Tito/Yugoslavia

[Andropov]

What are posters opinions on Yugoslavia and Tito?
Was he Marxist or did he cater to Nationalistic sentiment too much?
TBH this is a topic I know very little about so any information from both sides would be greatly appreciated.

[Uppercut]

Well, it's obvious that Tito wasn't a fan of the Soviets and wanted to break with Stalin and the rest of the Eastern bloc. It seems like he wanted to establish a new kind of socialism (collective ownership of large scale enterprises instead of central planning). Unfortunately, these economic policies led to a massive amount of debt, as these co-op enterprises traded and competed internationally, thus leading to the unbalanced and uneven development of the Yugoslav economy.
Also, The country was mostly driven by consumer goods, rather than by large scale agriculture or industry. Think it as a light form of socialism, and from what I can tell, although the enterprises were mostly cooperatively owned and operated, it wasn't too far off from capitalism.

[Robocommie]

I have in the past considered myself a Titoist, because of Tito's encouragement of worker control, and also because I like the concept behind Titoism, that the revolution must adapt to fit the conditions present in each and every country, that no single programme can be rigorously applied universally. It's possible this was more of a justification for Tito's break with the Soviet Bloc, but I feel it's a sound doctrine.

As Uppercut pointed out, there were problems, but then there were problems with the Soviet model as well.

[mykittyhasaboner]

I have in the past considered myself a Titoist, because of Tito's encouragement of worker control

Worker's control means nothing when the real control is exercised by market mechanisms and competition undercutting centrally planned organization.


, and also because I like the concept behind Titoism, that the revolution must adapt to fit the conditions present in each and every country, that no single programme can be rigorously applied universally. It's possible this was more of a justification for Tito's break with the Soviet Bloc, but I feel it's a sound doctrine.Every Marxist argues this, even Stalin. Tito didn't really say anything new. It can't be justification, because not even this justifies taking loans from the IMF or allowing workers to be used a cheap labor in western Europe.


As Uppercut pointed out, there were problems, but then there were problems with the Soviet model as well.Absolutely. Except the problems in the Soviet model were dealing with things like the abolition of the difference between mental and physical labor, and between town and country, under a system where property was held in common by the producing classes--generally developing socialism without the advanced economic countries of the west. In Yugoslavia the problems were rooted elsewhere.

A good critique was posted in a previous discussion by Mike Ely:


The Titoites broke the Yugoslav economy into small independent units. In agriculture, early experiments in collectivization were reversed–by 1957 virtually all the farms were in private hands. Nationalized industry was “privatized.” Individual factories were officially operating under “workers’ self-management.” But the policy was set by directors, and the real control was exercised by the market mechanism of capitalism. Without socialist planning, profit decided where investments flowed, what was produced, and who got to work. In reality “worker self-management” meant that wages were tied to factory profits–they were a form of piecework. Factories, industries and whole regions were competing with each other and profit was in command. And, more importantly, the proletariat did not have state power. It was impossible for them to revolutionize society....

Under the weight of growing debt to the West, the Titoites carried out new “reforms” in 1965. They moved to make their currency convertible to Western currencies–so that investments could more easily flow in and profits could more easily flow out. After 1968, foreign capitalists could invest directly in the private sector. Yugoslavia became the first revisionist country to set up a stock market. These innovations of the capitalist road are now being carried out in the rest of Eastern Europe.

Yugoslav proletarians were sent off as cheap labor for northern Europe–they basically became an “export commodity.” By 1971, over a million Yugoslavs were immigrant workers, over half of them in West Germany.

According to World Bank statistics, the wealthiest 5 percent of Yugoslav households earned 25 percent of the national income in the 1970s, while the poorest 20 percent of the population earned less than 7 percent. This was one of the most extreme income gaps in Europe–in fact, according to the World Bank, even India’s income distribution gap was not as big!

The northern nations of Yugoslavia–Slovenia and Croatia–were more highly developed industrially and agriculturally. The three southern national areas–Macedonia, Montenegro, and the Albanian region of Kosovo–were far more undeveloped and poor. Serbia, the largest national grouping, is in between North and South and is also a relatively poor area. These divisions within Yugoslavia got even more acute because of the capitalistdevelopment pursued by Yugoslavia. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Over decades, this created a powerful basis for antagonism between the nationalities of the country and for the growth of reactionary nationalism.

Investment flows where the profits are greatest. The industrial northern nations developed rapidly after 1945, while the poorer southern republics stagnated. When the 1990s started, per capita production in Slovenia was three times as high as it was in poorer regions like Macedonia. By 1970 the per capita income of the average Slovene was over six times that of the average Kosovar. Kosovo lives in Third World conditions–comparable to Bolivia or Morocco–while in Slovenia the standard of living is closer to that of neighboring Austria.

