Yugoslavia: will the party give up power?

Press, 6 December 1979, Page 20

Yugoslavia: will the party give up power?

By

MARK FRANKLAND

in Belgrade

“The Yugoslav Communist Party,” the Central Committee official said enthusiastically, “is the only political organisation in the world that is digging its own grave.” The idea that the Yugoslav I party should not play the boss like the other Communist parties in Eastern Europe, and that its role will diminish as society develops, is an important part of the Yugoslav theory of Communism. It is treated, it must be said, with considerable scepticism both by some Yugoslavs and foreign experts. For one thing the party, or the League of Yugoslav Communist’s as it is properly called, has not been reluctant to use and declare its power at moments of crisis. Thus Mr Stane Dolanc. a member of the Central Committee Presidium, said in 1972: “It must be quite clear to us that we Communists are in power, for, if we are not, then this would mean that someone else is, and this is not so, nor will it ever be.” At a more humdrum level everyone has stories about Communists throwing their weight around. Recently a Yugoslav magazine described how a factory elected a woman as its new managing director. All the Yugoslav system's rules of selfmanaging democracy were observed. The only trouble was that the woman was not a member of the League of Communists. The higher authorities delayed confirming her appointment. Then they asked her to join the league. The woman refused, saying she

was either fit to do the job or not: joining the party would not change that one way or the other. She did not get" the job. But the situation is more complicated than suggested by Mr Dolanc’s statement (made after a nationalities’ crisis that had threatened the unit of the Yugoslav federation) or the story of the woman director. It is complicated because the Yugoslav Communists are trying to reconcile two things that are very difficult to reconcile. The first is the claim that the Communists — the “most responsible, most progressive and most conscious section of the working-class,” to quote Mr Dolanc again — have the right to leadership. The second is the democratic ideals of the Yugoslav system of workers’ selfmanagement, which has its roots in Marx’s belief that the State would fade away and, in the words of Engels, that “man. at last the master of his own form of social organisation, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master — free.” A long conversation with the party secretary of a commune in the Croatian capital Zagreb (the commune is the basic unit of local government) convinced me that there are people in the League of Communists who really do want to pursue the democratic ideal. The secretary, a former journalist in his thirties, insisted that Communists were beginning to operate in a different way because the

latest changes in the selfmanagement system demanded it. In the old days, he said, it was often the Communists who really decided a factory’s plans, what wages should be paid and sb on even though on paper this was the right of the workers’ council. Now the party had to operate within the selfmanagement system, not as a force outside it. “Many party members,” he said, “cannot understand this new situation and there is resistance because they do not want to lose power.” He gave, as an example of the new order, changes in the Croatian republic’s railways, Until recently there was a party committee for the railways. It was closely linked with the administration of the railways and the senior party bodies of the republic, and it was, in effect, the boss of the railways. This had now changed. The party committee had been abolished, and instead the party has to work through the Basic Organisations of Associated Labour into which the railway system, like every other Yugoslav enterprise, is divided (a Basic Organisation or 8.0.A.L. may have as many as 300 workers). How is the party going to work through the Basic Organisations? First, there must be party organisations in each one. What Communists should not do, the secretary said, is to try to dictate to the workers in the 8.0.A.L.5.

This had happened recently in a Zagreb enterprise that was choosing a new managing director. The party organisations in two of the 8.0.A.L.s had recommended that a certain candidate be chosen. Unfortunately each had chosen a different one. The enterprise’s workers’ council (its parliament, so to speak) was thus left to choose between two Communist candidates and was unable to make up its mind. What should have hapoened. he said, was that the' partv organisations should have just given their opinions on all the candidates for the job without pushing their own choice. And if the workers’ council then elected someone the partv didn’t thing much of? “That would be no tragedy and it would be legal. But the party organisations would then have to reexamine their own judgments to see . if they had been mistaken.” For this man the aim was to make the League of Communists “not a party in power, but an equal part of the Yugoslav system, although the most responsible one.” That phrase “the most resnonsible one” is, of course, the safety clause. Yugoslav Communists remind one of a boy on a bicycle who lets go of the handlebars and shouts, “Look Ma, no hands!” But his hands go back as soon as he starts to wobble. Yugoslav Communists would like not to have to be the decision-makers. Over the last 30 years they have revolutionised Communist

practice by development of the potentially very democratic system of government, based on the place of work. However, in times of diffi-

culty and crisis, the Yugoslav Communists seem still to believe they have the right to make a fast grab for the handlebars. —O.F.N.S., Copyright.