MIA > Archive > Draper > Titoism
From Labor Action, Vol. 13 No. 52, 26 December 1949, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Last week we discussed the appeal of pro-Titoism for the neo-Stalinist type of pro-Russian “progressive” and the reason so many of them have found it easy to go over to Tito, retaining at the same time their pro-Russian-appeasement line on the cold war between the U.S. and the Kremlin.
But as we pointed out in an article on The Neo-Stalinist Type in the New International last year, this variety of liberal shades off imperceptibly at its fringes into other varieties who are not at all Stalinoid in their political sympathies. In fact, the same line of thought brings us to liberals (if some can still be called such) who are even bitterly and violently anti-Stalinist – Stalinophobes, in fact.
A strain of pro-Titoism is arising in such elements also, and the reason is not far to seek on the basis of what we have discussed. A few summary sentences not only bridge the apparent gap but show why it is necessary to follow the thought across the bridge.
Stalinism as a social system can be described as a completely statified economy and society with no democratic control over that state by the people. The neo-Stalinist is attracted by the first aspect – the appeal of the possibilities of replacing the incurable ills of capitalism with state controls and statification. He deplores the second as a democrat, but typically places no importance on the role of the working class, disdainful or suspicious of the action of the masses. The latter is true nine times out of ten even when (like many Wallaceites) he has learned to talk in lib-lab phrases about “labor” and even “the masses of people.”
But that is true not only of this recent political animal, the neo-Stalinist: the combination is typical of social-reformism in general, historically and in practice today.
It is doubly true today, when the woods are full of socialists and ex-socialists who have been sadly disappointed by the failure of the working class to bring socialism (after all the leaflets they distributed personally, too!). It is doubly true today when hopelessness and cynicism is rife in the breasts – not of the working class but – of a whole worn-out generation of socialist intellectuals who have given up hope in the mass movement of the people and now, at the best, think of it in traditional liberalistic terms as a handy pressure force through which enlightened men like themselves can get something done.
Where the most typical neo-Stalinists, like many Wallaceites, have never had any connection with the life-giving class struggle of the workers, these elements (many of them with socialist pasts) now look at the working class only with skepticism, despair or disdain. They once looked to the working class as a Power, and have been hurtfully disappointed. They looked on the socialist program as a Power also, and now nurse their disillusionment.
Now they no longer look for a program (“You with your musty books by Marx!”) but they still look for a Power. How great is the appeal of Power in the hand rather than a program in the bush! – even if the Power is in somebody else’s hand. (It was the intellectuals, was it not, as a group, that have been called the Powerless People, who are so often so easily swept into the train of Power?)
Unlike the often politically naive Wallaceite neo-Stalinists, the Kremlin is anathema to them. They seek a Power that can stop it. They have convinced themselves that it was part of their old mistaken ways, that they made a fetish of being “principled” and of eschewing opportunism. They are determined to be “broad” and “practical” and “realistic” – they even seek to be real good and opportunistic in order to make sure that there are no remnants of the old “dogmatism” – the new slogan is “Anything goes!” Especially any Power ...
We pass over the fact that so many of these types arrive, at a slower or faster pace, at a completely cynical support of American imperialism in its cold war with the hated Stalinist enemy. More to the point: Titoism too is a Power. Oh, not a Power like Washington, to be sure, but still a Power: it has a state, it disposes of an army, it even sits on the Security Council of the UN – above all, it is certainly not a struggling minority party holding propaganda meetings and managing to put out a weekly newspaper, possessing nothing but its program and its ideas. Ecce quam bonum – how good and pleasant it is to have a Power on one’s side! It is there because one has gone over to its side. One proclaims oneself a “Titoist.”
But whitewashing Tito is not confined to these ex-types. Tito is now on “our” side of the cold war, in a way – at least, he is a handle that may be used against the other side.
So you look in the pages of the social-democratic New Leader, which tries to be as “statesmanlike” as its reformist brethren in Europe, in its own minuscular way. Yesterday Tito was a totalitarian butcher; today the editor discovers that these Yugoslavs are really a “civilized” people, unlike its neighbors ...
The liberal New York Post, with a passing editorial disclaimer, prints hallelujah interviews with Tito (by Wallaceite Gailmor and liberal Marquis Childs), in which we discover that Tito is really a very benign man who says with utmost conviction that the Yugoslav people will never bow to tyranny ...
If the trend continues, we will be reading in the Saturday Evening Post that “we’ve really misunderstood the chap, you know, actually he’s the incarnation of George Washington at Valley Forge ...”
It is these people, from the New Leader to the slicks – who know of a certainty that revolutionary independent socialism is blood-brother to Stalinism, since Stalinism flows, from Leninism – who find no difficulty in whitewashing the Stalinist totalitarian in Belgrade, scrubbing his hands clean with printer’s ink, tipping him off on how to keep the bloody club out of sight, putting a democratic dressing on the raw gobs of tyranny, while Independent Socialists refuse any political alliance with any variety of Stalinism.
(Next week: Will Titoism be “democratized”?)
Last updated on 11 December 2022