From Trotsky To Tito. James Klugmann 1951
There is one more line of propaganda that is particularly dear to the Titoite propagandists. It is the proclamation, which is echoed in every type of capitalist newspaper, that ‘Tito is a new kind of Communist and Titoism a new kind of Communism’.
To this propaganda there is a very simple answer. All that is necessary is to examine for a moment who are the men, who are the parties, whose are the newspapers and journals, that today are lauding the Titoites.
Already by the end of 1949, Britain’s leading Tories were paying homage to their stooges. Lord Vansittart on 18 October 1949 spoke of Tito as the origin of a ‘crack throughout the Communist Empire’ and added:
It should be the business of our diplomacy to widen that crack by every possible means. (Manchester Guardian, 19 October 1949)
Mr Churchill himself, speaking in the House of Commons on 15 November 1949, rejoiced that Tito Yugoslavia (instead of Czechoslovakia) had been elected (under US pressure) on to the Security Council of the United Nations. On 12 December 1949, the Daily Telegraph published an article by Mr Eden declaring that:
Tito’s example and influence can decisively change the course of events in Central and Eastern Europe.
It is, indeed, a very ‘new’ sort of Communism that enlists the support of Messrs Churchill, Eden and Vansittart.
On the American side, as usual, the same sentiments were echoed with even greater frankness. The New York Herald Tribune wrote (2 September 1949):
Meanwhile [the US] Department of Commerce records showed yesterday that permits to ship goods to Yugoslavia have climbed sharply during the last ten months as Marshal Tito’s resistance to Russia increased.
The Washington Star proclaimed (8 October 1949):
In terms of the cold war between East and West, Yugoslavia today is one of the most important countries in the world.
The London Times, explaining how Tito had to conceal his surrender to the West, wrote that (14 July 1949):
Instead of making concessions in return for loans, Yugoslavia makes them in advance.
All the organs of the most openly reactionary of Wall Street satellites rallied to the support of the Marshal. The West German business organ published in Stuttgart declared (29 October 1949):
The Belgrade Marshal is on the way to becoming the favourite of the Western states engaged in the cold war. They fell over each other in their efforts to give him further political and economic help, and perhaps even to prepare for the despatch of arms. The American diplomats who recently met in London and Paris thoroughly discussed the possibilities of how Tito’s opposition to Moscow could help American policy towards the Soviet Union.
In Italy, the Titoites failed dismally to win support from the Nenni Socialists, but enjoyed the outspoken backing of the neo-fascists of the MSI (Italian Social Movement, upholders of Mussolini). A motion put forward by Signore Alfredo Cucco, the MSI neo-fascist leader, declared on 15 January 1950:
The Italian Social Movement expresses its dissatisfaction with the weaknesses, lack of understanding and restraint in the government’s foreign policy at a time when a country bordering us in the East... is in vital need of our mutual understanding.
Becoming franker and franker in their praise for Tito’s ‘new kind of Communism’, the Western imperialists began more and more openly to reveal their real motives. On 2 November 1950, an Economist article on ‘American aid to Tito’ explained:
For four years the Americans have been told by the government and their representatives in Congress that the United States is unalterably opposed to Communism and to dictatorship. Yet with surprising facility, without a word of debate, the American government has for almost one year been lending ever-increasing aid and moral support to the Communist dictatorship in Yugoslavia. Now the National Security Council has gone so far as to commit itself to the idea of military aid in the event of aggression, while the new American ambassador, Mr George Allen, has hinted that ‘aggression’ might include internal revolt fostered by a ‘certain foreign power'... The main problem for the State Department and for the Western world in general is to contain the Soviet Union...
