East Europe “State Capitalist” says ex-bureaucrat (1972)

From the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Referring to Russia and Eastern Europe in a recent article in The Times, Dr. Ota Šik, a Deputy Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia under Dubcek now in exile in Switzerland, wrote: “The system has become state capitalist, or state monopolistic, not socialist” (October 4).

Šik joins the former Vice-President of Yugoslavia, Milovan Djilas, in being an ex-State-capitalist bureaucrat who has come to recognise the class character of the regime of which he was once a privileged member.

Šik is no Socialist, however. Quite the contrary. He is the leading theorist of “market socialism” and so a leading distorter of Marxian economics. An opponent of bureaucratic state capitalism, he advocates instead competition between independent enterprises run by “elected supervisory councils”, a kind of “workers-controlled capitalism”. Marx would have regarded such a system as absurd since he was well aware that Socialism necessarily involved the complete abolition of the market and its replacement by democratic planning solely for use.

All the same, Šik (admittedly somewhat confused) recognition of the state-capitalist nature of Russia and Eastern Europe is a step in the right direction, and a sign that there will be others still in these countries who realise this too.

Marxism and Leninism in Myanmar (2022)

From the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A sympathiser sets out the history of ‘socialism’ in Myanmar.

Myanmar is a ‘Global South’ country with long borders shared with India and China. Before its independence, it was ruled by the colonial British as a province of British India. It was also known as Burma.

The earliest record of Marxism in Myanmar is 1923, long after the death of Marx and Engels. The Second International had already been replaced by the Third International. Most of the writers who represented orthodox Marxism were no longer alive or active. It was a time when most of the most talented scholars of Marxism had lost their influence and Marxism was being dictated by Stalin under the name ‘Marxism-Leninism’. Leon Trotsky also started the left opposition to the Bolshevik government in that year.

The very first localised literature of Marxism in Myanmar was Das Kapital in a misleading translation inspired by nationalism. Since then, ‘Bolsheviks’ and ‘communism’ were the kind of keywords that could be seen in some of the publicity released. In 1930, Dr Thein Maung brought back some left-wing books from London to Myanmar. Those were the first books the radical youths in Myanmar encountered about Western communism. They influenced Thakin Nu, who later became the Prime Minister of Burma, and Thakin Soe, who founded both the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) and the Red Flag Communist Party; together they founded the ‘Nagani book club’ for distributing left-wing books and articles. Dagon Taya, later a renowned writer, was one of the chairmen of the Rangoon University Student Union and once wrote a slogan on a wall claiming ‘Long Live Soviet Myanmar’ while he was travelling in 1939.

In 1939, a new chapter was opened for ‘Communism’ (‘Marxism-Leninism’) in Myanmar. Aung San (the ‘father of the nation’), Thakin Soe, a handful of Chittagong radicals and some other leftists together founded the Communist Party of Burma. The CPB managed to link with the Third International as soon as it was founded because of the link between the Chittagonian Bengali founders such as H. N. Goshal and the Indian Communist Party. At that time in 1939, the Third International had already become a tool of Russian foreign policy, under the leadership of Stalin, and had successfully sabotaged strikes under the Popular Front government in France and the social struggles of the CNT-FAI in Spain. The CPB was thus also bound to adopt disastrous tactics, including a series of mistakes that even orthodox Bolshevik leaders like Lenin and Trotsky had described as ‘ultra-left’, ie, the CPB chose not to take part in elections, but instead to wage war against the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League which was the acting government at that time. Later, the CPB didn’t stop with Stalinism; it went further to Maoism which had rejected the class struggle and advocated the alliance of four nationalist classes. It ended up killing its own founders like H. N. Goshal in 1967 during the cultural revolution era.

One Party Rule

On 2 March 1962, a coup d’état took place which heralded the commencement of one-party rule in Myanmar and the army’s political supremacy. The military who attempted the coup called themselves the Union Revolutionary Council (URC) and introduced a programme called ‘The Burmese Way to Socialism’. The CPB denied the ‘socialist’ credentials of URC, however, the URC shared a lot of similar characteristics with Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, and Tito’s Yugoslavia. The first of these was one-party rule with strong state power and hostility towards opposition. As Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas mentioned in his The New Class, ‘modern Communism is a modern despotism which cannot help but aspire towards totalitarianism’. In terms of Marxism, such one-party totalitarianism has nothing to do with the dictatorship of the proletariat. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote once, ‘Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only of the members of one party, however numerous they may be, is no freedom at all’. Equating one-party totalitarianism with the dictatorship of the proletariat shows a lack of understanding of Marxism. Marx and Engels identified the act of ‘raising the proletariat to a ruling class’ as ‘the conquest of democracy’.

