(November 1950)
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Comrades,
Faced with the evolution of your government's foreign policy since the Korean War, it is no longer possible to hide the anxiety that has gripped revolutionaries who, throughout the world, have surrounded proletarian Yugoslavia with their active sympathy, their enthusiasm, and their hopes since its break with the Kremlin.
This anxiety is now turning into the painful feeling of the approach of a genuine catastrophe that would nullify all the progressive influence exercised up to now by the Yugoslav revolution on the international workers' movement, following recent statements by Yugoslav leaders that are being interpreted as committing Yugoslavia's foreign policy to following in the wake of American imperialism and its instrument, the UN.
Unless your party reacts promptly and firmly to redress the course sketched out by your government of a marked tendency toward capitulation to the demands of imperialism, proletarian Yugoslavia would lose the sympathies it has aroused in the circles of the international revolutionary vanguard, and particularly among the proletarian and colonial masses who follow the Communist parties.
The essential strength of your revolution has hitherto been your independence from both Moscow and Washington, and the promise — repeatedly affirmed by all your leaders up until the Korean War — not to integrate into any bloc and to pursue a genuinely Marxist-Leninist policy.
Insofar as your rulers now seem to be discovering the "constructive" and "peaceful" role of American imperialism, its "disinterested" aid, the relative benefits of the Marshall Plan, and appear ready to endorse the decisions of the UN's crushing capitalist majority defining and sanctioning the "aggressor" in the person of the colonial peoples, of Korea and China fighting for their independence, proletarian Yugoslavia appears to be abandoning its independent policy and to be lining up with the imperialist bloc led by Washington. Such an attitude would fulfil the wishes of the Kremlin, which has sought from the very first day of your break with it to isolate Yugoslavia in order to force it to capitulate to imperialism and thus discredit it in the eyes of the proletarian and colonial masses influenced by the Communist parties.
Certainly, your serious internal difficulties and the fear of a military attack by the Kremlin's armies explain the scale of the concessions your government is currently making to the imperialists. Certainly, the blockade to which the Kremlin has subjected Yugoslavia, in order to prevent your experiment in the free development of the revolution from succeeding, and the weakness of the aid you have received to date from the world proletariat, have contributed to weakening your government's resistance in the face of imperialism's brutal demands. We deeply understand this attitude and certain necessary compromises, but we do not for all that justify a tendency toward capitulation.
We consider, on the contrary, that the path along which your government is steering Yugoslavia's foreign policy, far from providing a solution to the country's grave internal difficulties and to the threat of military attack by the Kremlin, can only have the effect of weakening Yugoslavia by depriving it of its one real support: the sympathy and active aid of the world proletariat and the colonial masses.
From the standpoint of the general and historic interests of the world proletariat, the goal is not to safeguard, at any cost, with any deformations and any abandonments whatsoever, power conquered in this or that country. Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Lenin taught us that there are defeats that are worth infinitely more than certain victories; and that there are "victories" and accommodations that are in reality crushing defeats.
If Yugoslavia were to capitulate to American imperialism, it would still gain a respite and would preserve, for a time, the economic and social foundations of its proletarian regime. But in reality, in the long run, an alignment of its foreign policy with the policy of imperialism would have inevitable domestic repercussions, and its proletarian regime would inevitably succumb.
In the meantime, its continued existence would contribute not to the renewal and regrouping of the revolutionary forces of the proletariat and the colonial masses, but to their prostration before the Soviet bureaucracy and Stalinism.
In order not to capitulate to imperialism, and in the face of growing internal difficulties, would it therefore be necessary simply and purely to abdicate power and conclude that there is no longer any prospect for proletarian power and socialism in Yugoslavia?
Not at all.
It is neither in our power nor in our intentions to instil defeatism in you. To hold firm, to manoeuvre both internally and externally, to exploit international antagonisms as far as possible, to fight to the end — that is our line, but without ever losing sight of the conditions and historical limitations of this necessary struggle, nor of the limits of permissible manoeuvres, and while subordinating the struggle for socialism in Yugoslavia to the struggle of the international proletariat for world socialism.
If, in the course of such a struggle, proletarian power were to succumb in Yugoslavia, this would not be a simple, pure and simple defeat but an enrichment of the experience and moral capital of the international workers' movement, an important stimulus to new struggles and to broader and more decisive victories over world capitalism and all forces hostile to the revolution.
Such was the line of Marx, the line of Rosa Luxemburg, the line of the Third International up until Lenin's death, and it is also our line.
