(8th Plenum of the International Executive Committee, 26–30 April 1950)
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RESOLUTION ADOPTED
The 8th Plenum, although there exist differing assessments as to the stages of development of the Yugoslav revolution, considers that, following the victory of the proletarian revolution in Yugoslavia, there exist a workers' state and a regime of the dictatorship of the proletariat in that country; observes that, in the particular conditions of the Yugoslav revolution, bureaucratic deformations persist within this state; notes that a serious struggle is being waged by the Yugoslav communists against these deformations.
The International's campaign for the defence of Yugoslavia must be made more precise along these lines.
The discussion within the International will continue on the assessment of the stages of the Yugoslav revolution, including the present stage.
This resolution was carried by 8 in favour, 3 against (Austria, Switzerland, Vietnam).
COUNTER-RESOLUTION REJECTED
1) The IEC notes that Tito's Yugoslavia is a capitalist state that has been reconstructed, after the strangling of the Yugoslav proletarian revolution, by Tito, his bureaucracy, his party and his regime, against the labouring masses who pushed, and are still pushing today, for the establishment of a dual power in their struggle for the creation of their Soviet state.
2) The IEC notes that the Titoist CPY rejects on principle Trotskyism, the world proletarian revolution, and revolutionary proletarian internationalism, and that the whole of its policy remains, in practice, based on the fundamental principle of "Yugoslav socialism" in one country. The anti-Stalinist criticism of the CPY and the apparently leftist words and deeds of its leadership must not deceive the sections of the Fourth International and the masses as to the fundamentally national "communist" line — that is to say, the anti-revolutionary, anti-Trotskyist, anti-socialist line — of Tito's party, Tito's bureaucracy, Tito's government, and Tito's Yugoslavia.
It is an illusion to think that Tito's party is "a force developing along the road to Leninism," or that it, and its regime, can consciously favour and propel the proletarian revolution in Yugoslavia. The Fourth International, by virtue of its programme, has the duty of pursuing a revolutionary policy. The IEC therefore rejects illusions of this kind and warns all comrades against their anti-revolutionary consequences.
3) The IEC notes that it is necessary to exploit, by means of the Yugoslav question, the crisis of Stalinism for the building of the proletarian class party. The sections of the Fourth International must not, however, support Tito's regime and Tito's party, but must call upon the labouring masses of all countries:
a) to support the workers and poor peasants of Yugoslavia in their struggle for their right of democratic proletarian self-determination, to be able freely to determine, themselves, both their own existence and that of their state, and in their struggle for the establishment of proletarian democracy, that is, of a Soviet state in Yugoslavia;
b) to support the Yugoslav popular masses in their struggle for national independence. They will grant this support both against the world bourgeoisie and against the Kremlin bureaucracy and against the "people's democracies," while always bearing in mind that the principal struggle must always be directed against the world bourgeoisie. Proceeding from this fundamental orientation, they must not also support Tito's regime and Tito's bureaucracy.
This counter-resolution was, in a preliminary vote, rejected by 2 in favour (Austria, Switzerland), 8 against, and 2 abstentions (Vietnam).
RESOLUTION PRESENTED BY GABRIEL (RAPTIS)
1. The 8th Plenum of the IEC considers that the progress of the discussion within the International on the case of Yugoslavia, together with the increasingly clear orientation given to the campaign our sections are conducting in defence of Yugoslavia, allow — indeed compel — us to settle without further delay the question of the class character of Yugoslavia.
2. Even before the CPY's break with the Cominform, the International tended to regard the case of Yugoslavia as not being absolutely identical to the rest of the "buffer zone," and on several occasions since 1943 had stressed both the revolutionary character of the mass movement that brought the CPY to power and the scale of the economic and social transformations that marked the life of this country between 1944 and 1948.
After the break, particular attention was paid to the case of Yugoslavia and, in the resolution of the 7th Plenum on the "buffer zone," the analysis given of this country should logically have led to the conclusion that Yugoslavia had ceased, even before the break, to be a capitalist country. However, the International, held back by considerations bearing on the "buffer zone" as a whole, hesitated to assess at their true worth the specific characteristics of the Yugoslav case and to draw in good time the conclusions that were called for.