The second characteristic was the act of strengthening the state, which confirms the claim of Milovan Djilas which states: ‘there is no doubt that a national communist bureaucracy aspires to more complete authority for itself’. Thirdly, Ne Win, chairman of the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) was anti-union just like Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Tito. The BSPP faced much opposition from every side including student unions, workers’ unions, political armed groups, and the government-in-exile.

Student Uprising

The best example of this was the ‘7th July Student Uprising’ which was a series of marches, rallies, and protests against stricter campus regulations and the policies of General Ne Win’s BSPP regime. The BSPP responded to the uprising by violently attacking the students, shooting them with machine guns and using explosives to blow up the whole student union building in University of Yangon, resulting in the deaths of more than a hundred, and the arrest of more than 6,000 students. The BSPP accused the students of being counter-revolutionary and reactionary because they were protesting against the ‘socialist’ state in the BSPP’s view. After that incident, the BSPP attacked the very existence of the unions.

Furthermore, the BSPP implemented a programme like the ‘war-communism’ of Lenin’s time. The BSPP-led Socialist Economy Construction Committee introduced an economic policy aimed at nationalising all businesses across the board, similar to what Milovan Djilas had described the self-styled Communists (Marxist-Leninists) as doing. According to Djilas, the communists wanted to ban strikes because in their view the working class was already in power and owned the means of production via the state. So if there was a strike of workers or students, it meant workers were striking against themselves. Through this tyrannical self-delusion the BSPP, along with all the communist regimes who claimed to follow Marxism-Leninism, responded violently to workers’ strikes. A few international examples would include the Kronstadt rebellion against the Bolshevik government and the Georgian Mensheviks’ soviet rebellion against the Bolshevik government. The CPB argued that the BSPP didn’t represent the legacy of Marxism-Leninism, yet ironically the CPB claimed to follow Maoism while Mao Zedong himself was on excellent terms with Ne Win and his regime. The role of the CPB was ended by a series of battles with the military as well as internal coups resulting from their own inefficient revolutionary strategies and tactics.

Ultra-nationalism

After 1988, a lot of regimes had come and gone, and Myanmar was on the way back to globalisation from ‘socialism’. From 1988 to 2010, Myanmar was governed by purely repressive regimes with no ideological background. However, after the 2007 Saffron revolution, the military regime had to acknowledge the revolutionary potential of the Buddhist monks, students, workers, and the public. So they tried to create an ideological fantasy based on ultra-nationalism, Buddhist supremacy and crony capitalism. From 2010 to 2021 most of the public were under the illusion of living in a democratic nation while minority ethnic groups were being bombed and killed. The oligarchs managed to accumulate capital which was more than enough for three to five successive generations while working-class people struggled to make ends meet. That was when the public enjoyed the illusion of liberal democracy and was the least revolutionary period, until some students chose to protest with an agenda for educational reforms in 2014. During that decade, the military had successfully radicalised the majority of the Buddhist monks with their self-serving ultra-nationalism and Buddhist supremacy. As Myanmar has a unique culture of monks being important (too important) when it comes to social values, a fraction of the working class also chose to give support to the successors of the military regime, bolstered by irrational fear of minority groups and other religions. Such a political agenda recalls Daniel De Leon’s remark that ‘the capitalist class is interested in keeping the working men divided among themselves’.

The National League for Democracy (NLD) was founded by ex-communists, ex-military officers and left-leaning social democrats in 1988. Aung San Suu Kyi, the ‘democracy idol’ of Myanmar, forged a de facto alliance with the military to attain governmental status. Since then, not only did the NLD not achieve its goal of kicking the military out of politics but they also failed to protect minority ethnic groups like the Rohingya from genocide. Under the leadership of ‘the lady’ Suu Kyi, the NLD changed its political ideology from social democracy to liberalism. This was not apparent at first, but as soon as they were elected as an acting government, they failed to implement all the social democratic policies. The NLD lost their social democratic connections with the interests of the working class and with the national self-determinism of ethnic groups. Such reactionary behaviour resulted in some far-left and centre-left youths losing their trust in the NLD, and searching for a third alternative either in some social democratic reformist party or a revolutionary socialist party.

Another military coup

In February 2021, the military decided to stage another coup to restore their former golden days and to protect family members who had become oligarchs and cronies. The public at first was hesitant to react with strikes and protests. But the coup sparked enormous protests and dissent which were brutally suppressed by the military, with about 1,500 people dead, either shot in the streets, tortured and murdered in detention, or just disappeared. Even though the military managed to seize power and arrest some influential political leaders like Suu Kyi and Mya Aye, some of the NLD members escaped and formed a National Unity Government (NUG) in exile, in alliance with some ethnic leaders and other small political groups taking the role of consultative council. Even today, the NUG fails to grasp the opportunity to radicalise the public, even for reformist social democratic values. The NUG still acts like a parallel government. Yet third-party alternatives such as the Maoist CPB, Trotskyist organisations and social democratic reformists also failed to radicalise the public for a socialist revolution.