The policy has already paid its dividends. Political convulsions produced by the Belgrade – Moscow struggle in Bulgaria and other satellites; the loss of prestige suffered by the Russians at the last General Assembly of the United Nations; the splitting of ‘front’ organisations and the defections in Western Communist parties over the ‘Titoist’ issue; the removal of Trieste as a danger spot from the international agenda; the end of the Greek civil war; the solution of the Carinthian problem in Austria – these are the rewards of the policy forwarded by the State Department... Moreover the interest accruing from this policy has far exceeded the principal expended. In fact, it has been the cheapest and most rewarding of all Western investments so far. [My italics – JK]
Read between the lines of the curiously semi-Aesopian language of British diplomacy, and what have you? A frank acknowledgement that Titoism and the Titoites are recognised by Western reaction as an important anti-Soviet and anti-Communist weapon, dividers of the people’s front for peace, betrayers of the Greek people, and the Slav peoples of Trieste and Carinthia; a frank recognition that of all quislings Tito is the most cheaply bought!
Along the same lines the press of American big business put its cards on the table:
It is pointed out that advantages accruing from Marshal Tito’s survival have included the distancing of Russia from the Adriatic Sea; a weakening of Communist guerrilla bands in Greece, an important factor in their collapse; some protection for the Western position in Austria in the event of war... (New York Herald Tribune, 12 June 1950)
In Belgrade, Marshal Tito’s capital, a new Tito is on display. Old Tito, pre-1948 model, appears to have disappeared... It is this new Tito who says he might send troops to Asia in support of the United Nations, says he’s willing to return Greek children to Greece, release a Catholic archbishop from jail, trim Communist privileges in Yugoslavia, and accept loans and gifts from the United States. (US News and World Report, 24 November 1950)
Look at a map. Yugoslavia today is, as a country hostile to Russia, the biggest bargain in foreign relations the United States has ever had. (Look, 10 April 1951)
To be a ‘Tito’ has become a synonym in the press of Western capitalism with a ‘friend of Western imperialism’. The capitalists turn hopefully from country to country looking for Titos – usually in vain:
It would be delectable, indeed, if a split after the style of that with Yugoslavia’s Tito should occur between the Politbureau crowd and Mao. (Philadelphia Inquirer, quoted by United States Information Service in London, 21 December 1949)
Since the Chinese Communists came to power the hope has been openly expressed in the West, particularly in the United States, that Mao Tse-tung would become the Tito of Asia. The bait has been offered almost openly. If Mao will act the Tito, the West will not refuse economic aid. (World Today, organ of Chatham House, June 1950)
They hope in vain, but they make themselves clear. To be a Tito means to surrender to imperialism and to become an enemy of the USSR, the Communists, Socialists, working class, and of all those who stand for progress and for peace.
All these quotations, and ten thousand more, make it abundantly clear what is the true nature of what some of the capitalist and right-wing Labour propagandists call a ‘new kind of Communism’. Imperialism needs Tito dressed up as a Communist: ‘Titoism remains a force, however, only so long as Marshal Tito can claim to be a Communist.’ (The Times, 13 September 1949)
But imperialism openly recognises that beneath the Communist façade they have a cheap, obedient tool, ready to carry out their war policy directed against the Soviet Union, People’s Democracies and the working people everywhere. ‘There are two kinds of Communism’, they proclaim. But is it not rather strange that there is only ‘one sort of Communism’ that captivates the capitalists, that Churchill lauds, Truman supports, the right-wing Labour leaders admire, that the red-baiters acknowledge as their friend, the Greek monarchists and Italian fascists and German monopolists recognise as their ally?
No! It is not so strange. Because there is only one sort of Communism, one sort of Marxism-Leninism, one genuine sort of Socialism, and because Tito’s ‘Communism’ has as much in common with real Communism as Hitler’s ‘National Socialism’ had with a true Socialist outlook.
Tito’s ‘Communism’ is as Communist as Hitler’s ‘Socialism’ was Socialist. But the particular value of the Titoites to imperialism, like the Trotskyites before them and along with them, is that they carry the utterly imperialist outlook and actions concealed under a thin veneer of ultra-rrrrevolutionary pseudo-Marxist phrases. That is their utility and that is the use that has been made of them by imperialism in Britain, too.