Such, however, is not the nature of the foreign policy embarked upon by your government.
The building of socialism in Yugoslavia seems to it to be an end in itself, one that can be achieved independently of this or that concession and of the repercussions of these concessions on the international workers' movement.
So that Yugoslavia may, in the event of an attack by the Kremlin's armies, benefit from the support of the capitalist majority at the UN, your government tends to see the role of the UN only through this aspect, directly linked to Yugoslavia's own immediate fate.
But the UN's action extends worldwide, and certain peoples — the colonial peoples of Asia in revolt — are currently suffering it in their own flesh, in the form of mercenary armies, bombs, planes, and tanks fighting against them.
When your government presents the UN as the supreme assembly of peoples which can democratically decide by majority who is the "aggressor" and then sanction it in the manner in which it sanctioned the Koreans, it is elaborating a pernicious theory that idealizes the UN, an instrument of imperialist policy.
For the overwhelming majority of the UN is composed of representatives of capitalist and imperialist governments, dominated by the great imperialist powers and principally by the USA, and not of representatives of the peoples.
No decision of this body will ever go against the fundamental interests of imperialism, and of American imperialism in particular. On the contrary, this imperialism uses the UN to camouflage its policy of world domination under the cover of the United Nations.
Is it really necessary to insist further, to Marxists, on this use of the UN by imperialism? How, then, can one entrust this body with the task of "designating" and then "sanctioning" the "aggressor"? To begin with, this notion of the "aggressor" does not belong to the domain of jurists and diplomats, but to that of the class struggle and of the class character of every phenomenon in our epoch. Like Marx, like Lenin, we are not against every war, but against certain wars. We admit the absolute legitimacy of wars waged by colonial and semi-colonial peoples against imperialism, and of wars waged by workers' states against capitalist and imperialist states. We admit that it is possible, and sometimes necessary, for a workers' state to lend military aid to the revolutionary forces of another country so that they may achieve victory over their class enemy.
Given all these fundamental notions of Marxism, enriched by so many past examples, how is it possible to fall into this meticulous, formalistic definition of the "aggressor" entrusted to the UN — a definition worthy of lawyers and jurists claiming allegiance to an abstract "justice" and "international law" suspended above classes and their struggles in our epoch?
In the aftermath of the First World War, the imperialists created the League of Nations, which Lenin and the Third International, during his lifetime, described as a "den of imperialist brigands," and the USSR resolutely refused to join it.
It was only from 1934 onward, following the victory of German fascism, the general retreat of the workers' movement, the isolation of the USSR, and the approach of war, that the Soviet bureaucracy revised the Leninist policy on the League of Nations and had the USSR join it in order to benefit from "democratic" imperialist aid against the Axis powers. But instead of presenting the USSR's entry as a necessity imposed by an unfavourable international situation, and explaining this retreat to the world proletariat, Stalin elaborated a theory that idealized the League of Nations and distorted its character and class role.
In the League of Nations, dominated by a number of imperialist powers of roughly equal antagonistic strength, it was, moreover, easier to manoeuvre and exploit their mutual antagonisms than it is possible to do today at the United Nations, dominated by the crushing superiority of American imperialism over all the other capitalist powers, and by reason of their united front, without cracks, against the USSR and the bloc it leads.
Revolutionaries, friends of proletarian Yugoslavia, can accept that Yugoslavia's particular position of isolation obliges it to belong to the UN and to exploit the antagonisms between the two blocs in order to survive. Revolutionaries can justify certain concessions to the UN by Yugoslav representatives so as not always to clash head-on with the imperialist majority at the UN and thereby aggravate the Stalinist blockade of Yugoslavia with a parallel blockade by the imperialists.
But what revolutionaries can in no way accept is that Yugoslav representatives and the Yugoslav government should become the champions of theories, proposals, and plans idealizing the UN, camouflaging its well-defined and unalterable class character, and above all that they should appear to commit themselves to respecting and enforcing, with the support of their country, every decision of the UN, including decisions such as those that would hand Korea back to the regime of Syngman Rhee and to MacArthur's administration, and that would threaten China — which has rushed to the aid of the Korean masses fighting against imperialism — with war.
What revolutionaries can in no way accept is that the Yugoslav Communist Party [PCY] should remain silent about this line of the government, identify itself with it, and fail to explain clearly to the Yugoslav and world masses the class character of the struggle in Korea, of China's intervention, of the policy of the imperialists and their UN, as well as the motives and meaning of the concessions made by the Yugoslav government to the imperialists.