Theo Maung, who describes himself as a libertarian socialist and one of the founders of the Burmese Atheists Association, said that he was expecting a more progressive and secular society from the revolt against the coup. He was confident that people were turning away from authoritarianism and racial and religious discrimination as a result of their struggles against the junta. He pointed out that the CPB managed to recover again after the coup but that the new generation of leftists like him didn’t accept the authoritarian communists. He also said that if there was to be another communist party in Myanmar, he expected a more libertarian-leaning one with little influence from Marxism-Leninism and Maoism. Yoe Thit Aung, an anarchist, also had a view on the revolution: ‘I personally don’t see the revolution as a class struggle but rather a transformation of crony capitalism into corporate capitalism. Traditionally the NLD is a populist and conservative party. NUG is trying their best for more progressive reforms, but they will never go for radical ends’. He thinks that the old bourgeois crony class will be useful as a national bourgeois class in the post-revolutionary period.

To sum up, Myanmar has a lot of experience of Marxism-Leninism (so-called communism) and military dictatorships. It’s unfortunate that Myanmar was never influenced by the internationalist and revolutionary socialism (Marxist) tradition of Georgi Plekhanov, Julius Martov, Rosa Luxemburg and others, which represents the Marxism of Marx and Engels in seeking the democratic emancipation of the working class.

Hein Htet Kyaw

The Rise of Yugoslavia - Part 2 (1962)

From the November 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1

The new constitution of 1945 brought ninety per cent. of Yugoslav industry under State control. Only those which were not worth bothering about were allowed to escape, such as shoe making, watch repairing, inn-keeping, etc. Agrarian reform dispossessed the old landlords and distributed the land to the peasants according to family size. “The land should belong to those who cultivate it,” was the cry, but this was no common ownership, only the handing over of land from one set of private owners to another.

In any case, the peasants’ troubles were by no means at an end. They still had to sell their agricultural produce in a market, capricious and uncertain as markets are. So that in times of glut it was less costly to leave salad stuff and soft fruit to rot, than to try and sell it. An old and familiar problem, by the way, and one of the many which prompted the start of collectivisation in 1949.

As we mentioned in Part 1, there was much reconstruction and industrialisation to complete, and as early as 1946, the government had announced a five year plan aiming at 400 per cent. increase in industrial production. Belgrade called for workers to assist with voluntary labour, and the response found expression in such projects as the gigantic iron works "Lilostroy” of Ljublijana, the Samac-Sarajevo and Doboj-Banjaluka Railroads and the Cetinje hydro-electric power station.

But in other ways also, Yugoslavia was making her presence felt. Tito had visited Stalin in 1945, and signed a treaty of mutual assistance. Russian technicians and military advisers went to Yugoslavia as a “help to fraternal countries” and quite clearly the country was earmarked for inclusion in the Soviet sphere of influence. Tito and his henchmen began to doubt the wisdom of allowing so much Soviet infiltration and signs of a rift were apparent at an early stage.

It has been said that the 1948 disagreement between the two states was a battle waged for Yugoslavia’s “Socialism” against Russian “Stalinism,” but this is quite untrue, if only for the reason that there never was any Socialism in Yugoslavia anyway. Tito himself came nearer to the mark when he said at the time:

  The real issue is the relation between one state and another. In my view they are using ideological questions as a pretext for putting pressure on us and our state.

The Yugoslav government strongly resented the Russian attempts to regulate buying and selling between the Cominform Stales, seeing it as a threat to their already weak economy.

Nor must we forget the part that Yugoslav/Albanian relations played in widening the breach. Moscow and Belgrade had agreed in principle to the unification of the two states and already their economies were becoming linked, with Yugoslav influence predominating. But the Russians were taken unawares by the subsequent agreements (signed without consulting them) to allow Yugoslav forces to be stationed in Albanian territory. According to Milovan Djilas, who was deeply involved in the dispute with Moscow, it was this military move most of all which persuaded Stalin that in Tito he had a rival rather than an ally. Yugoslavia was promptly expelled from the Cominform to the accompaniment of the most violent abuse.

In 1955, there was some reconciliation between Yugoslavia and the USSR, and since then Tito has managed to sit precariously on a rather wobbly fence, obtaining economic aid from both sides of the Iron Curtain, but refusing to join either power bloc, at least for the time being. It remains to be seen how long he can play one side off against the other in his efforts to win economic elbow room for his ruling class. Only recently, America has scaled down her financial assistance to Yugoslavia, causing Belgrade to go into a panic-stricken huddle. One result has been a renewed demand for farm collectivisation, although many of Tito’s colleagues remember its previous failure and are not enthusiastic. Neither are the peasants, who want to remain proprietors in their own right and not become agricultural wage workers.

