Ismail
18th May 2010, 10:15
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hoxha/works/1978/yugoslavia/index.htm
One of the more famous major works by Hoxha is now available online. In it, Albanian leader Enver Hoxha notes the revisionist content of "Workers Self-Management" and its pseudo-socialist nature, often by quoting the Yugoslavs themselves.
Credit goes to RevLeft user Rjevan for translating it.
Also, FWIW, the attempts of the Soviet Union after Stalin kicked it to recognize Yugoslavia as "socialist" and to praise the social-democratic pro-Western Tito as a "socialist leader" in a futile effort to bring him "back into the fold" are pretty good evidence that the Soviet leadership was not particularly communist.
Random excerpts from the book (which was written in 1978):
The Yugoslav revisionists have issued special laws to encourage the private economy, laws which recognise the citizens' right to “found enterprises” and “to hire labour”. The Yugoslav Constitution explicitly states: “Private owners have the same socio-economic position, the same rights and obligations as the working people in the socio-economic organisations.”
Small private property reigns supreme in the Yugoslav agriculture and occupies nearly 90 per cent of the arable land. Nine million hectare of land belong to the private sector whereas over 10 per cent, or 1.15 million hectare belong to the monopoly, the so-called “social sector”. Over 5 million peasants in Yugoslavia are engaged in cultivating privately-owned land. The Yugoslav countryside has never embarked on the road of genuine socialist transformations. Kardelj has not one word regarding this situation in his book and he avoids dealing with the problem how his system of “self-administration” is extended to agriculture. However, if he pretends that socialism is being built through this system, then how is it possible that he should have forgotten about “building socialism” in agriculture, too, which accounts for nearly half the economy? The Marxist-Leninist theory teaches us that socialism is built both in the city and in the countryside, not on the basis of state capitalist ownership, the ownership allegedly administered by workers' groups, or of private ownership in its open form, but only on the basis of socialist social ownership over the means of production.
If the Yugoslav economy has made some steps forward in its development this is in no way due to the system of “self-administration”, as the Titoite revisionists try to claim for themselves. Large amounts of capital from the capitalist world in the form of investments, credits and “aid” have been poured into Yugoslavia and this constitutes a considerable part of the material base of the Yugoslav capitalist-revisionist system. The debts alone amount over 11 billion dollars. Alone from the United States of America, Yugoslavia has received over 7 billion dollars in credits...
With their investments, foreign capitalists have built numerous industrial projects in Yugoslavia which turn out products ranging from the highest to the lowest quality. Most of the best products are, of course, sold abroad and only a fraction of them are marketed within the country. Although there is great capitalist overproduction abroad and all the markets there are monopolised by the same capitalists who have invested in Yugoslavia they nevertheless sell the best Yugoslavian goods precisely on these markets for fabulous profits because labour power in Yugoslavia is cheap, products are turned out at a lower cost in comparison with the capitalist countries where the trade unions, more or less, make demands on capital in the workers' name....
The so-called self-administrated enterprises, whether big or small, are in fact compelled to take account of the foreign investor. This investor has his own laws, which he has imposed on the Yugoslav State, has his own direct representatives in these joint companies and has his own representatives or his influence in the Federation. In fact, directly or indirectly, the investor imposes his will on the Federation, the joint enterprise or company. This is precisely what the “self-administration” is seeking to conceal. Kardelj needs this camouflage, this tour de passe-passe (conjuror's trick), as the French say, in order to “prove” the absurdity that Yugoslav “self-administration” is genuine socialism.
All this is just nonsense because under the conditions that bourgeois democracy is ruling in Yugoslavia no genuine freedom of thought and action exists there for the workers. The freedom of action in the “self-administrated” enterprises is false. In Yugoslavia the worker does not run things, nor does he enjoy those rights which the “ideologist” Kardelj proclaims so pompously. In order to show that he is a realist and opposed to the injustices of his regime, Tito himself admitted recently in the speech he delivered at the meeting of leading activists of Slovenia that ”self-administration” does not stop those who work badly from increasing their incomes at the expense of those who work well, while the directors of the factories who are to blame for the losses incurred can sneak out of their responsibility by taking responsible positions in other factories without worrying that somebody may reprimand them for the mistakes they committed.Edit: Bit of an error, Chapter 1 has text from all the other chapters besides chapter 1 (thus appearing unusually long), but that isn't a big deal.
