Titoism

TITOISM WAS A NATIONALISTIC ideology and practice of communism in Yugoslavia during the regime of Josip Broz Tito, officially knows as Marshal Tito, the president of Yugoslavia from the end of World War II until his death in 1980. This ideology took shape after Tito's quarrel with the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia's subsequent expulsion from the Cominform, the Communist Information Bureau, an information agency organized in 1947 and dissolved in 1956, consisting of the communist parties of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. Titoism was developed during the period of “Splendid Isolation” that lasted from the break with the Soviet Union until Nikita Khrushchev's reparatory visit to Belgrade, the Yugoslavian capital, in 1955. The Titoist paradigm was called “social democracy” and came about as a result of the Yugoslav communists' inability to sustain Stalinist Marxism after the dispute began.

The reforms of Titoism came out of practical considerations: As a result of the intensification of the bureaucracy, the experiments in collectivization, the reign of the secret police, and other classically Stalinist measures, the morale of the general population was low and weakened national defense efforts. In order to improve the living conditions in the country as well as to stabilize political and economic relationships with the West, the Yugoslav communists divested themselves of the [Page 454]rigid form of Stalinist communism, which they had been following as a blueprint before the crisis. As a result, Tito decentralized the economy, turning over economic controls from the state apparatus to the republics, limited the power of the secret police, and permitted a limited relationship with the West. Ideologically, these reforms signaled a break with the orthodox Marxist-Leninist doctrine, which mapped out the course of the communist revolution according to the scientific principles of dialectical materialism within history.

The Titoist doctrine went so far as to agree that small, poor countries have little or no chance to establish a viable capitalist system, sustained by the basic owner-worker relationships of capitalism, so it is impossible for such a society to progress to socialism by orthodox Marxist methods, that is, through a collapse of capitalism brought about by its internal contradictions, which, in turn, would serve as a basis for the new society. Thus, Titoism accepted that a Leninist-style revolution was the only way for a poor country to bypass the capitalist stage described by Marx in his evolutionary model of history. However, Titoism rejected the scientific rigidity of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine, claiming instead that the project of the revolution had to be practically adapted to individual national environments in order to avoid degeneration into Stalinism and state capitalism.

Titoism implied that, ideologically, a large difference between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia was the historical role of the individual in both societies; the Soviet Marxist system that combined Marxism with the Russian tradition of placing the collective over the individual self was not an acceptable model to emulate for Yugoslavia, where historically the idea of an individual was a more important one. As a result of these differences Titoism was less ideologically militant than the other Soviet protégé ideologies, and thus has been generally perceived by historians as an authoritarian, rather than a totalitarian regime.

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