Yet this may well be the future tendency, as industry develops and the demand for labour increases. The old peasant family proprietorship will be regarded as wasteful of labour and efficiency, and there is likely to be increasing interference by the State. There is a growing working class today in Yugoslavia facing the same sort of problems as their brothers elsewhere. Sooner or later they will have to get down to an appreciation of the need for Socialism, but there is no sign of this happening, as yet.

In the meantime, it is interesting to speculate on the future role of Yugoslavia in the changing pattern of capitalist world politics. A glance at the map will show the strategy of her position with an Adriatic coastline facing Italy and frontiers with Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Austria and Italy. As her industries develop, we may well see her jostling for a share of the markets in an increasingly competitive world. But it is difficult to view her future as other than that of a minor capitalist power at most. This does after all make sense in a world where even Germany, France and Britain—the major powers of yesterday—have been ousted from dominance, and the arena left to America and Russia, two colossi of capitalism, glaring at each other in sullen anger.

(Concluded)

Remy Starc.

What is class? (1972)

Book Review from the March 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class Inequality and Political Order, by Frank Parkin. (MacGibbon and Kee £2.25.)

Parkin defines class by occupation and status, and divides western capitalist society into two classes: manual and non-manual workers, or the "working class” and the “middle class”. The latter he describes also as the dominant, and relatively privileged, class and the former as the subordinate, and "disprivileged”, class.

This won’t do since it includes the mass of ordinary white-collar workers amongst the privileged. They may enjoy more fringe benefits at work than industrial workers, but their overall standard of living is not all that different.

Class is more realistically defined by reference to where people stand in relation to control over the means of wealth production. An analysis of society, in Russia as well as the West, reveals a definite group which, as a group, has exclusive control over the use of the means of production. The great majority of people, whatever their occupation or social status, face this group as sellers of their mental and physical energies. This is where the dominant/subordinate, privileged/disprivileged dividing line runs. The two classes in society are the owners and the non-owners, the capitalists and the workers. The middle class is a myth most of whose alleged members are really in the working class.

Parkin himself has to abandon the absurd view that ordinary white-collar workers are members of the dominant, privileged class when he comes to discuss the attempts of Labour and Communist governments to improve the lot of manual workers.

He argues that the kind of reforms Labour governments have brought in—more educational chances and State welfare benefits for manual workers—have been those which have also benefited the dominant class, “or many influential sections within it”:

Without too much exaggeration we could in fact say that whether or not socialist approaches to equality become politically acceptable depends on whether or not they confer advantages on the dominant class, or at least an important section of it” (Our emphasis; he means “Labour” not “socialist”, of course).

But who are these important and influential sections if not the property-owning capitalists? For how do ordinary white-collar workers benefit from a less discontented, better trained and more healthy industrial workforce?

 

With regard to Russia and east Europe (which he also calls “socialist” although noting that some regard it as “state capitalist”), Parkin sympathises with the “new class” theory expounded by the former Yugoslav Vice-President Djilas. He notes that in these countries ordinary white-collar workers are, if anything, slightly worse off than skilled manual workers and suggests that the dominant, privileged class are the top industrial and political executives. Summarising Djilas’ view, he finds that as a group the “new class” has features in common, not with his “middle class”, but with the property-owning capitalists!

Djilas . . . argued that the class based on the Communist Party enjoyed virtually the same rights over property as a traditional bourgeoisie. If ownership is defined as rights over the use and products of collective property, and not simply legal entitlement, then the dominant class of socialist society can be conceived of as a propertied class. In this sense it has the same exploitative status as its capitalist counterpart; both enjoy a materially privileged position based upon expropriation of the surplus value created by the subordinate class. If, then, we replace the legal definition of ownership with a sociological one, the similarity between a classic bourgeoisie and the ‘new class’ of socialist society is thrown into high relief.

It is because we take what Parkin calls a “sociological" view of ownership that we say that the ruling class in Russia is a capitalist class. By the same token, the dominant class in the West are the capitalists, not those in white-collar jobs.

We drew attention to Parkin’s inadequate theory of class in the Socialist Standard for December 1968 in a review of his book on CND.

Adam Buick

Class Society in Poland (1967)

From the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party of Gt. Britain holds to be false the claim that in Russia and East Europe have been established classless societies in which there is no exploitation of man by man. What exists there is a form of capitalism best called “state capitalism” in which a privileged minority exploit the wage-labour of the propertyless majority.

Despite years of propaganda, censorship and suppression the rulers have not been able to get everybody there to believe their claim. Milovan Djilas, as former Vice President of Yugoslavia himself once a member of the privileged class, is one of the best known demolishers of the myth. Expelled from the Communist Party in 1954 and jailed, he later wrote The New Class in which he argued that “a new class, previously unknown to history, had been formed”.