3. The revolutionary mass movement, which had already arisen during the war in Yugoslavia and was led by the CPY, played a fundamentally proletarian-revolutionary role, progressively demolishing the old bourgeois state apparatus and radically transforming capitalist property relations. The CPY was brought to power by this revolutionary mass movement, with which it remained constantly linked.
The fluctuations known to have occurred in the development of the Yugoslav revolution, and particularly the interlude of the agreement and the Tito–Šubašić government, are explained principally by the pressure jointly exerted by imperialism and the Soviet bureaucracy between 1944 and 1945 on the CPY leadership, itself still strongly marked by its Stalinist upbringing.
4. The completion of the revolution that had already begun during the war in Yugoslavia took place in the period 1946–1948, during which there were accomplished both the replacement of the old state apparatus by an apparatus based on the committees as organs of a single power throughout the whole territory, and the radical transformation of property relations.
The period 1946–1948, far from being one of inertia and practical prostration of the masses and the committees, is on the contrary that of the completion of the revolution, the CPY maintaining and strengthening its ties with the masses precisely through the achievements of the revolution. This explains the break to the left that took place in 1948 with the Cominform and the Kremlin, and the victorious resistance shown on that occasion by the CPY, supported without reservation by the masses.
5. The break enabled the victorious Yugoslav revolution to attain higher levels, characterized above all by the increasingly conscious struggle undertaken since then against the danger of the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution, through the extension of socialist democracy.
Yugoslavia, being a workers' state, a state of the dictatorship of the proletariat even before the break, is evolving, under the pressure of the objective and subjective conditions created by the break, towards a constant expansion of socialist democracy and of the active and effective participation of the masses in the management of the state and the economy.
This evolution is increasingly effacing the bureaucratic deformations of this state as it was set up before the break, when the pressure of the Soviet bureaucracy, exerted through the CPY apparatus, itself marked by its Stalinist upbringing, limited the organization and democratic development of the masses.
6. However, this progressive evolution, which is reflected both on the ideological plane and in the economic and social measures taken in Yugoslavia since the break, has objective limitations inherent in the isolated character of the Yugoslav revolution, in a small country with a peasant majority. Should the dynamic of the international revolutionary movement prove incapable, in the years to come, of relieving and even breaking the enormous pressure currently exerted jointly by the Soviet bureaucracy and imperialism on proletarian Yugoslavia, the dictatorship of the proletariat in that country could begin a new course of bureaucratic regression, which would rapidly endanger its very class character.
Hence the duty of the international revolutionary vanguard to situate itself not outside the Yugoslav revolution, but to regard it as a moment in the realization of the world revolution, whose fate is organically linked to the development of the latter.
Indicative vote: 5 in favour (India, Greece, Holland, Great Britain, Italy), 4 against (Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Vietnam), 2 abstentions (France).
RESOLUTION PRESENTED BY GERMAIN (MANDEL)
1. The events that have occurred in Yugoslavia since the break between the Kremlin and the CPY require the International to revise its analysis of the class nature of the Yugoslav state. This revision must in no way have retroactive scope, and can, on the contrary, be based on the new facts that have occurred in this country since the establishment of the blockade of the "Cominformist" countries and the Rajk trial. These facts consist fundamentally in a mobilization of the Yugoslav labouring masses by the CPY for the defence and completion of the conquests of a proletarian revolution. This completion is verified above all in the following factors:
a) The state structure is becoming effectively based on the people's committees. The functioning of these committees stands in contrast to their practical inertia between 1945 and 1948. The CPY leaders have themselves, since 1948, been re-evaluating the significance and role of these committees, both on the practical plane and on the theoretical plane.
b) Workers' control over the management of industrial enterprises is beginning to be established under the impulse of the CPY, and a high degree of control, and even of direct management by the masses, is being introduced within the agricultural cooperatives.
