BY GREG McCARTAN
Two Education for Socialists bulletins contain reading on the Yugoslav revolution for all who want to learn the truth about imperialism's' war drive against Yugoslavia today. Combined with books listed on page 4, the documents help refute the guise of a "peace-keeping" force and of neutrality under which NATO is mounting its aggressive policy.
Following a devastating bombing and invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 by the German army under Hitler, writes Robert Chester, "scattered remnants of the army in Serbia began to carry out guerrilla actions under General Mihajlovic," who identified with the ruling royal family ousted by the German occupation army.
"At the same time, under the leadership of the Communist Party, partisan guerrilla groups began to operate, gradually fusing into a centralized national command under Tito. The partisans had a mass base from the start. They maintained a policy of working with anyone who was willing to fight the Nazis, and they conducted an irreconcilable struggle," he writes. "This was a heroic chapter in Yugoslav history, in which the partisans fought and sacrificed against immense odds."
Chester's enthusiasm and identification with the mighty revolution that unfolded in Yugoslavia is combined with a scientific approach to how a workers and peasants government was established, capitalist property relations abolished, and formerly entrenched social relations torn asunder. He explains how the Yugoslavian Communist Party under Tito, a party whose leaders "were all trained in the school of Stalinism and patterned their political structure, as well as the country's economic structure, on that of the Soviet Union," could come to be at the leadership of a socialist revolution.
"We can conclude," Chester writes after detailing the evolution of the new government, "that the effective nationalization of industry, the elimination of foreign holdings, the progressive increase in state control of commerce and retail trade, plus the introduction of planning, establish that the point of qualitative change in taking Yugoslavia's economy out of the orbit of capitalism was the implementation and extension of the December 1946 nationalizations."
Despite being weakened due to the counter-revolutionary policies of the regime, these fundamental gains of the workers movement remain.
Chester's article is contained in the bulletin, Workers and Farmers Governments Since the Second World War. Other articles in the bulletin take up the Algerian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions. Chester gives the reader a good feel for the sharp class conflicts and revolutionary upheavals coming out of World War II, especially in Europe.
Workers states in Eastern Europe
A second Education for Socialists bulletin, Class,
Party, and State and the Eastern European Revolution,
records the evolution of a discussion among
revolutionaries on the Eastern European workers states
between 1946 and 1951.
The bulletin documents the factual, theoretical, and programmatic questions taken up by communists responding to the changed world situation coming out of World War II.
The possibility of the establishment of workers states without a communist leadership of the working class was never excluded by communists, but it was seen as something that could happen only, as Russian Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky wrote, " under the influence of completely exceptional circumstances (war, defeat, financial crash, mass revolutionary pressure, etc.)." In that case, Trotsky added, "the petty-bourgeois parties, including the Stalinists, may go further than they themselves wish along the road to a break with the bourgeoisie."
The bulletin contains an extensive article by Socialist Workers Party leader Joseph Hansen, "The Problem of Eastern Europe," written in 1949. The questions posed in the upheavals in Europe deal "with the touchstone of the proletarian revolution and the heart of Marxist politics - the class character of the state," Hansen writes. "When we deal with this question, the utmost scientific scrupulousness is required of us."
Hansen takes up arguments advanced by some in the international communist movement that shied away from recognizing Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe as workers states.
After a careful examination of the question, drawing on writings of communist leaders such as V.I. Lenin and Trotsky, Hansen concludes that in "a country where the rule of the bourgeoisie as a class has been broken and the principal sectors of the economy nationalized, we must place the state in the general category of `workers state' no matter how widely or monstrously it departs from our norms. This change cannot occur without a civil war although this civil war may also be a mutilation of the type, differing in important respects from our norms."
A resolution on the Yugoslav revolution, adopted by the Fourth International at the time, concludes the bulletin. The document puts as a central task defending "the conquests of the Yugoslav revolution against world imperialism and against the Soviet bureaucracy." This included "mobilization of the international revolutionary vanguard and of the proletarian masses of all countries for concrete actions in defense of the conquests of the Yugoslav proletarian revolution."