Yugoslav "Self-Administration"

Enver Hoxha

Yugoslav "Self-Administration"

4. The System of Self-Administration and the Denial of the Leading Role of the Party

The Yugoslav revisionists also maintain an anti-Marxist stance towards the leading role of the communist party in the construction of socialism. According to Kardelj's "theory" the party is unable to lead any economic or administrative activity; it can and should exercise its influence only through its educational activity among the workers, so that they totally understand the socialist system.

The denial of the role of the communist party in the construction of socialism and the reduction of this role to an "ideological" and "orientating" factor is in open opposition to Marxism-Leninism. The enemies of scientific socialism substantiate this thesis by "arguing" that leadership of the party is allegedly incompatible with the decisive role which should be played by the masses of producers. Those, according to their opinion, should exercise their political influence directly and not through the communist party, because this would bring about "bureaucratic despotism"!

Contrary to the anti-scientific theses of these enemies of communism, historical experience has shown that the undivided leading role of the revolutionary party of the working class in the struggle for socialism and communism is absolutely essential. The leadership through the party constitutes a question of vital importance for the fate of the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, as is well-known; it reflects a universal law of socialist revolution. Lenin says that

"... the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be realised except through the Communist Party." (V. I. Lenin, Collected Woks, vol. 32, p. 226, Alb. ed.)

The direct political influence of the working masses in socialist society is not in any way hampered by the communist party which represents the working class, whose interests do not run counter to the interests of the other working people. On the contrary, it is only under the leadership of the working class and its vanguard that the working masses participate broadly in governing the country and realizing their interests. In a genuine socialist country, such as Albania, the opinion of the working masses on important questions is directly sought. There are so many examples for this that they are countless, from the discussion and approval of the Constitution to the drafting of economic plans etc., etc. "Bureaucratic despotism" is a characteristic of the capitalist state and it can never be attributed to the leading role of the party under the system of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is sternly anti-bureaucratic by its nature and class character.

Continuing the explanation of the revisionist views on the role of the party, Kardelj writes that the League of "Communists", although it must fight for the key positions of state power to be in the hands of those subjective forces which are on the side of socialism and socialist self-administration still "... cannot be a political class party" (p. 119). So this is the sort of party the Yugoslav revisionists want! They do not want and in reality do not have a political party of the working class but a bourgeois organisation, a club which anybody may enter or leave when and how it pleases him, provided only he declares he is a "communist" without needing to be such. Of course this is absolutely normal for a party like the League of "Communists" of Yugoslavia, which has nothing communist about it.

There has never been a classless party or state, nor will there ever be. The state and the parties are class products. That is how the parties and states came into existence and this is how they will be right up to communism.

Although Kardelj assumes that the leading role of the League of "Communists" has been liquidated, for demagogic purposes he still does not forget to say that this League, "through its clear stance" (which in fact is far from being clear but on the contrary obscure and blurry) "has to do a great deal to find means to solve many questions about the ways and forms for the further development of the political system of socialist self-administration". If it is not state or the party which can bring happiness to the people, as the renegade Kardelj writes, then why does he seek that these prerogatives are given to the League of "Communists" of Yugoslavia? If the Yugoslav society of "self-administration" has no need for the leadership of a single political party, as it is claimed, why then should it need the leadership of the League of "Communists" of Yugoslavia?

Whereas Marx stands for a genuine party of the working class which must lead this class and make it conscious of its historic mission, the proletariat, according to Kardelj, can carry the country forward and realise its aspirations in a spontaneous manner, even without the leading role of the party. Kardelj says this in order to justify the theory of "self-administration", this theory which stands both for political pluralism, that is, for the unity in of all social forces regardless of their ideological and social differences in the so-called Socialist League of Working People and for a party which has no communist value at all but to which he nevertheless attaches the label of the leader in the whole anti-Marxist system of "self-administration".