2. Carried out in conditions of a new revolutionary upsurge, deeper than that of the partisan war, both in the number of working people taking part and in the degree of consciousness of the masses participating, these measures have been accompanied by a tendency towards the democratization of the whole of social life, which is manifested notably:
a) By the relaxation of bureaucratic control over the political thinking of communist militants and of vanguard workers in general, by the establishment of a climate of freedom and discussion within the communist movement, causing the political regime of Yugoslavia to evolve in the direction of a genuine proletarian democracy.
b) By important economic measures (decentralization of industry), political measures (real participation of the masses in the organs of power), and ideological measures (speeches and articles of the CPY) taken against the danger of bureaucratism, a danger recognized, in the tradition of the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky on this subject, as a social danger inherent in every workers' state.
c) By important reforms in the field of education, cultural and artistic life, etc., in which the will to reject every Stalinist-type straitjacket is manifested.
Consequently, the Fourth International has the duty to characterize the Yugoslav state, in accordance with all these facts, as a non-degenerated workers' state (dictatorship of the proletariat). Important deformations persist, due above all to the backward character of the country and its narrow material base, but also to the Stalinist past and survivals in the theory and practice of the CPY.
3. The particular conditions in which the proletarian revolution triumphed in Yugoslavia stem from the particular historical conditions this country has known for the past ten years, namely:
a) the physical and social destruction of the greater part of the old possessing classes in the course of the partisan war and the civil war of 1941–1944;
b) the loss of all possibility of political action by the remnants of these possessing classes, from the end of 1945 onward;
c) the establishment of an international balance of forces between the classes and between imperialism and the Soviet bureaucracy, which made impossible any sustained intervention by the international bourgeoisie against the Yugoslav revolution;
d) the fact that the sole factor which halted this revolution on the threshold of its total victory in 1944–1945 was the counter-revolutionary intervention of the Soviet bureaucracy;
e) the fact that during the years 1945–1948 no bureaucracy detached itself from the Yugoslav proletariat and poor peasantry as a separate and distinct caste, possessing important social privileges and subordinating the defence of the revolutionary conquests to the defence of its parasitic privileges.
For all these reasons, the completion of the proletarian revolution in Yugoslavia, that is, the transformation of the workers' and peasants' government into a dictatorship of the proletariat, under conditions of the complete prostration of the old possessing classes, took particular forms different from those of a "classical" completion of the proletarian revolution facing a non-degenerated bourgeois state. Nevertheless, the events that have unfolded in Yugoslavia since 1948 involve profound upheavals on every plane (state, economy, social relations, ideology, morals, justice, culture, etc.), far more profound in any case than anything that had been seen in any other country of Europe since the October revolution, and fully justify, in this sense, their characterization as a completed proletarian revolution.
4. This definition of present-day Yugoslavia rests entirely on the plane of the Marxist-Leninist theory of the state. The International rightly characterized the state apparatuses of the other countries of the "buffer zone," not born of a proletarian revolution, as hybrid state apparatuses that could not yet escape the definition of bourgeois states degenerated from the point of view of the bourgeoisie, while characterizing the tendency of the evolution of these countries as one of structural assimilation to the USSR. This particular character of the state apparatuses of the other countries of the "buffer zone" is manifested first of all in the purely administrative and bureaucratic combination of the old state structure of these countries with the fiction of new state forms.
Yugoslavia, from the outset, had followed a particular path, arising from a radical destruction of the old state structure through the civil war. One could characterize the Yugoslav state between 1945 and 1948 as a particular form of dual power, in which the reconstructed old forms of power were progressively emptied of all their content, as a result of the disappearance of the old possessing classes, while the new forms remained fictitious for want of real participation by the masses. It is the transformation of these new forms (committees) from fictitious into real that brought about the de facto disappearance of any function of the remnants of the old state structures reconstructed in 1944–1945, and which constitutes the dialectical leap transforming Yugoslavia into a dictatorship of the proletariat. This transformation was possible only through a new and powerful upsurge of mass activity, thereby once again confirming the Marxist-Leninist theory of the state.