When the war was over every effort was made by the Yugoslav embassy in Britain to attract the maximum number of British Socialists and Communists, and particularly the youth, to Tito Yugoslavia. Deceived by the propaganda of the Titoites, Socialists and Communists accepted the invitations in large numbers. When the publication of the resolution of the Communist Information Bureau in June 1948 revealed the anti-Socialist character of Titoite policy, the Titoites, through channels of the Yugoslav embassy, and amply supplied with finances from sources it is now not hard to guess at, made a dead set at the British Communist Party, deluging its members with propaganda of every type, invitations to receptions, free holidays, and unlimited wining and dining. Their aim, quite openly expressed, was to split the Communist Party.
Here they met with abysmal failure and succeeded in clipping off from the party at most a dozen or so wobbling elements throughout the whole country, by the loss of whom the Communist Party was undoubtedly strengthened. With this fiasco, the British Titoites directed their attention to the Labour Party, to the trade-union and cooperative movements, joining forces with the small clique of Trotskyites (once self-styled ‘Revolutionary Communists’), most of whom entered the Labour Party in the course of 1948.
In this ‘operation’, and with the fullest aid of the capitalist press, they tried to present themselves as a new brand of ‘left’ Socialist. Here their manoeuvre was clear. Inside the broad British labour movement, the right-wing Social-Democratic leaders still exercised a very great influence, and, in 1948-49, could still succeed in holding back the larger section of British workers from united struggle with the Communists and militant Labour workers against capitalism. The theories of the right-wing Social-Democrats were still politically disarming a large section of the working people. But they were losing ground. More and more attacks were being made against the living standards of the working people, against democracy. The war propaganda of the Attlees and Bevins was becoming more and more blatant, and their surrender to US imperialism more and more apparent. More and more trade unionists, cooperators, Labour Party members were throwing off the long-established influence of Social-Democracy, moving into struggle for wages, democracy, independence and peace, moving into united action with the Communists and militant workers. This made it necessary for imperialism – and for the right-wing Labour leaders – to look for an instrument with which to divert and confuse the growing militancy and the growing unity. This was the role assigned to the Titoites.
In the 1949 period the Titoites in Britain turned their attention, in the first place, to the youth and to the students. The reason for this is not hard to find, for it is precisely amongst the youth and students that the influence of the right-wing Social-Democrats has been, and remains, the weakest. The youth, by nature fighters, prompt to rebel against persecution and bad conditions, ardently desirous for peace, have continuously found themselves opposed in their struggles, not only by Tories, but by the right-wing Labour leaders. Time and again the Labour Party leadership has stepped in to disband or to ‘discipline’ the Labour League of Youth, to stop them from united struggle with the other sections of the youth, including their comrades in the Young Communist League. As for the students, no one could claim that Transport House had a high intellectual appeal, or that the student youth would find inspiration in Attlee or Morrison. Hence it was in the fields of the youth and the universities that imperialism, first and most urgently, found need of the Titoites.
When young members of the Labour League of Youth protested that the Labour Party was rejecting Socialism, they were side-tracked on to the Tito issue. ‘You want Socialism’, they were told, ‘then go to Yugoslavia, there you will find a new sort of Socialism.’ Whilst youth from the Labour League were disciplined for united action with the Young Communist League on issues of peace or wages, whilst the Transport House press inveighed against the evils of Communism, they were given every encouragement to visit and make contact with ‘that new kind of Communism’ of the Tito brand. In the universities the old Trotskyite arsenal of anti-Soviet slanders dressed up as Marxism was heavily drawn on to confuse the students who were moving left. Youth and students were deluged with Yugoslav embassy propaganda, gratis and unasked for. Carefully conducted tours were organised to Tito Yugoslavia, where the youth were shepherded with the aid of carefully chosen interpreters from one well-prepared showpiece to another. A number of experienced Trotskyites, skilled in diversionary phrases and tactics, were drafted into the ranks of the Labour League of Youth.
