PAGE 10 VOL. 1, NO. 1 ZEITGEIST "Communism in one country” (5). This idea is based on the fact that every other major power at the time was opposed to the USSR, which was true when Stalin came into power. Through this belief, Stalin wanted to set up satellite states that would serve as buffers against the capitalist world, rather than grow organic communist movements. Tito, like many other leading socialist figures at the time, had many core criticisms of Stalin and his regime. One of these main criticisms was directed at “communism in one country.” Tito believed in growing organic communist revolutions like Lenin, so this policy brought him to such lengths as to call the Stalinist USSR imperialistic, claiming, “the trade of the Soviet Union With the socialist countries is carried on a purely capitalist basis. They sell as high as possible and buy as cheaply as they can, trying to get as much as possible from socialist countries under the pretext of strengthening the international working class movement by helping the first country of socialism”(7). The USSR, in Tito’s eyes, had essentially set up colonies across Eastern Europe, demanding complete control and using them only for ulterior motives. In the Marxian sense, Stalin’s policies would be very capitalist. The Yugoslavian leader despised the massive bureaucracy in Stalin’s government and believed that it betrayed the most basic socialist principles. Stalin had set up an enormous network of insiders and bureaucrats to serve his every need. Every decision came from the top down and was centralized, directly going against the concept of the disintegration of the state. Tito writes, “What about the withering away of the state in the Soviet Union? Are there any tendencies in that country to turn over the state functions, either economic or political, to the lower organs? Are there any signs of decentralization? So far there have been none”(6). In Marx’s theory, this kind of extremely centralized state will inevitably become a tool of the bourgeoisie, and in Tito’s eyes, and in the eyes of many socialists today, the Stalinist USSR was a bourgeois state. Tito brought his own alternative forward instead. The brand of socialism that Yugoslavia enacted honed in on a specific aspect of Marxism and broadened it widely. Tito’s vision for socialism centered around the idea of a worker-controlled economy. This form of organizing socialism is today known as market socialism. In essence, the workers are given full control of their workplaces, most commonly factories, rather than the state owning all property. Tito claims, “Our state also has a general fund for capital accumulation, and each factory is obligated to give a part of its accumulation fund to the state accumulation fund in relation to its productivity. This is about all that the factories are to contribute to the general industrial development. After all these deductions are made, the rest goes to the workers”(7). Tito had it all planned out, even down to how taxes would work in this system. His main goals were to give all profits to the workers that produce the products, and go down a path that would lead to the disintegration of the state. He Josip Tito, Yugoslovian leader
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