5. The revolutionary transformation carried out in Yugoslavia since the break with the Kremlin was possible at so rapid a pace and in so radical a fashion only thanks to the leading role played by the CPY in this process. In retrospect, it must be recognized that this party had, since 1941, ceased to be a Stalinist party in the proper sense of the word, servilely subordinating the interests of the Yugoslav proletariat to those of the Kremlin. Through the influx of revolutionary masses into this party during the partisan war, and through the ideological evolution of this party's leaders, the CPY constituted, from the time of the civil war in Yugoslavia onward, a party that strove to establish in its policy a compromise between the interests of the Yugoslav socialist revolution and those of the Soviet bureaucracy. This evolution of the CPY introduced a differentiation within it, a right wing (Žujović and Hebrang) tending to represent within the CPY the defence of the Kremlin's interests, the rest of the leadership tending objectively to represent the interests of the Yugoslav proletariat vis-à-vis the Kremlin. With the break in 1948, this transformation was completed on the objective plane. From that moment on, the CPY no longer represents a party which, like the reformist and Stalinist organizations, serves social interests other than those of the proletariat (the trade-union bureaucracy of the capitalist countries, or the Soviet bureaucracy), but a party that strives objectively to represent the interests of the proletariat of its country. The ideological transformation, which is still in progress, lags, as does all coming to consciousness, behind the objective process which it reflects, and may still pass through several intermediate stages.
6. In the light of the position the Fourth International adopts today on the problem of the class nature of the Yugoslav state, it is obliged to submit its past analysis of Yugoslavia to a rigorous self-criticism. This self-criticism must proceed notably from:
a) An underestimation of the scale of the revolutionary mass movement and of the upheavals it caused in the country from 1943–1945 onward. Although on several occasions (articles in Fourth International, late 1943; the Russian theses of the 3rd Congress of the PCI, 1946) this factor was brought to light in unofficial texts of the International, the latter did not draw the necessary conclusions from it, and continued to regard the "buffer zone" as a single bloc, without introducing into its official texts the fundamental difference between Yugoslavia and the other countries — a difference stemming from the fundamentally different nature of the origin of the CPY's power.
b) A failure to understand the specific nature of the CPY, which, both through the role it played during the civil war and through its composition, differentiated itself from the outset from the other communist parties of the "buffer zone" and of the whole of Europe.
The International's lack of understanding regarding these two phenomena prevented it from foreseeing the Yugoslav events in the manner in which they occurred. Although the International tirelessly defended the thesis of the instability of the Soviet bureaucracy and of Stalinism, and of the necessary differentiation of the communist parties under conditions of revolutionary upsurge, it had always envisaged that this differentiation would be established against the leaderships of the national CPs, and had not foreseen the possibility of a differentiation between a CP as a whole and the Kremlin.
The cause of this lack of understanding cannot be sought in a theoretical insufficiency, but in a lack of information and thorough analysis of the specific Yugoslav phenomenon. The lesson that must be drawn from this experience is that all political analyses must be still more specific and complete, taking into account in each case the particularities of national development, and that any replacement of these specific analyses by general formulas paralyses the elaboration of a correct political line.
However, the fact that the International, as the sole current of the workers' movement, was able from the very beginning of the Yugoslav affair to take a correct position towards it, and that it alone understood the historic significance of the break between the CPY and the Kremlin, confirms that, despite particular errors of analysis, the general line of the International has been correct, and notably that its understanding of Stalinism and of its relations with the proletariat has been brilliantly confirmed. That is why the necessary self-criticism fits perfectly with our general programmatic conceptions and reinforces the unique value of our programme as the sole basis for a revolutionary policy in the world of today.
7. The future of the Yugoslav workers' state and of the CPY depends fundamentally on the action of the international proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard towards them. Only the constant and ever-expanding aid of the international proletariat to Yugoslavia will make possible a passage by the CPY to the positions of proletarian internationalism. Only an international extension of the Yugoslav revolution will definitively secure its material bases and its evolution in the direction of socialist proletarian democracy. The possibility of a bureaucratic regression of the Yugoslav revolution, in the event of an isolation of this revolution and a retreat of the international workers' movement, is, however, limited. Conditions of such a retreat would rather rapidly result in the crushing of workers' Yugoslavia between Wall Street and the Kremlin.
Indicative vote: 1 in favour (Belgium), 7 against (India, Greece, Holland, Great Britain, Italy, Switzerland, Austria), 3 abstentions (France, Vietnam).