The revisionist Kardelj refers to the bureaucracy of the Western parties of capital. Here, too, he has discovered nothing new because it is well known that bureaucracy is part of the nature of capitalism and characteristic of it. But he denounces bureaucracy in other parties not in order to criticize them, but to hide the bureaucratization and then the liquidation of the Yugoslav communist party and the stripping of all prerogatives that belonged to it. If the Titoites place the party at the tail-end of events, phenomena, or processes of political and social life and transform it into a party of the bourgeoisie, they call this de-bureaucratisation. And in order to cover up their betrayal, they only left the name the "League of Communists of Yugoslavia" to the party.

Whether or not a party is communist, whether or not it is a party of the working class, cannot be judged from the name it bears but especially from whom it has as its leadership and what activity it carries out. Lenin said

"If a party actually is a political workers' party also depends on who leads it and what the content of its actions and its political tactic is." (V.I. Lenin, Collected Woks, vol. 31, p. 285, Alb. ed.)

And indeed the League of "Communists" of Yugoslavia did not only not escape bureaucracy but in reality it does not exist as a party of Yugoslav communists for a long time. Its swelling through numerous instruments, through a high number of bureaucratic functionaries and party officials, just like in the revisionist parties of the West or the social democratic parties, is one of the elements which cause that the League is not only no longer vanguard of the working class but even a party opposed to this class.

The rule of the proletariat and the vanguard party of this class as leader of the state and the society does not exist in Yugoslavia. According to Kardelj the League of "Communists" of Yugoslavia is in no way entitled to the political leadership in the system, because state power is "...realised through the system of delegates, while the League of Communists, as component of the self-governing system, is one of the most important elements of social influence in shaping the consciousness of the self-governing and the organs of the delegates" (p. 73). I think this needs not much explanations. What the renegade writes is enough to see for oneself that in Yugoslavia the dictatorship of the proletariat as the political rule of the working class and as state leadership of society does not exist. And since this dictatorship does not exist there, there can also be no talk about the existence of the party of the working class but only of the party of the bourgeoisie.

Kardelj claims that the "one-party system" in a socialist country is a specific transformation of the bourgeois political system and the role of a party (here he refers to the Bolshevik Party) is the same "multi-party system" like in bourgeois political pluralism, with a "slight" difference, namely that in a one-party system only the leaders of this party hold all political power, while in a multi-party system the leadership changes. This imposter puts the bourgeois parties and the Bolshevik Party, which was founded by the Russian revolutionaries with Lenin heading them, on the same level. For him there is not the slightest difference between the leadership of the state and the society by the genuine party of communists and the rule of the bourgeoisie through the multi-party system. This proves once again that the Titoites, as well as the bourgeoisie, treat the political parties and the state as institutions which allegedly stand above the classes.

If it is the case that the working class is opposed to the bourgeoisie in a fight to life and death and in order to defend their antagonistic interests and to rule in society both these classes are organised in a political party, then this is not supposed to mean that the party of the working class, the Marxist-Leninist party, does not differ from the bourgeois party. On the contrary. When the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was transformed into a revisionist party, it became in no way a party standing above the classes but it it became a tool of the bourgeoisie, it only lost its proletarian class character but not its class character in general, because it was transformed into a party of the new bourgeois class. The difference between a communist party and a bourgeois party in the way of leading the state is everything else than "slight", it is very big, deep, in principle and of class nature and it cannot be reduced to the "rotation" of its leaders who hold political power, like this renegade claims.

With this "theorising" about the "slight difference" between the bourgeois system and the socialist system and between the bourgeois party and the Marxist-Leninist Party the Yugoslav revisionists want to say that their race towards capitalism must not be seen as anything special. It is totally clear that the Yugoslav revisionists cannot take any other position in theory than the one they took in practice.

With intent to attack the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union at the times of Lenin and Stalin, Kardelj drivels about "the weak points of the one-party system": "In this system mainly the tendency of the party leadership to form a personal union with the executive state apparatus is brought to surface and this way the latter becomes a tool of technocratic-bureaucratic tendencies in society" (p.64).