Another field where Titoite activity in Britain took on a special concentration was amongst the colonial peoples living in Britain and especially amongst the colonial student organisations – African, West Indian, Indian, Ceylonese, etc. In the colonies, too, for obvious reasons, there was no economic basis for a mass influence of Social-Democracy. The colonial people and the colonial youth were, everywhere, on the march against imperialism. Imperialism, as we have already seen in an earlier chapter, saw in Titoism a specially important weapon to confuse, disrupt and spy on the colonial people, and British imperialism saw that a ‘useful’ (in the MI5 sense) job could be done by the Titoites in the colonial student organisations, using them as a bridge to gain an influence in the colonial and semi-colonial countries themselves. Here Titoite propaganda took on a special demagogy. It tried to cash in on the revolutionary sentiments of the colonial youth, to turn their national revolutionary aspirations against the Soviet Union, to confuse their study of Marxism, to lead them to skip stages in the revolutionary struggle, to put forward Tito Yugoslavia as a ‘model’.
By 1950, the successes scored in these activities were extremely slight. A few initial successes were quickly repelled when the progressive youth and students saw the need to expose the true character of Titoism, and when, each month, history itself made clearer and clearer the road of disaster, hunger and subjection to imperialism along which the Titoites were leading the Yugoslav people. But in 1950, disillusion with Social-Democracy began to accelerate not only amongst youth and students, but in the broad adult labour movement – in the trade unions, cooperatives and Labour Party branches.
In the course of 1950, therefore, and still more in 1951, the right-wing Labour leaders, themselves, began to make direct personal contact with the Titoites, to take the pro-Tito campaign out of the hands of the phoney ‘left’, into their own hands. The direct link-up was more and more openly established between the Titoites and Transport House. The Daily Herald and all the official Labour Party propaganda publications began more and more openly to boost Tito.
Labour ministers and Labour Party leaders visited Yugoslavia and publicly paid homage to Titoism. Noel Baker, Morgan Phillips, Sam Watson, the right-wing miners’ leader from Durham, and Mr Ernest Davies, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, took the road to Belgrade. All that was most openly and consistently anti-Communist in the labour movement began to laud to the skies Tito’s ‘new kind of Communism’. In return, the Titoites began to praise the Labour Party leaders and their right-wing policy in their official press. Indeed, they went further and began to make open contact with the Tory leaders and to find sweet words for them.
The Belgrade Review of International Affairs, which has an English edition, and which is aimed at functioning as an international Tito – Trotskyite ‘ideological’ centre, loudly praised Gaitskell’s budget:
The Labourite Minister Mr Gaitskell succeeded in balancing the new budget by proposing decisive but popular [sic! – JK] measures which prevented the Conservative opposition from publicly taking a stand against the budget as a whole... The Labour followers are pleased [sic! – JK] that taxes have been increased for the rich. (Review of International Affairs, Belgrade, 25 April 1951)
Djilas, Titoite Minister without Portfolio, paid a hush-hush visit to Britain in February 1951, had conferences with Labour ministers, a number of secret talks, and gave a lecture to the élite of reaction assembled by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, on how to distort Marxism. Needless to say, the Djilas brand of ‘Marxism’ was warmly received by the most reactionary press of the country.
On 28 February 1951, Borba printed an interview with Marshal Tito with a Reuter correspondent. The Marshal had been converted to Social-Democracy:
I consider the British Labour Party [he explained] a workers’ party which in practice is led by elements of Socialist science, especially in solving the economic problems in its own country.
In mid-March 1951, the Titoite ‘theoretician’, Moša Pijade, led a Titoite delegation to Britain and delivered himself of the following at the official dinner organised by the Foreign Press Association (15 March 1951):
Our yesterday’s meeting with the representatives of the two Houses of Parliament happened to coincide with a fierce [sic! – JK] tussle between the government and the opposition, yet we were able to observe that as far as feelings of friendship for Yugoslavia went, there was no difference between the conflicting parties.
