify one in saying: if this be “state capitalism,” it is at any rate a social system, headed by a ruling class, fundamentally different from the social system and ruling class we have known. That is, it is a new social system and ruling class.
And as for the adherents of Trotsky’s pre-war view that the Russian Stalinist state is a “workers’ state” (degenerated, but still some kind of workers’ state), this view is now mainly of historical interest – and that interest derives not from the fact that it is still preserved in formaldehyde by the Fourth International but that it could have been held by the greatest Marxist of our own day as late as 1939–40, and from him absorbed by his movement.
At that time the dispute was on a theoretical basis. In these paragraphs on the question, we are not harking back to the theoretical problem. The fact is that the East European satellites of the Russian empire are socially and structurally identical with Russia today; and if they too are workers’ states (born degenerated) then the first problem is verbally solved only to raise a much greater one. Yesterday capitalist states, today workers’ states – a socialist revolution has taken place in these lands. By whom? When? How? A socialist revolution not. made by the working class? A bureaucratic socialist revolution imported on the Russian army’s gun carriages?
The extreme piteousness of the plight of the orthodox Trotskyists is that THEY CANNOT EVEN BE ORTHODOX, easy as that usually is! For them, either the heterodoxy of a new analysis of Russia, or the heterodoxy of the concept of the “bureaucratic socialist revolution.”
The very existence of the Russian empire demonstrated that we have here a new social system – a barbarous, exploitive social system in which not any private property-owning ruling class rules, nor the working class, but one in which the state bureaucracy rules over an economy which is the property of the state, which is in turn the collective property of the bureaucracy. We note that the term which we use for this new social system – bureaucratic collectivism – has become well enough known to make its way even into Arthur Schlesinger’s book The Vital Center (unaccompanied, sad to say, by any evidence that he understands it).
And the first significance of the rise of Titoism is its impact on the notion (which rose with the burgeoning of Stalinism) that since this new social system has come, it must be the “wave of the future,” the image of a new long era through which mankind must struggle again as it did through previous eras, with all hope of freedom postponed.
This totalitarian monstrosity of a social system seemed almost youthfully vigorous; hateful, but victorious; appalling, but seemingly invincible in its advance; not only in complete control at home but already taking over the world. But how unlike its predecessors has been its course! Not after a thousand years of triumphant growth, not even after a hundred, not even a decade – but in three short years from the beginning of its expansion, the whole structure shakes. Not with a minor ague: from the very top down, from that very top which always seems so stable and secure until it cracks.
It was not out of excessive optimism that we greeted the Titoist crackup as the beginning of the end of Stalinism; but because here one could recognize the forces which, inserting into the crack, could wedge that crack apart, opening up yawning fissures through which the revolt of the people could pour.
And so we have to discuss the meaning of two propositions: (1) Titoism is a force gnawing at the very underpinnings of world Stalinist power; (2) Titoism, at the same time, is itself a form of Stalinism. How do these two facts about Titoism square with the real objectives of fighters for socialist democracy and freedom? Is Titoism on “our side,” so to speak? Is it paradoxical to cheer at the infiltration of Titoism in the Stalinist world, as we do – even gloat over it, if you will – and still not be “pro-Titoist”? What is the policy for independent socialists on the struggle between the Moscow form of Stalinism and the Titoist form of Stalinism?
(Next week: The nature of Titoism’s international appeal)
Last updated on 11 December 2022