The issue of Tito was (and remains) a very important one.
People may not know who Tito was: he was a Communist leader in the Balkans/Yugoslavia. He led a guerilla army against the Nazis in the 1940s, and as the Nazis were defeated in europe, the Yugoslav partisans liberated the balkans and created a unified country called Yugoslavia -- that combined many Balkan nationalities. But Tito quickly took a path different from the other revolutionaries of that time.
Before Tito there had been revisionists-out-of-power (like Bernstein) who urged Marxists to adopt non-revolutionary policies. Then there were revisionists-in-power (like Bukharin) who urged pro-capitalist policies in the USSR... but Tito was the first time that such a capitalist roader got OVERALL power. And studying this, Mao Tse-Tung was able to do two things:
a) He was able to sum that "the rise of revisionism to power is the rise of a new capitalist class" -- even if the capitalist roaders still called themselves "Communists"
b) He was able to have a sense of what was going on when the new crew in the much-respected Soviet Union started adopting "revisings" of socialist policies -- and Mao was able to lead real Communists to oppose and resist the Krushchevite attempt to destroy the international Communist revolution.
As for what the policies Yugoslav revisionism and capitalism were...
First let me point to a valuable early resources:
The Communist Party of China wrote a series of famous open letters in 1963 challenging Krushchev when he came to power. They are called "The Great Polemic."
One of them is called "Is Yugoslavia a Socialist Country?". It lays out a historic, early analysis of capitalist restoration -- (which was, as a I said a very new thing in the world -- no one had seen it before, and many people didn't think it was possible!)
It is here >>>>
www.marx2mao.com/Other/IYS63.htmlHere is another source. It is from the more recent Maoist article "Prelude to Genocide:
How Capitalism Caused the Balkan Wars" from the RW.
rwor.org/a/v20/1000-1009/1001/kosobk.htmThe evidence of this revisionism was on several levels:
1) First, the Titoites opened themselves to the U.S. This was a time when the U.S. was violently "encircling" the "socialist camp" after WW2 (the McCarthy Period and Korean war.) And the Titoites cozied up to the U.S., and took their distance from the socialist countries like USSR and China.
2) They pursued other bourgeois nationalist policies that were opposed to internationalism. Particularly they tried to gobble up neighboring nationalities (the way Milosevic later did) -- they opposed independence for Albania and tried to take it over. They demanded parts of Bulgaria, and proposed a "Southern Slav federation" -- which they would have controlled. (These are documented in the new books printed containing Dimitrov's memoirs from that period, and his correspondence with Stalin... I think I have some of them on my other computer)
3) Closely related, their policy was to combine state capitalism with private capitalism within Yugoslavia. This took many forms over time -- but one key (and rather famous) component of it was (ironically) called "worker self-management." On paper the workers ran each large enterprise. But in fact what happened was that the INTERACTION of the enterprises was left in the market (they acted as autonomous units, making deciions at the enterprise level). What this meant was that the law of the market forced each enterprise (regardless of WHO was running it on paper) to act like a capitalist enterprise -- investing their surplus in whatever made the most profitable sense for THEIR enterprise, making management decisions that served THEIR enterprise (including layoffs etc.)
A system was created that "on paper" was a form of socialism -- but in reality operated like capitalism, with unplanned production based on individual maximization of profitable investment. And inevitably this meant that the laws of capitalism, not the workers, would decide what was produced. (This history, by the way, is an excellent example to show Anarchists: cuz it shows why you can't just have "workers running their factories" WITHOUT CENTRALIZED SOCIALIST PLANNING.)
The RW describes some of the results of this mix of bourgeois nationalism, plus internal capitalist roadism:
"Under the weight of growing debt to the West, the Titoites carried out new "reforms" in 1965. They moved to make their currency convertible to Western currencies--so that investments could more easily flow in and profits could more easily flow out. After 1968, foreign capitalists could invest directly in the private sector. Yugoslavia became the first revisionist country to set up a stock market. These innovations of the capitalist road are now being carried out in the rest of Eastern Europe.
Yugoslav proletarians were sent off as cheap labor for northern Europe--they basically became an "export commodity." By 1971, over a million Yugoslavs were immigrant workers, over half of them in West Germany.
According to World Bank statistics, the wealthiest 5 percent of Yugoslav households earned 25 percent of the national income in the 1970s, while the poorest 20 percent of the population earned less than 7 percent. This was one of the most extreme income gaps in Europe--in fact, according to the World Bank, even India's income distribution gap was not as big!
The northern nations of Yugoslavia--Slovenia and Croatia--were more highly developed industrially and agriculturally. The three southern national areas--Macedonia, Montenegro, and the Albanian region of Kosovo--were far more undeveloped and poor. Serbia, the largest national grouping, is in between North and South and is also a relatively poor area. These divisions within Yugoslavia got even more acute because of the capitalist development pursued by Yugoslavia. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Over decades, this created a powerful basis for antagonism between the nationalities of the country and for the growth of reactionary nationalism.
Investment flows where the profits are greatest. The industrial northern nations developed rapidly after 1945, while the poorer southern republics stagnated. When the 1990s started, per capita production in Slovenia was three times as high as it was in poorer regions like Macedonia. By 1970 the per capita income of the average Slovene was over six times that of the average Kosovar. Kosovo lives in Third World conditions--comparable to Bolivia or Morocco--while in Slovenia the standard of living is closer to that of neighboring Austria."I'll stop there, for the moment.
I hope, Comrade Korey, that gives a sense of the way that "revisionism-in-power" means capitalism is in power.
One of the first things Krushchev did was open new ties with Tito -- AND start to study and applies the state capitalist enterprise models from yugoslavia. Which is why when the Maoists upheld the correct analysis of Yugoslavia in 1963, they were really making a pointed and public warning that capitalism was now being restored in the Soviet Union (under the Krushchevites). So, if we're going to get to where we need to go today, we don't need cold, state-capitalist ideologies like Titoism... we need revolutionary, scientific, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and all that it entails.