Now comes the news that there are a handful of people in Poland who also reject the claim that they live in a classless society. In 1966 they were expelled from the Communist Party and later tried and jailed. Their crime apparently was to circulate a document expressing their views. A summary of their views, written by two of them, appeared in the Polish émigré  journal Kultura at the end of August. Basing themselves on this, Solidarity (Vol. 4, No. 4) has been able to give a general account of their views.

They deny that Socialism exists in Poland, saying rather that what exists there is capitalism. State ownership there is “just another form of ownership” and the worker is no better off than in the avowedly capitalist countries. The real owners of the nationalized industries are, they argue, a group they call the “Central Political Bureaucracy . . . The worker is exploited because he is denied ownership rights. He’s got to sell his labour power in order to live". What he produces belongs to those who buy his labour power and exploit him, namely, the Central Political Bureaucracy. This bureaucracy is a new ruling class as it uses, for its own benefit, the workers' labour and product against them.

Although it is true that these people’s other political views are probably confused (after all the fact that Djilas declared himself a gradualist does not detract from his significance), what is important — and heartening — is to see that the Polish rulers have not been able to deceive everybody. It is also a sign of the awakening of the working class, so long subdued and intimidated. As time goes by the rulers in Russia and Bast Europe will find themselves increasingly under pressure, industrial and political, from the working class. We can expect to see the emergence of working class organisations which are independent of the bureaucracy. Of course these won't be socialist but, in the conditions of this part of the world, they would be a great step forward.

Adam Buick

Communist versus Communist: The Affair of Yugoslavia (1951)

From the February 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the rulers of Yugoslavia decided to move out of the Russian sphere to seek better terms from the American-British groups a row started that is still going on between the Communist parties of that country and Russia. The quarrel had no more to do with ideas and systems of government than do any of the quarrels between the Powers. One person who has admitted this is the Vice-Premier and Foreign Minister of Yugoslavia, Mr. Edvard Kardelj. Speaking in March, 1950, as reported in the Yugoslav Fortnightly (Belgrade, 24th March, 1950) he said:—

    "You all know that our dispute with the Soviet Government was not about whether our Socialism was more or less Socialist than Soviet Socialism. No, the crux of the matter was this: We would not allow any foreign domination; we would not allow an alien will to be imposed on the Yugoslav peoples, even though it were veiled in revolutionary phrases.”

Where we, as socialists, join issue with Mr. Kardelj is on the claim that Yugoslavia or Russia have Socialism. Both are State capitalist dictatorships with all all usual dictatorship features of secret police, censorship, and the suppression of opposition parties, and with the main features of the capitalist economic system with which the rest of the capitalist world is familiar.

It is, however, not intended to deal with these aspects here, but to glance instead at some entertaining features of the bitter dispute between the former Communist allies.

Now the Communist parties of Yugoslavia and of the Cominform countries find nothing too harsh and insulting to say of each other, but that is only since 1948: before then they were mutually admiring friends. The Russian and British parties agreed that Yugoslavia was “socialist” and that Tito was a fine fellow, and Tito and his Communist party responded with loyal admiration for “socialist” Russia.

As late as September, 1947, Mr. William Rust, the British Communist, visited Yugoslavia and wrote in the Daily Worker telling what a fine place it was. Everyone was happy; eager to work hard, and Mr. Rust was happy to see Tito looking so bonny.

    "The Yugoslavs not only won the war, but also won their country. And out of that heroic struggle whose glory will never fade, there was born a new patriotism which now inspires feats of endurance and heroism in the labour front” (William Rust, Daily Worker, 13th Sept., 1947.)

The article was called “The People Rule in Yugoslavia” and Mr. Rust found it to be “the most advanced of the new democracies in Europe which in these days are drawing closer together because of their political affinities and close trading relationships.”

“It is,” he wrote, “a real democracy where the people rule and build a new life.”

Mr. Rust was not then to know that a few months later he and his fellow Russia-supporters wen going to be required to call Tito a scoundrelly tool of American imperialism, and to describe the Yugoslav workers as groaning under the tyranny of the Tito police state. 

And here is Mr. Rust on Tito:—

   “Before we left this wonderful new Yugoslavia which has shaken off its dark Balkan past, its backwardness and hatred between the nationalities, we spoke with Marshal Tito about our impressions. We were happy to find him looking so healthy, youthful and confident. He spoke with a quiet pride about the achievements of the people, the rising standard of living, the co-operation between town and countryside, and the achievements of the Five Year Plan.” (Mr. Rust, Daily Worker, 13th Sept., 1947.)

Those who are impressed by Communist eulogies on conditions in Russia and other satellite countries might usefully remember that this and similar Communist praise of Yugoslavia was to be completely repudiated by those who made it within a few months.

Mr. Rust died not long afterwards, but he lived long enough to be attacking the Yugloslav rulers in the columns of the Daily Worker (6th July, 1948).