Indeed how could there be a difference of attitude between Tories and right-wing Labour leaders who so ‘fiercely’ contest who is to prepare imperialist war and defend capitalism in Britain, towards their joint and obedient stooges? The Tories are delighted with the open rapprochement of Tito and Transport House. Already in September 1950, the Economist, commenting on the right-wing Labour delegation to the Titoites, applauded the fact that it could find in Yugoslavia ‘a Communist party which has irretrievably burned its boats with the Soviet Union’ and which ‘can overcome any inhibitions it may have against the representatives of these Western democrats who are so continually reviled by the Communist Information Bureau...’ (Economist, 16 September 1950).
And The Times, describing the visit of Pijade and his men, lauded the new ‘liberalism’ of the Titoites (17 March 1951). ‘Pendennis’ in the Sunday Observer’s weekly ‘Table Talk’ remarks how ‘Yugoslavia continues to move, quietly, towards the Western system’ (26 June 1951). Indeed the Titoites are forced more and more into the open by history, and are even beginning to admit their conversion to capitalism. Boris Kidrič, member of the Political Bureau of the Titoite Party, exhorted the Yugoslav economists at a meeting of the Society of Economists in mid-April 1951, to study much more the development of capitalist countries. He described as ‘all very ridiculous’ the theory that there is unemployment in the USA. ‘The Society of Economists’, he declared, ‘ought to pay great attention to the development of capitalist economy.’
The Manchester Guardian’s diplomatic correspondent, writing on his visit to Yugoslavia ('Yugoslavia in Transition – The West and the Future’, 14 June 1951), remarked how Titoite officials told him that they ‘recognised that there were many good aspects of the capitalist system’.
Thus history itself has shown, as it always does, that there is no difference in practice between the doctrines of the Trotskyite – Titoites covered with a veneer of revolutionary phrases and those of the right-wing Social-Democrats, and that both act as instruments for the defence of dying capitalism. Despite all demagogy, Titoites, Tories and right-wing Labour leaders all serve the same end.
This does not mean that Titoism is already exposed for what it is amongst all sections of the British labour and progressive movement. This does not mean that there is not urgent need of increased explanation of the true role of the Titoites. For as the mass movement for peace, democracy, independence and living standards swings into motion, as the unity of the labour and progressive movement against capitalism is forged in action, as the Marxist explanations of the causes of the growing misery of the people, of the menace of war, and Marxist indications of the way out of crisis, of the way forward for the British people towards independence, peace and Socialism, fall on ever more fertile ground, imperialism looks for weapons to divert this movement, to split it and confuse it, and more and more as the masses of the people turn away from the right-wing Social-Democrats, reaction will turn to Titoism and all brands of pseudo-left demagogy as its main weapon of disruption.
Moreover, the Titoites have become a coordinating centre in Britain, as in other countries, for the secret infiltration of spies, provocateurs, stooges of all kinds into the working-class movement. Indeed as the struggle develops, there will be need for ever-increased vigilance, and for ever clearer exposure of the role of the Titoites as instruments of reaction.
The visit to Britain of two further leading Titoites in June-July 1951 only adds point to this fact. In June, following Djilas and Pijade, Ranković himself, chief of the Titoite repressive forces, came to Britain on a mission of which both British and Yugoslav officials kept equally silent. In July came General Popović, Chief of Staff, fresh from Washington, where he was ‘understood to have made a favourable impression’ (New York Herald Tribune, 9 July 1951).
The task of explaining to the masses of the people the role of treachery played by the Titoites is not an affair for specialists. For those who are fighting for peace and Socialism, in this country as in all others, will find that they have to face, not only open Tories and reactionaries, not only right-wing Labour leaders who try to disguise the class struggle, to secure class collaboration, and to put forward perspectives of winning Socialism without struggle within the framework of capitalism. They will also find themselves, inevitably, up against leftist demagogues who conceal a right-wing policy in left-wing phrases (and we have had plenty of these in our country), and against agents of capitalism who try to penetrate into the militant labour movement, and to sap it, disrupt it, spy on it, from inside.
