Tito Hate?

[The Red Comet]

I've noticed a lot of hate surrounding Josip Broz Tito. Can anyone explain why that is? I'm genuinely interested in learning why people seem to either completely love the man or hate his guts.

Thanks.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

I gather that he threw a lot of "orthodox" marxist-leninists in jail to preserve his own ideology of what Socialism consists of (one might point out that the MLs are pots calling the kettle black on that one), and he also preserved the market to a much greater degree than others. His government didn't get along with the Soviet block, the Chinese block or Albania, so that also meant that its relations with the rest of the 20th-century Marxist-Leninist world was frayed throughout the cold war.

IMO the collapse of Yugoslavia and its reintegration into the global marketplace shows that Tito's theories were flawed at least, but one can say the same about the theories underpinning the Russian and Chinese revolutions as well as the whole Warsaw Pact, where various forms of nationalism and capitalism ultimately replaced the decayed "socialism" of the whole Eastern Block.

[Rafiq]

I've noticed a lot of hate surrounding Josip Broz Tito. Can anyone explain why that is? I'm genuinely interested in learning why people seem to either completely love the man or hate his guts.

Thanks.

The only real "hatred" Tito receives on this site is from the hoxhaist crowd.

The reason most people oppose him, though, has absolutely nothing to do with the territorial disputes between Yugoslavia and Albania and more to do with the fact that he was not only a bourgeois-liberal ideologically but was at helm of a capitalist state. Nothing exclusively different from other Communist states at the time, as far as opposition goes though.

[subcp]

The group Aufheben has an excellent article on the history of Yugoslavia's political and economic spheres during the YCL/Tito years to the war in the 90's/dissolution of Yugoslavia (Issue #2 of Aufheben I believe).

http://www.libcom.org/library/class-yugoslavia-aufheben-2

A small subsect of Leninists think that what happened in Yugoslavia is a better or more democratic model of a command economy-one party state apparatus ('socialist state'). Like SCM says above, since the 1950's, all manner of Marxist-Leninists oppose the attitude of Yugoslavia toward the West, toward socialist primitive accumulation/collectivization, the non-aligned movement, while Trotskyists have historically varying degrees of warmth for 'Titoism'.

I'd recommend the Aufheben article as an overview of what "Socialist Yugoslavia" really was, why political differences and manifestations happened, etc. rather than a heavily partisan article by someone affiliated with Leninism.

[Karabin]

The only real "hatred" Tito receives on this site is from the hoxhaist crowd.

The reason most people oppose him, though, has absolutely nothing to do with the territorial disputes between Yugoslavia and Albania and more to do with the fact that he was not only a bourgeois-liberal ideologically but was at helm of a capitalist state. Nothing exclusively different from other Communist states at the time, as far as opposition goes though.

Exactly. The Hoxhaist's have a special hatred for Tito.

Yugoslav society has more similarity to modern day Sweden than it ever had with the Soviet Union (Between liberation and 1948 however, Yugoslav society was very Soviet orientated). However, Tito did implement the policy of Workers' Self-Management which, fragmented as it was, is a step above the heavily bureaucratic and centrally planned style in which Soviet production was organised.

[Ciarog]

Kicked out the Nazis and looked good doing it. So much so that he gave Stalin and Khrushchev the finger and, apart from some half-hearted assassination plots, they didn't dare move against him. I admire Stalin overall but even I have to admit that many of his actions in Eastern Europe were unconscionable.

The world has had its share of good communists who were poor leaders; if Tito happened to be the opposite then I really don't see it as a major problem, so long as whatever heresy he espoused worked. The Balkans have been a non-stop warzone ever since Homo Sapien first set foot there (literally; it ain't conclusive, but humans are looking more and more guilty for the extinction of the Neanderthals.) The only exceptions I know of was during the reign of Tito... and maybe the better decades of the Ottoman occupation.

Really Tito's biggest mistake was dying, and the establishment he left behind had put so much faith in him that they couldn't handle that eventuality. Hard to hold that against him; even Alexander the Great fumbled when it came time to pass the torch, and you'll probably see the same happen to Cuba when the Castros are gone (and I'll bet the Mob and United Fruit can't wait to get back to business down there).

[The Red Comet]

I appreciate the replies everyone! They are informative. I'm also (hoping) that a Hoxhaist and a Titoist (Are they on the site?) chime in. Would be interesting to see both of their perspectives on this matter.