In order to "escape" this "technocratic bureaucracy" and this tendency of a "personal union of the party leadership with the executive state apparatus of socialism", which they arbitrarily attribute to the Bolsheviks, the Messieurs Yugoslav revisionists have created their own system, which is nothing else but a dictatorship of the Titoite clique. In the so-called assemblies of the self-governing communities and their executive organs "... currently the bureaucratic-centrist tendencies appear very strongly" (p.232), as the author of the book admits. In Yugoslavia the executive power is manipulated by Tito and his clique. In spite of all assurances that they do not claim any power, the President of the Presidium of the League of "Communists" of Yugoslavia is the President of the Yugoslav state for life and all functionaries in the key positions of state power, the army, the economy, the foreign policy, the culture, the social organisations et al. Hold important functions on the League of "Communists" of Yugoslavia. Everything boils down to the Yugoslav revisionists, while attacking the Marxist-Leninist teachings about the leadership of the proletarian party in a socialist society, are in practice keen to hold all power in their hands. The so-called Presidency of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was neither created to guarantee the cooperative leadership of the state, nor to fight the bureaucracy which it relies on, nor to defend the Yugoslav state from ruling powers outside itself, as it could be heard sometimes, but as desperate attempt to secure the leadership of Titoism after Tito's death. This shows that the Yugoslav regime not only in content but also in form is nothing else but a capitalist force which suppresses the people and aims at hiding this behind treacherous phrases.

Kardelj is not able to dispose this black period in the history of Yugoslavia which was fought out on the backs of the peoples of this country; the injustices, the violence and the boundless terror which was a result of the betrayal of the leadership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the construction of the Titoite dictatorship. The Titoite spokesman Kardelj tries to penetrate the darkness with some phrases to get the peoples of Yugoslavia to don't complain about their sufferings, because "our socialist revolution in its first phase, too, constituted in a certain way the one-party system of revolutionary democracy, albeit never in its 'classical' Stalinist form." (p. 64-65). This shameless renegade is not at all in the position to harm the "classical Stalinist form", which has been such a democratic and socialist form that the Tito-Kardelj-Rankovic regime can not even dream about getting close to it but that it is a shame to actually draw a comparison here. The outrageous crimes in Yugoslavia were not committed during the period of friendship with Stalin and with the Soviet union during his life time but deliberately after the break of this friendship and at the time when Yugoslavia openly took the road of "self-administration".

According to Kardelj's theory the connection of the executive organs of the League of "Communists" of Yugoslavia with the state executive organs in personal unity has been abolished "completely" and "radically" at present because the League of "Communists" of Yugoslavia has no prerogatives for the position of the leading ideological and political power in society.

In which way and what for is this kind of League then supposed to influence the masses, if it has no prerogative for the leadership? For nothing. In a moment of desperation Tito admitted that "the League of Communists of Yugoslavia has become an unformed apolitically organisation.". But Kardelj corrects his master, in order to avoid that the Titoites completely lose their facade, and writes that allegedly "... the League of Communists of Yugoslavia has become one of the mighty pillars of democracy of the new type -- the democracy of pluralism of self-governing interests." (p. 65)

If Yugoslav "self-administration" divested the League of "Communists" of Yugoslavia from political leadership, it is clear that this "self-administration" also divested the working class from its political power because the working class is only able to achieve its prerogatives through the Communist Party. If the vanguard of the class is stripped of its prerogatives then it is an absurdity to claim that the class exercises its due rights. One can imagine under those circumstances how the proletariat and the other working people are able to "self-govern" in this kind of democracy "of a new type"! Concretely Kardelj says about this question: "The League of Communists of Yugoslavia does not rule through political monopoly but is an expression of a specific but nevertheless very important form of the interests of the working class in social and historical regards and thus of the interest of all working people and of society, too -- in the system of self-government and of the power of the working class and the working masses, in a system, which is based on democratic pluralism of the interests of the self-governing subjects." (p.65-66)