From the examination that we have made of the role of the Titoites, what lessons can we learn?
The first lesson is the importance of Socialist theory to the working class and working people in their struggles to establish a Socialist Britain. It was on the background of a low level of Socialist theory, of the understanding of Marxism, that the Titoites were able to betray the liberation struggles of the Yugoslav peoples, and to get power into the hands of their own clique.
Wherever Titoites through their secret work have been able to gain leading positions in the working-class movement of this or that country, it has been by trading on weaknesses of political understanding – bourgeois nationalism, abstract doctrinaire approaches, lack of political education and discussion.
In this country where the right-wing Labour leaders preach that the working class has no need of its own theory, its own philosophy, and where the Attlees and Morrisons purvey throughout the labour movement the theories of the capitalist class, Titoism and Trotskyism are of especial danger, unless there is a consistent effort made by the Communist Party and militant sections of the Labour workers to fight for a political understanding based on Marxism-Leninism.
Action alone will not bring Socialism. How many Labour workers have toiled and sacrificed all their lives to build up the labour movement, to find themselves betrayed in the end by right-wing Labour leaders? Action and struggle will only lead to Socialism when the working class and working people know where they are going, have a sure course set before them, a compass that can guide them, which can only be the theory of Marxism-Leninism applied concretely to their own country, their own historic conditions. Without this the working people can again and again, despite their efforts and sacrifices, be misled and betrayed and see their movement, built up with such pains, disrupted.
All the theories of the right-wing Labour leaders attempt, in one form or another, to show the need for class collaboration, the need for the working class to collaborate with the capitalist class of both their own and other countries. They teach that the state is a neutral apparatus, above classes, which loyally serves whichever party is elected to office.
But the whole of history repeatedly brings to the fore the lesson that class collaboration leads to disaster, that friendship with, say, the American capitalists leads to colonisation by American imperialism, that the transition to Socialism is only possible in continued struggle against the capitalist class at home and internationally.
It is not by accident that the Tories, right-wing Labour leaders and the Titoites all point their shafts in one direction, that their venom and their hatred, their lies and their slanders, are all directed, in the first place, against the Soviet Union.
It is because the Soviet Union has given an example to the working class and the working people of the whole world. It has shown them that the working people can take power under the leadership of the working class, that the people can build Socialism without the capitalists. It is because the very existence of the Soviet Union and its enormous achievements in all spheres of life, inspire the working people in all capitalist and in colonial countries, to follow the example of the Soviet people, to end the rule of the capitalists and landowners, and build their own new free and prosperous lives in a country which belongs to them.
It is because it is the Soviet Union that leads the world struggle for peace, which has become today the greatest dread of the monopolists. The imperialists see war as the only ‘solution’ of their problems, and they hate most those who the most strongly and the most consistently fight for peace.
The imperialists hate the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its leader Stalin, because it is the most experienced and clear-sighted of all working-class parties in the world – the greatest enemy of dying capitalism.
When the tricks and cunning of the Titoites were misleading the working class of all countries, when they had succeeded in concealing their real aims and intentions, it was the CPSU(B), with its great experience, that first gave warning of the betrayal of Tito and his confederates, that first unmasked their departure from Marxist theory, that first exposed the Titoite conspiracies. Those of us, like myself, who in the early stage were deceived by the manoeuvres of the Titoites, can well understand the gratitude that we owe, and that, indeed, the peoples of all countries owe, to the wisdom of the warnings given by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Indeed we only have to think what might have happened if the Communist Information Bureau, on Soviet initiative, had not warned and had not unmasked the plots of the Tito, gang, to understand the debt of all progressive people to the Soviet Communists.
And therefore a second task that emerges from an examination of the role of Titoism is the appreciation of the need ceaselessly to fight in the labour and progressive movement to make known and understood by the people the vanguard role of the USSR in the world fight for peace and Socialism and ceaselessly to fight for friendship and trade with the Soviet people.
