WAS THE SOCIALIST FEDERATIVE REPUBLIC OF YUGOSLAVIA (SFRY) A WORKERS’ OR BUREAUCRATIC STATE?

Dimitar Anakiev

WAS THE SOCIALIST FEDERATIVE REPUBLIC OF YUGOSLAVIA (SFRY) A WORKERS’ OR BUREAUCRATIC STATE?

On the eve of the Second World War interesting debates about socialism were held. After Stalin had driven the October Revolution to the deadlock, extensivere-questionings of the Marxist practice were launched. Theories came in showers regarding the nature of the USSR. The three main theses were the following:

1. STALINISM=SOCIALISM. This thesis otherwise equally pleaded for by both imperialists and Stalinists argues that Stalinism is a natural continuation of Leninism and that Stalin’s USSR stands exactly for the social order which is generated from the proletarian revolution.
   
2. STALINISM = DEFORMATION OF SOCIALISM. This is Leon Trotsky's thesis which insists upon the fact that the USSR is still a workers' state though deformed by Stalin's usurpation of power. Trotsky claimed that Stalinist bureaucracy is not a class by itself since it does not possess means of production but it is only the caste that usurps the government.
   
3. SOCIALISM = STATE CAPITALISM. This is the thesis propounded by an Italian shoe salesman, Bruno Rizzi, who used it to oppose Trotsky. In its essence, it claims that bureaucracy is a new class and that socialism is nothing else but state capitalism, that is, the form of capitalism in which profit does not belong to a capitalist individual but to a collective of bureaucrats who manage it alienatedly from the working class, i. e., the revolution had never happened at all. The main idea of this supposition is to deny revolution as such; accordingly, October is only a coup d’état in which one group of power holders replaced another while the worker was not liberated at all; profit is again alienated from labor.

The Revolution in Yugoslavia came out victorious with 28 years of delay in comparison to the Soviet one which explains why more extensive thinking in the above-mentioned ways about the SFRY did not take place. Among our students involved in 1968 protests the dominant ideas were those of Bruno Rizzi. The major banner of the mutinous students was “Red bourgeoisie” which means that the students experienced Tito’s bureaucracy as a class(red bourgeoisie). We just have to remember Stevo Žigon reciting Robespierre speech on the “Marquis of the Revolution.” In Berlin the awarded film “Early Works” by Želimir Žilnik explicitly stated that the revolution is impossible. Even today some of our young Marxists speak about self-management as a project of state capitalism. How is it possible that the Yugoslav intellectuals and artists, all and sundry, accepted the thesis of the above-mentionedshoe salesman without giving any serious thought to the views of the Russian revolutionary who, after all, carried out the Revolution, was victorious at the battlefield fighting against the counter-revolutionary White Guard and its helpers and then opposed, wholeheartedly, Stalin’s terror?

All of us who used to live in the SFRY can give firm first-hand testimony that Bruno Rizzi’s thesis is not correct. Namely, the profit of the socialist society was structurally accessible through the right to labor, the right to education andother rights including the policy of peace. Deformations were, naturally, present, but it is incorrect to claim that the working class was estranged from profit. Regarding the nature of ownership over the means of production Yugoslavia was, just like the USSR, a workers' and not a bureaucratic State.

In Jelšane, September, 9, 2015