The villages in the poorer peasant regions of the south emptied. People went north for lousy jobs and barrack-like living conditions as “guest workers”–within the supposedly “equal” Yugoslav federation. These “guest workers” make up 15 to 20 percent of the Slovenian workforce and are treated like dirt...

In the 1980s the conflicts intensified because of classic “IMF crisis.” Yugoslavia sank deeply into debt to the International Monetary Fund and other international imperialist lenders–to the tune of $1.8 billion. The lenders demanded that capitalist Yugoslavia take “austerity” measures to pay back the debt, and this inflamed the conflict in the country.http://www.revleft.com/vb/anarchist-views-sfr-t132608/index.html?t=132608

[Bright Banana Beard]

Some critique by a Maoist. http://partisan-news.blogspot.com/2009/12/josip-broz-tito-and-yugoslavia.html

[Ismail]

As I said in the topic pointed out by mykittyhasaboner:

One of the reasons the Cominform was annoyed was because Tito wasn't actually collectivizing that much at all.

As mykittyhasaboner noted, Tito stopped supporting the Greeks too once deals were made with the British.

On Trotskyism (http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/OT73NB.html) by a Greek Maoist named Kostas Mavrakis, has a section on the civil war in Greece:

Tito's defection - contributed to the Democratic Army's rapid defeat. In 1946 Tito had promised considerable assistance to Zachariades and had encouraged him to embark on an armed struggle, in contrast to Stalin who proved sceptical about the Greek communists' chances of success. After his break with the Comintern Tito stopped his aid and in July 1949 he closed the frontier completely, which had the immediate effect of removing from the Democratic Army 4,000 reserves quartered in Yugoslavia, to which must be added the 2,500 maquisards who were in Bulgaria and the 2,500 who were fighting in eastern Macedonia and Thrace. In fact, as the Axios Valley between the Yugoslavian frontier and the Gulf of Salonika was easily guarded, the troops which we have just mentioned could only have linked up with the main body of the Democratic Army at the time of the decisive battle by passing through Yugoslavia. Tito's defection thus deprived the Army of a third of its forces. So much for the glorious Tito who valiantly aided the Greek Communists "in spite of Stalin's views."And:

It was capitalist in the sense that the bourgeoisie owned the means of production and that the society was led by the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. A few concessions to workers do not make it "socialist" anymore than 1980's Sweden was "socialist."

Furthermore, as Žižek (I can't believe I'm citing him) once said:

From the 1970s onwards, the third stage, a new figure of the “spirit of capitalism” is emerging: capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist structure of the production process and developed a network-based form of organization founded on employee initiative and autonomy in the workplace. Instead of hierarchical-centralized chain of command, we get networks with a multitude of participants, organizing work in the form of teams or projects, intent on customer satisfaction, and a general mobilization of workers thanks to their leaders’ vision. In this way, capitalism is transformed and legitimized as an egalitarian project: by way of accentuating auto-poetic interaction and spontaneous self-organization, it even usurped the far Left’s rhetoric of workers’ self-management and turned it from an anti-capitalist to a capitalist slogan.To add onto this, the chauvinistic way Yugoslavia and Tito treated Albania was less than internationalist.

Tito's "defiance" of the USSR ended after Khrushchev unilaterally declared Yugoslavia to be "socialist" in 1956 without consulting any of the other East European states (which annoyed Albania greatly and which was clearly opportunist).

By 1971, the Soviets considered Yugoslavia as socialist as any other state. When Brezhnev visited Yugoslavia in that year, he told people there that: "Another thing we always remember is that it was in the crucible of the Russian revolution that Comrade Tito started on the path of a revolutionary; today he is known to us all as the organiser and hero of the liberation, revolutionary struggle of the Yugoslav people, the leader of the Communists of Yugoslavia, the head of the Yugoslav socialist state."

There was virtually nothing that made Tito progressive. Domestically he was a capitalist, in foreign policy he was an absolute opportunist and not at all "non-aligned." Look up Tito's funeral, note those in attendance. "They included four kings, thirty-one presidents, six princes, twenty-two prime ministers and forty-seven ministers of foreign affairs."

Some "socialist."

Also, a good Mao-era critique of Yugoslavia: http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/IYS63.html

[Die Neue Zeit]

On a related note, what is the "Anti-Revisionist" view towards this possible transitional measure?

Total replacement of the hiring of labour for small-business profit by cooperative production