Combating Social-Democracy and combating Tito – Trotskyism is not simply a question of explanation and education. These are essential. But, at the same time, it is in the course of struggle that the people learn the most quickly, and it is in the course of the struggle against capitalism, for peace, independence, living standards, democracy – for Socialism, that the explanations and education fall on really fertile soil. When the struggle is weak, when politics is divorced from action, then the Titoites can thrive.
And, therefore, we learn from our examination of the role of the Titoites the need for unity, for an ever-growing unity of the working people and of the working class, which will help the people, in the course of their struggle, to throw out the betrayers of their movement, which will divide the demagogues from those who genuinely are prepared to struggle, which will strengthen the bonds between the most militant class-conscious and far-sighted workers with the masses of the working people.
The British bourgeoisie is the most experienced capitalist class in the whole world. No group of capitalists in any country has learned better how to combine ruthless repression with cunning bribery and corruption. No ruling class has acquired the same skill at manoeuvring, retreating where necessary, disguising its real aims.
Over a long period British imperialism has used a small portion of the super-profits that it has drawn from the colonial people, to draw over to class collaboration (often without their being conscious of it) a section of the working class. Now that British imperialism has entered into deep crisis, that it can no longer give the sops and concessions of yore, it is still aided and abetted by a group of right-wing Labour leaders, who try by every means to conceal the facts of exploitation, and the truth of the dictatorship exercised, under a Labour government, by the monopoly capitalists, through the capitalist state.
The right-wing Social-Democrats teach that the state is neutral, above classes, that the generals, and police chiefs, colonial officials, ambassadors, spies, MI5 agents and Foreign Office leaders, under a Labour government serve the interests of the labour movement. They try by every method to disarm the working class and the working people, to make them relax their vigilance.
But the British ruling class and its state apparatus are experienced in all forms of exercising class rule. As we have seen, it was the British capitalists who first, alongside their open, overt instruments of class rule, their parties, army, police and law courts, set up the network of police spies and provocateurs to spy on and disrupt the working-class movement from within. In every colonial country within the Empire the British capitalists have set up their network of police agents and provocateurs in the labour and national liberation movements. It was Britain who first on a large scale developed the machinery of espionage against the USSR. And though they have tried to disguise and conceal it, the British capitalist class has maintained its apparatus for secret espionage and disruption inside the labour movement.
They have their whole apparatus, and on a very large scale, for tapping the telephones of progressive people, for opening and recording their personal correspondence, for reporting on trade-union and political meetings. And they have their apparatus which is constantly trying to infiltrate into the organisations of the labour and progressive movement and, in the first place, into the Communist Party, agents of different varieties, to spy on it and disrupt it from within.
The issue of vigilance, therefore, too long and too much neglected by the British workers, disarmed by Social-Democracy, is a question of urgent importance for the whole labour movement. It does not mean that every worker or youth or student who has been misled by Titoite propaganda is a police spy. Far from it. But it does mean that the workers and their people have to be on their guard against individuals sent by the police or Intelligence, including Trotskyites and Titoites amongst the first, trying to make their way into the organisations of the working people and to capture leading positions.
Throughout their history the peoples of Yugoslavia carried out with untold heroism the struggle against foreign rule and domination. It was indeed a tragedy that their struggles and sacrifices in the Partisan war against the Axis should have ended in so deep a betrayal.
But the Yugoslav peoples have known other defeats and they have known other traitors. Not all the repressions and ruthlessness of Ranković will succeed in holding them in servitude. And stage by stage as they grow conscious of the character of the betrayal their resistance will grow stronger, better organised, until the rule of the Titoite clique is shattered and the Yugoslav people can return to the road of People’s Democracy and Socialism.
But we cannot stand by, watching their difficult struggle, in a mood of passivity. Every step taken to make the British people conscious of the real role of the Titoites and the real character of Titoism helps the Yugoslav people in ending their domination by the Titoites and their imperialist masters.
In the interests of the international solidarity of the working people, of peace and of Socialism – the combating of Titoism, instrument of imperialist rule, is an urgent and honourable task.