On one point during his earlier admiration of the Yugoslav regime Mr. Rust accidentally turned out to be correct, for when he wrote in September, 1947, he quoted Tito as believing “that Angto-Yugoslav relations will continue to improve.”

Now let us turn to the Yugoslav spokesmen. Mr. Rust had referred to “close trading relations” between Yugoslavia and the “new democracies in Europe.” Tito on the other hand was later to complain that “ no ‘help’ had been received from the Eastern European countries, in fact they owed a considerable amount to Yugoslavia.” (Yugoslav Bulletin, London, 24th March, 1950.)

And on the same occasion Tito complained that Russia promised Yugoslavia 70 locomotives and railway wagons “ as part of war booty,” and then charged 6 million dollars for them.

But of more interest still is the Yugoslav Communists’ criticisms of the regime in Russia, made of course in flat contradiction of their earlier approval.

The following is an extract from an article in the Yugoslav Communist paper Borba, by Milovan Djilas, a leading Yugoslav Communist (reproduced in the Tanjug Telegraph Agency “Weekly Bulletin,” London, 24th November, 1950).

“The State monopoly in the Soviet Union, continues Djilas,  

.  .  .  has acquired monstrous, despotic forms in all fields of life. Thirty-three years have passed, but rotten and effete Capitalism does not fear the influence of the Soviet Union. On the contrary, the Soviet Union is, unlike in Lenin's day, defending itself and shutting itself from that world. The Soviet leaders are hiding their system and its features, which are monstrous, even when compared with bourgeois democracy. Furthermore, writes Djilas, a class is in power in the Soviet Union which makes use of all class capitalist privileges. This is borne out by the periodical ‘purges' due to national ‘deviations’ in all Soviet Republics of the U.S.S.R. These deviations are either the expression of the imperialist strivings of domestic national State capitalisms against the hegemony of the dominating over-all State capitalism, or the democratic and socialist strivings of the working masses.
    “At a definite Leninist phase of the Soviet Union, the national question was solved, but it has come into a blind alley, and is becoming more and more a constitutional formality with which nobody now complies in the new bureaucratic conditions. As shown by the experiences in, the last war, in which all republics except greater Russia proved themselves relatively weak because of such an anti-socialist policy, the sharpening of the national question is not diminishing, but is becoming more acute and has led to the annihilation of entire nations, which even German capitalism under Hitler was not able to carry out except towards the Jews.
   "Leaders of the Soviet Union, concluded Djilas, are not only ‘revisionists' in theory, but also in practice, and they are acquiring and have already acquired a more expressive aspect of the enemies of Marxism, and they do not deny that distorted and false as it is, it helps them as a mask which they remodel and adjust according to the necessity of concealing their real features. They are, will be, and must be, against every resolution and democracy, which does not mean that they will not use them for definite practical hegemonistic aims.”

Readers of the Socialist Standard can well form their own opinion of these various recriminations and belated discoveries. It need only be added that now Yugoslavia is moving into the Western group of Powers the British Press is cautiously “discovering” that that dictatorship is not such a nasty kind as the Russian one.

Edgar Hardcastle

The lesson of Milovan Djilas (1980)

From the February 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Milovan Djilas was for many years—before, during and after the war—Tito’s closest associate and after the war, when Tito had seized power, he became one of the leading members of the government in Yugoslavia. Nothing special, you might think—a typical East European communist leader. However, this man did something remarkable. He broke with the party, the government and Tito—voluntarily, as distinct from all those “communist” leaders who never broke but were broken by Stalin and by little Stalins like Rakosi in Hungary or Dimitrov in Bulgaria, who made quite a habit of hanging their erstwhile comrades in arms in order to remove any possible competition for the job which they held.

Djilas was one of those rare specimens who, when he reached a position of power after many years of bloody struggle, saw that he was part of a new ruling clique, even harsher towards the working class than the villains they had replaced. He did not like what he saw and denounced the regime of which he was a shining light. By that stage (the early fifties) the Yugoslav regime had apparently had its fill of blood and Djilas was not hanged for his heresy but sentenced to prison (to which he was to return more than once). But Djilas did more than just resign. He was able to write a number of books and get them published in the West. In particular, he wrote a book called The New Class. This book provides the definitive answer to the common question: “But if Russia is a capitalist state, where are the capitalists?”, for it describes—from the inside, for a change—the power, wealth and privilege of those who rule over the proletariat in Russia and the other state-capitalist regimes. Only from the inside could one get an account of sheer gluttony and drunkenness under Stalin and the rest of the gangsters, often at times when the workers were literally dying of hunger.

To this extent, therefore, we owe a debt to Djilas—and we recognise the courage needed to make the break that he did. But the lesson which this article is minded to draw is something different based on a long interview with him which appeared in the December 1979 issue of Encounter. What Djilas says in this interview is of considerable interest and importance, but in particular what stands out all the way through is that although Djilas is a man of undoubted ability and courage, who seems to have read a good deal of Marx and has realised that the parties to which he devoted his great ability, are a snare and a delusion, he remains supremely ignorant. That may appear to be a harsh verdict. But it is clearly the lesson that runs like a thread through all the twenty pages which the interview takes up in Encounter.