Perhaps we shall be told that all this is well known and that it is, on your government's part, merely a matter of tactical procedures, of manoeuvres aimed at lulling the imperialists as to your true course and obtaining their indispensable aid in the immediate term!
No more than Lenin do we believe that manoeuvre can be a substitute for a principled line.
The words and acts of your government and of your representatives at the UN are taken seriously by the proletarian and colonial masses; they influence them and determine, for them, the true character of your policy.
The masses react to what they see, hear, and read, not to the secret intentions hidden behind this or that so-called "manoeuvre."
It was Stalin, after Lenin's death, who substituted the idea of the omnipotence of manoeuvre and opportunism for the strength of a principled line and of an ample and frank explanation given to the masses. Lenin called things by their name and educated the masses by explaining his policy to them frankly. He had nothing to hide and hid nothing from the masses. He did not idealize his retreats and his defeats, for he had confidence in the masses and expected the true support of the USSR and of the world revolution from them alone.
Only opportunists believe they are manoeuvring the imperialists, when in reality they are manoeuvring the masses who trust them and take their acts and words seriously.
The revolutionary education of the masses is not the privilege of a secret explanation among initiates, but the fruit of a consistent, principled line of the party.
Moreover, when your government and your representatives at the UN appear to commit themselves to endorsing the UN's decisions on Korea, or those it might take tomorrow against China, and to enforcing these decisions by integrating Yugoslav troops into UN forces sent into the colonies to restore the feudal-capitalist and imperialist order, these verbal manoeuvres or these hollow promises risk leading them to acts that would forever stain the Yugoslav revolution.
The danger is too serious for us to remain silent or to temporize. We, who from the very first day of your break with the Kremlin hailed the new and hopeful course of the Yugoslav revolution; who have done everything in our power to make the truth about Yugoslavia known and to propose a movement of sympathy and active aid from the world proletariat toward your revolution — we are also the first to feel deeply that the foreign policy your government is currently sketching out is the equivalent of a grave defeat for the entire workers' movement.
If Stalin succeeded in persuading the proletarian and colonial masses influenced by the Communist parties that Yugoslavia is truly aligning itself with the capitalists, he would have achieved his principal aim. After that, it would be infinitely easier for him to resurrect a strong Cominformist current in your country and even to attack a Yugoslavia militarily that would by then be discredited and isolated from the proletariat and the colonial masses. And, in that case, to count on aid from the imperialists to allow you to survive as a workers' state would truly be to sink into the worst illusions.
Through your government's present foreign policy, not only would a Stalinist military attack be made easier, but in addition the whole real and profound crisis of Stalinism in other countries — which the example of your independent position has hitherto greatly fuelled — would necessarily be checked. For those elements who are hesitant or shaken in their attachment to Stalinism, among other things by its behaviour toward your revolution, risk once again losing all faith in the possibility of a path independent of Moscow and Washington, and either submitting passively to the influence of the Kremlin, or abandoning the struggle in demoralization.
Deprived of the sympathy and support of the masses, what hope would you then have of surviving between the anvil of imperialism and the hammer of the Kremlin?
It is not too late for your party, discussing and deciding democratically, to halt and redress the disastrous course now being sketched out in foreign policy.
Moreover, how is it possible that such profound changes in Yugoslavia's foreign policy should become public on the occasion of speeches at congresses or interviews with journalists?
It is for the party as a whole to discuss and decide these questions, if proletarian democracy — and above all the most elementary democracy within the party — is not to be a sham.
The hour is grave, and there is not much time left to react before it is too late.
The world is heading toward gigantic explosions and decisive events. You must choose: either to stand clearly and firmly with the proletarian and colonial masses against imperialism and against the Soviet bureaucracy, or to slide into the wake of imperialism against the proletarian and colonial masses.
Your relations with the revolutionaries who, throughout the world, have shown themselves to be friends of proletarian Yugoslavia will be determined by this choice.
Spare the Yugoslav revolution the prostration before [text apparently truncated in source]! Spare the entire international workers' movement such a defeat! Trust the revolutionary forces, independent of the Kremlin, which are awakening and organizing throughout the world and which your example has so greatly helped up to now! Call upon them for aid, explaining frankly to them your difficulties and the concessions to which you are being forced! Let your party discuss and decide democratically the course to be followed!