Tito and the Bureaucrats By JENNY NICHOLSON FTER two years
of hesitation, arguments and experi- ments, the Yugoslays have now streamlined and per- fected their dogma. Tito's original quarrel with. Stalin in 1948 was not, of course, anything to do with dogma at all. But both found it tactically necessary to present it like that. And Tito, like all schismatics, is now setting himself up as the fr champion of true, pure Communism, slanging Stalin as a misguided deviationist. This summer he has crystallised the conflict by championing one of the most curious items of Communist doctrine—the withering away of the State. He has begun to wither the State of Yugoslavia.
Briefly, Tito and his spiritual advisers argue that Russia has bolted headlong into one of the two dangers which Lenin forecast for the revolution. She has avoided the reactionary counter-revolution by the dispossessed bourgeoisie, but has ensnarled herself in her own bureaucracy. She has allowed a, new privileged class to grow up. Far from allowing the State to wither away, as the law and the prophets of Marxism insist that it must, the Russian State has sprouted and blossomed, steadily growing in power and size. The Yugoslav leaders have boldly and publicly enumerated the abuses to which this Russian deviation leads—unequal social relations, over- emphasis on nationalism, vast differences of pay, the barring of workers from any control over the factories in which they work, deification of personalities, suppression of " the struggle- of opinion," and more. Tito insists that Yugoslavia, following in Russia's footsteps along the road to revolution, has seen Russia take the wrong turning. She herself intends to keep straight on along the true road—towards the withered State.
The new doctrine was first enunciated by Tito in a 12,000- word speech on June 26th of this year. It has been followed during the last three months by a movement which is some- times referred to as " the decentralisation drive " and some- times described as " the fight against bureaucracy." Tito claims that it inaugurates a new form of liberal and enlight- ened Communism.. A great many Yugoslays—some from • conviction, others hoping that it is the thin end of a wedge with which they can hold open the door and let in a little light and trade from the materially glittering western world—have flung themselves into it with enthusiasm. The new move- ment takes two main forms. One is the reduction of the Ministries and Government organisations and the handing over of federal powers to the republics, and the republican powers to district councils, and so on, downwards. The other is the handing 'over of the management of factories to the workers. Both these processes are genuinely going on. Every day you see in the papers reports like : " Croatian Executive Committee cut down by 85 per cent.," " Five Ministries abolished in Ljubljana," or Slovene District People's Committees reduced by two-thirds."
But the pruning of the civil service is creating another problem. What is going to be done with all the bureaucrats who are being thrown out of work ? Although there is said to be enough work for everybody in Yugoslavia, it is not always suitable work for an experienced ex-bureaucrat. So they wander around jobless and hungry—for they automatic- ally forfeit their privileged ration-card.. You can tell the newly dispossessed privileged class because they tend to cling to their worn but respectable suits and their cheap fountain- pens shining in their top left-hand pocket. You can see them wandering disconsolately round the muddy walks of the public gardens in Zagreb. They sit, staring down on the filthy waters of the Danube from the wooden benches near the Belgrade War Museum. You can pick them out in the shuffling crowd bearing some treasure to a commission shop (a State-run junk shop where you can sell or buy anything from an electric light bulb to a pair of Moslem trousers for the price of a little extra food on the free food market-111e State taking a fair commission). You can even spot them in the churches of Ljubljana, refugees from the cold rain, grateful for. a quiet place in which to decide that they are not so enthu- siastic about Communism after all.
For the workers, too, the blessing of being given their own factory is mixed ; in many cases it blesses him that gives more than him that takes. The Palace Hotel, Zagreb, was taken over by the hotel employees while I was staying there. So was the local newspaper a few streets away. The voting rooms in both places were State-decorated with scarlet drap- eries, huge pictures of Tito, regulation ballot boxes and a great many aspidistras in pots. The electors scuttled in grinning, marched in stern with their new importance, or sidled in with bowed heads as if they were performing some religious rite. For each of them it was transparently a great occasion. This was the moment they had been promised—that they had begun to doubt would ever arrive—when they should work for themselves. From now on there was to be no capitalist boss and no more of his unattractive successor, remote State control. From now on the business was really going to belong to the chambermaid, the liftboy and the kitchenmaid ; to the compositor, the sports reporter and the paper-seller. But what neither hotel employees nor the newspaper workers seemed to know was whether the business they were inheriting was a good business. For a large number of factories and businesses have been running at a loss. Some are heavily in debt, or else efficient working is impossible because an essential supply of raw material is missing.
Still, whether they like it or not, the workers are having to elect their own committees of management, pay their own taxes and make their own profit if they can. In many cases they may do surprisingly well, for they are taking over factories, not from an efficient capitalist management, but from an inefficient State control. It is, of course, much too early to judge whether the process of the withering away of the State is a success or not. One can merely, for the moment, record an obvious general conviction that less bureaucracy is more attractive than more bureaucracy, and that liberal Communism is likely to be more congenial to live with than tyrannical Communism.
Moscow has already been stung into taking part in the doc- trinal controversy. But the Russian attack has so far consisted of airy pronouncements by Stalin and others which do not mention Yugoslavia at all, though clearly aimed at it. The Soviet thesis is that Tito is trying to run before he can walk. Lenin specified State capitalism as the first con- sequence of the Communist revolution ; only later would the " apparatus of State power " be destroyed and a final ideal Communistic society be achieved. The Russian Communists claim that Yugoslavia has not nearly reached this second stage. Stalin argues in the magazine Bolshevik that, on the contrary, now is the moment for a " comprehensive strength- ening of the State. " Soviet Marxists," he says, " have come to the conclusion that as long as there is a capitalist encirclement, as long as Socialism is victorious only in one country while capitalism holds sway in all the others, the country in which revolution has triumphed must extensively strengthen and not weaken its State, the State organs, the intelligence service and the army." It is a fascinating schism, which causes the Yugoslays to grope, like the early Christian heretics, through a cloud of dialectic. There are many who are deeply afraid of it— afraid that they are far the weaker party and must lose in the end. But most people's fear is eclipsed by some enjoyable by-products of the fight against bureaucracy ; the new game of hunt-the-scandal ; discovering inefficiencies which can be attributed to " Russian-type thinking " ; and a wave of self- criticism. Who knows where this self-criticism may lead ? Tito may think it is dangerous ; but he has Iet himself in for .s
it ; and the Yugoslays are enjoying it.
Previous page