One of the more famous major works by Hoxha is now available online. In it, Albanian leader Enver Hoxha notes the revisionist content of "Workers Self-Management" and its pseudo-socialist nature, often by quoting the Yugoslavs themselves.
Credit goes to RevLeft user Rjevan for translating it.
Also, FWIW, the attempts of the Soviet Union after Stalin kicked it to recognize Yugoslavia as "socialist" and to praise the social-democratic pro-Western Tito as a "socialist leader" in a futile effort to bring him "back into the fold" are pretty good evidence that the Soviet leadership was not particularly communist.
Random excerpts from the book (which was written in 1978):
The Yugoslav revisionists have issued special laws to encourage the private economy, laws which recognise the citizens' right to “found enterprises” and “to hire labour”. The Yugoslav Constitution explicitly states: “Private owners have the same socio-economic position, the same rights and obligations as the working people in the socio-economic organisations.”
Small private property reigns supreme in the Yugoslav agriculture and occupies nearly 90 per cent of the arable land. Nine million hectare of land belong to the private sector whereas over 10 per cent, or 1.15 million hectare belong to the monopoly, the so-called “social sector”. Over 5 million peasants in Yugoslavia are engaged in cultivating privately-owned land. The Yugoslav countryside has never embarked on the road of genuine socialist transformations. Kardelj has not one word regarding this situation in his book and he avoids dealing with the problem how his system of “self-administration” is extended to agriculture. However, if he pretends that socialism is being built through this system, then how is it possible that he should have forgotten about “building socialism” in agriculture, too, which accounts for nearly half the economy? The Marxist-Leninist theory teaches us that socialism is built both in the city and in the countryside, not on the basis of state capitalist ownership, the ownership allegedly administered by workers' groups, or of private ownership in its open form, but only on the basis of socialist social ownership over the means of production.
If the Yugoslav economy has made some steps forward in its development this is in no way due to the system of “self-administration”, as the Titoite revisionists try to claim for themselves. Large amounts of capital from the capitalist world in the form of investments, credits and “aid” have been poured into Yugoslavia and this constitutes a considerable part of the material base of the Yugoslav capitalist-revisionist system. The debts alone amount over 11 billion dollars. Alone from the United States of America, Yugoslavia has received over 7 billion dollars in credits...
With their investments, foreign capitalists have built numerous industrial projects in Yugoslavia which turn out products ranging from the highest to the lowest quality. Most of the best products are, of course, sold abroad and only a fraction of them are marketed within the country. Although there is great capitalist overproduction abroad and all the markets there are monopolised by the same capitalists who have invested in Yugoslavia they nevertheless sell the best Yugoslavian goods precisely on these markets for fabulous profits because labour power in Yugoslavia is cheap, products are turned out at a lower cost in comparison with the capitalist countries where the trade unions, more or less, make demands on capital in the workers' name....
The so-called self-administrated enterprises, whether big or small, are in fact compelled to take account of the foreign investor. This investor has his own laws, which he has imposed on the Yugoslav State, has his own direct representatives in these joint companies and has his own representatives or his influence in the Federation. In fact, directly or indirectly, the investor imposes his will on the Federation, the joint enterprise or company. This is precisely what the “self-administration” is seeking to conceal. Kardelj needs this camouflage, this tour de passe-passe (conjuror's trick), as the French say, in order to “prove” the absurdity that Yugoslav “self-administration” is genuine socialism.
All this is just nonsense because under the conditions that bourgeois democracy is ruling in Yugoslavia no genuine freedom of thought and action exists there for the workers. The freedom of action in the “self-administrated” enterprises is false. In Yugoslavia the worker does not run things, nor does he enjoy those rights which the “ideologist” Kardelj proclaims so pompously. In order to show that he is a realist and opposed to the injustices of his regime, Tito himself admitted recently in the speech he delivered at the meeting of leading activists of Slovenia that ”self-administration” does not stop those who work badly from increasing their incomes at the expense of those who work well, while the directors of the factories who are to blame for the losses incurred can sneak out of their responsibility by taking responsible positions in other factories without worrying that somebody may reprimand them for the mistakes they committed.Edit: Bit of an error, Chapter 1 has text from all the other chapters besides chapter 1 (thus appearing unusually long), but that isn't a big deal.