And before we have a look at some of the interesting things he says (it would take a whole issue of the Socialist Standard to do justice to them all), it is necessary to make one thing clear. During all his remarkable career Djilas has never shown the slightest sign of knowing what socialism is. He will learnedly discuss Trotsky’s view that Stalin distorted the “pure socialism” of Lenin while still leaving Russia a “socialist country”, which apparently it remains to this day, despite all the horrors which Djilas knows about (none better). He has, apparently, been too busy all his life waging a struggle for “socialism” to have time to wonder what it is he’s been fighting for. And he is no nearer understanding now, at the end of his career, than he was in his romantic youth. Neither does he begin to imagine that there must be something odd in fighting for a cause when you don’t really know what it is—and when you’ve apparently won it, you don’t even know if you’ve got it or not. Such are the traps into which our “intellectuals” blithely fall. So now Djilas finds himself, sickened by the abomination that is Russia today, yearning for a new system which is “beyond capitalism and socialism, escaping traditional leftist dogma.” Well, we will agree on the need for the working class to shun leftist claptrap; but this society which is beyond capitalism and socialism—what on earth is it? It is no more than a figment of Djilas’s imagination. He knows that he has been utterly and desperately wrong—but he has not the remotest idea why.

Yet some things Djilas can see clearly enough. He knows it is impossible to derive from Marx anything like a Stalinist cult of personality and contrasts that with Lenin: “There is absolutely no contradiction between Soviet (socialist) democracy and the exercise of dictatorial powers by individuals”—a famous piece of Leninist twisting to prove that black is white, that dictatorship equals democracy. Djilas also quotes Lenin: “a personalised dictatorship of the proletariat is a hundred times more democratic than the rule of the bourgeoisie”. “In that backhanded way”, says Djilas, “Lenin was, if you like, a democrat.” (“If you like” is rather good.) “And indeed Lenin tolerated, until the 10th Congress, a certain amount of democracy within the Communist Party.” No doubt a cat is behaving with a certain amount of democratic justice when it allows the mouse to run around for a second or two. However, Djilas comes nearer to the real world when he goes on to say that “Lenin’s political practice consisted of a ruthless will to coerce and subjugate. Stalin’s terror and Stalin’s tyranny are unmistakably foreshadowed by Leninism.” Djilas is also fully alive to reality when he says that Russia is immune to “constructive criticism” from leftist professors and “well- meaning” fellow-travellers. “Communists with power and privilege to lose regard them as fools.” Which they undoubtedly are. And again: “I want to demolish the notion that the evils of Stalinism were due to Stalin’s character as put about by Soviet propagandists. In all political aspects, Lenin regarded Stalin as his rightful heir.”

Djilas then goes on to take issue with Marx by saying that the Communist Parties (and in particular the Yugoslav party) came to realise the importance of nationalism as compared with class, “whatever Marx may have said”. Workers of each land unite with yourselves! But then he also thinks that “any Communist social order necessitates the exclusive right to say what the individual may think and feel”. He sees hope in the fact that so-called Eurocommunists like Carillo of Spain and Berlinguer of Italy are imbued with patriotism. After all, he points out, at the beginning of the century socialists used to talk of a classless society but then they “all supported the war in their various countries and were distrusted no longer”. In fact, genuine socialists-in the Socialist Party of Great Britain and our companion parties abroad—opposed the war in 1914 and equally in 1939. Perhaps desperately, Djilas suggests that the communist parties of the West will probably change their names in due course. He offers: Socialist Workers Party! One wonders whether he appreciates the irony of this when he was, as he says, interviewed for the BBC by “a wordy representative of the extreme left (Paul Foot) who lectured me on the need to destroy parliamentary institutions”.

Djilas welcomed the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 (which gave the green light for the outbreak of war) because, he says, he could see no difference between the Nazis and the western democracies. So much for all the propaganda of the various “communists” in favour of a United Front against fascism which fooled the entire Left (including, we now read, the Cambridge spies like Burgess and Maclean and Blunt). But then this is the same misguided “intellectual” who could once write: “Can there be any greater honour and happiness than to feel that one’s friend is Stalin? He is the bitter enemy of all that is inhumane, he is the wisest person, he nurtures human kindness”! (Borba, the Yugoslav Communist Party paper, 1942). But even today he says he has no sense of shame in recalling his own part in wartime atrocities. Such little matters as personally cutting the throat of an unarmed German prisoner—a worker—and then clubbing him to death. He refers to the actions of Eden, the “not- guilty Man of Munich” in leftist mythology, in connection with the return of civilian prisoners at the end of the war (after all fighting had ceased in Europe). Eden justified sending hundreds of thousands of these poor wretches to be slaughtered in cold blood by Stalin by saying that otherwise Stalin would not release British prisoners.