This overblown and confused phraseology illustrate noting else but the undeniable fact that the Party in Yugoslavia is at the tail-end, that it only exists on paper. Although Kardelj formally represents the position of strengthening the role of the party, just as he understands this role, he cannot avoid to admit: "... the League of Communists of Yugoslavia is politically and creative... in the whole system of democratic self-government and in the planning of the policies and practice of the other social and political organisations not present enough..." (p. 263-264) Where is this League present then, if not there, where it would have to be, if in Yugoslvia -- as the Yugoslav news agency TANJUG lately reported -- tow third of all villages lack a basic organisation of the "League of Communists". The embarrassing answer to this question is not given by Kardelj but his correct analysis of the practical actions of the League confirms without any doubt that it is nowhere present as "Party of Communists", while it can be present everywhere as party of the new Yugoslav bourgeoisie and of Tito's fascist dictatorship.

In this Yugoslav "self-administrative socialism", which Kardelj made his business to deal with theoretically, the League of "Communists" of Yugoslavia takes a specific position. This specific position, which can be found everywhere in his his book, can be interpreted as you like, that is, as specific position in the education of the working class, as specific position in the relationship towards the proletariat, as specific position in the so-called system of delegates which the League does not participate in and which must not be lead by the League for fear of "political monopoly" and other specifics. This party with these endless specific positions is entitled to have an own delegation through which they work together with the other "self-administrated" delegations at the assemblies of the so-called Socialist Alliance of Working People of Yugoslavia. This illustrates that the League of "Communists" of Yugoslavia has no independent political power and that it exercises the function of the agency of Yugoslav anarchist federalism or a long time. It exists in order to satisfy the foreign capital, which stroke roots in Yugoslavia, in order to ensure that "self-administration" will not touch the system of private property and that no party, howsoever, will change the course of this anarcho-syndicalist state.

According to E. Kardelj the role of the individual is everything in society while the working class and its party are nothing. The vanguard of the working class, he claims, is not the Marxist-Leninist party but this vanguard consists of the "self-governing communities". This is an abstract organisation which was invented to pretend something big without really holding any life. This revisionist does not imagine the working class as the leading class of society but mingles it with all working people. The whole Yugoslav people, he says, could be seen as vanguard, in which, of course, man is put ahead of this "vanguard", man who "freely" (in the anarchist sense) expresses his goals (in this anarchist society) and realises them. From these explanations one can clearly see that the working class in Yugoslavia does not and has not acted commonly for a long time, that it has lost its leading role in Yugoslav society. Since the party and thus the power has been taken from the hands of the Yugoslav working class, it is no more a class in power, it rather got into the position of a class which is exploited by the new bourgeoisie, which rules by its manipulated state power over the working masses.

To escape the accusation that the dismissive stand towards the leading role of the party of the working class betrays the interests of this class, the notorious traitor quoted the following from the "Communist Manifesto" by Marx and Engels out of context: "The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement." By these quotes Kardelj wants to create the impression that Marx and Engels held the opinion that the communists need no own party as long as it is no party which differs from the other worker parties with regard to characteristics, interests and principles. What a renegade! Without a trace of diligence he regards the proletariat -- through the glasses of the social democratic anti-Marxist -- as an amorphous mass. He allegedly fights for general interests but has no principles, no class and no revolutionary orientation and no programme for struggle to gain his rights!

In the second chapter of the work of scientific communism, in the "Manifest of the Communist Party" Marx and Engels brilliantly defined the historic mission of the communist party as an inseparable component of the working class, as its vanguard, etc., etc. but they have never promoted the opinion that the communists do not have to have an own party. On the contrary, Marx and Engels precisely wrote the Communist Manifesto, which was regarded as the first scientific programmatic document of communism, so that the communists have their own party.