A spurious reason this, but one that, as Djilas says, does not apply to Yugoslavia. They held no British prisoners to use for blackmail; nevertheless Eden still sent 30,000 men, women and children from camps in Austria to the mercies of Tito who murdered every single one of them at once. Eden well knew the grisly fate in store for them. As Djilas says, Tito made it quite clear to a British mission what would happen to these utterly defenceless human beings. (And of course it would be absurd to imagine that Eden’s Prime Minister Churchill, and his deputy Prime Minister Attlee, soon to become Labour Premier, were not aware of what their own forces were doing. Should they not all have been tried at Nuremberg along with Goering and the other Nazis? And Stalin who, as Djilas makes clear—in case anyone doubted—slaughtered thousands of unarmed Polish prisoners of war in the Katyn Forest? And Djilas?)

That was all many years ago. And as one now sees what happens in Cambodia, Iran, Timor or Ethiopia, it is clear that all this inhumanity is integral to the present system which will change only when the working class decide they have had enough of horrors of all kinds in peace and war. But that will require, to begin with, a little clear thinking—too much to expect from Djilas.

L. E. Weidberg

Party News (1960)

From the October 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Islington

Islington members have been reading The New Class, by Djilas (former supporter of Tito and ex-Vice-President of Yugoslavia), and J. Bonus will open a discussion on the book at the Branch Room, Co-op Hall, 129, Seven Sisters Road, N.7. on Thursday, October 13th, at 8.15pm. Further, Islington Branch is arranging a discussion with a member of the Yugoslav Democratic Union (an organisation of exiled Yugoslavs) sometime in November. Details will be announced soon.

Wembley

The new branch at Wembley seems to have made quite a good start. The inaugural meeting was held at the beginning of July, and a fair amount of activity has packed in since then.

Two visits have been paid to Southsea, one on August 14th and the other on September 11th, and both were successful, with interested audiences and good literature sales. In addition, on Friday evenings throughout September, some very encouraging outdoor meetings were held by this branch at Gloucester Road.

A film show took place on September 12th at the branch rooms and although it was the first to be held there, it attracted a number of non-members. The title of the film was "Eldorado" - a documentary on British Guinea, and it was followed by the usual comments, by a member of the Party.

This has encouraged us to think about further shows in the future, but this will, of course, depend on time available, for there is a very crowded autumn and winter programme of historical lectures. Three members of the branch will be responsible for these, and details appear elsewhere in this issue.

The branch has lost no time in canvassing the Socialist Standard, and both Harrow and Greenford areas have been given special attention. The results have been most gratifying, and local comrades are following up the contacts made. It is hoped to expand sales of the S.S. and other literature steadily over the next few months.

It can be seen from all this that the new branch is active and intends to stay that way. But more help is always welcome and members living in the vicinity are particularly asked to give us their support where possible. We have pleasantly situated branch rooms at Barham Old Court, Barham Park, Harrow Road, Wembley, and meet every Monday at 8pm. Members of the public are cordially invited and facilities are available for the friendly cup of tea and cake after each meeting.

Ealing

Ealing Branch meetings are continuing very satisfactorily. Outdoor activities have been handicapped by the weather, but some good meetings have been held at Gloucester Road with reasonable literature sales. A very good propaganda trip to Southsea took place on 4th September, with two meetings at which there were excellent audiences. Some useful contacts were made. Winter activities include lectures by Branch members and the resumption of the West London Writers' Class.

Paddington

On Sunday, September 11th, Paddington Branch paid a social and propaganda visit to Birmingham. Eight members (and a "fellow traveller" from Fulham) drove up in a minibus and were most hospitably received by Birmingham Branch members. After Sunday dinner and conviviality as guests of the local members, an outdoor meeting was held in the centre of the city at Chamberlain Place. This speaking spot is being built up in place of the traditional Bull Ring which is being completely rebuilt. It proved difficult to gather a large crowd partly due to the overwhelming noise from its fountain and droves of starlings on the surrounding buildings, but a small and attentive audience remained for three hours, and a fair amount of literature was sold. The speakers were L. Cox, E. Grant, S. Goodman, I. Jones and C. Wilson. Thanks Birmingham members for your hospitality and support!

Swansea

Welcome Swansea Branch! This new Branch was recently formed by our enthusiastic and active Swansea members, who have been keeping the torch of Socialism alight in South Wales for some time. We invite all readers in the Swansea area who are unable to personally attend Branch meetings to make a point of contacting the secretary (See Branch Directory, page 146. for details)

Glasgow

The two Glasgow branches, City and Kelvingrove are going to amalgamate their forces. watch this column and the Branch directory for more details.

P.H.