Partisan Ruptures

Self-Management, Market Reform and the Spectre of Socialist Yugoslavia

Gal Kirn, Borut Praper

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780745338941
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786805362
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Yugoslavia's twentieth-century bore witness to civil war, sharp ideological struggles and a series of 'partisan ruptures'; revolutionary events that changed the face of Yugoslavian society, politics and culture, which were felt on a global level. This book is a comprehensive historical and political analysis of the three major ruptures; the People's Liberation Struggle during World War Two, the self-management model and the Non-Aligned Movement. In order to understand what provoked and what came out of these revolutionary ruptures, Gal Kirn examines the implications of communism and socialism's productive relationship, the Yugoslavian 'experiment' of market socialism that marked the political and economic shift towards 'post-socialism' already in the 1960s, which crystallised new class coalitions that will later on - together with austerity politics - lead the way towards des-integration of Yugoslavia. Filling a much-needed gap in English language literature, this book's interrogation of the Yugoslav socialist experiment offers insights for left projects and democratic socialist discussions today, as well as historians of Yugoslavia and revolutionary movements.

1
On Partisan Rupture as a Revolutionary Process: Tito Versus Schmitt

Every real revolution is actually the most direct form of self-management. Our revolution was just such a revolution.

Edvard Kardelj, Reminiscences, 1977

This chapter is a theoretical intervention, which reads Yugoslavia as a revolutionary project that consisted of three partisan ruptures. The key thesis focuses on the beginnings of the new Yugoslavia that emerged from World War II. New Yugoslavia cannot be regarded either as a continuation of the old Yugoslavia nor as a representative of the Eastern Bloc, whose liberation and socialist tradition were ‘bestowed’ upon it by the Soviet Union and in some cases, local partisan resistance formations. In Yugoslavia, the People’s Liberation Struggle (the PLS) was not only a resistance movement against the fascist occupation and local collaboration, but rather the beginning of something radically new, bringing about a resolute rupture with the old order of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In the ‘impossible circumstances’ that were present in 1941, when any kind of resistance appeared futile and the ‘enemy’ that occupied Europe seemed invincible, nobody, it seemed, could even conceive the organisation of a resistance on the symbolical, military, or political level.

According to the philosophical–political thesis, the first partisan rupture of the PLS did not conclude with the end of the war. Instead it was a rupture that had ‘long-term consequences’¹ for the way of thinking as well as for the political organisation. It continued, with somewhat different means, as the rupture with Stalin (1948), which resulted in the workers’ self-management and in the rupture with the Stalinist road to socialism. Furthermore, it was also followed by the rupture with the bloc division and the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement, which catapulted Yugoslavia from total isolation onto the global scene. The PLS rupture thus far overreached the Yugoslav context, contributing significantly to the social revolutions of the working classes and the anti-imperialist struggles of the second half of the twentieth century. To a certain degree, Yugoslavia can be perceived as a successful case of the anti-imperialist as well as anti-fascist struggle. Yugoslavia represented the victorious part of the forgotten underground history of the (South) European periphery that started with the revolution in Spain (1936–49), continued in Yugoslavia (1941–45), and ended with the defeat of the partisans in Greece (1941–49). Minehan (2006) wrote a fascinating study about this sequence, which represents the struggles against fascism and the civil wars between 1936 and 1949. We should add that this sequence is overdetermined by the social revolution that was taking place in these peripheral conjunctures. In my understanding, this was the last major revolutionary sequence in Europe in the twentieth century, characterised by the intervention of the local ruling class and the global superpowers that carried out counter-revolutionary politics.

The philosophical-political intervention of this chapter departs from the recent political-philosophical debates, through what I here term ‘partisan ruptures’ with the help of Althusser’s concept of ‘rupture’. Althusser is, in the history of Marxism, not deemed a theoretician who contributes a great deal to the thought of revolution. Indeed, he became much more famous for writing about ideology and state apparatuses (structure), for his critique of humanism, and for his structuralist understanding of capital. There are evidently very conjunctural and political texts that deal with Lenin and the October Revolution (conjuncture). Althusser put forwards a concept of ‘overdetermination’ that went beyond a theory of ‘the weakest link’ and provided a more appropriate explanation of the revolutionary situation in October. He criticised the more vulgar Marxist (and the Second International) thesis, based on the strict economic determinism that predicted the following historical development: revolution would first take place in the industrialised centres of the West. Althusser pointed out how this line of argumentation remained predominantly teleological. Although he was not specifically interested in the studies concerning the revolutionary dynamics of socialist transitions or the Yugoslav partisan revolution in particular, I argue that his most productive theses on rupture can be useful for reconsidering the radicality of the partisan rupture in the Yugoslav context, which spread beyond World War II, as we will see in the chapters yet to come.

Thoughts on Rupture: Althusser and Machiavelli

Besides reconsidering the October Revolution through the prism of ‘overdetermination’, we should mention another more radical shift in Althusser’s political thought, based on the concept of ‘rupture’ which took place already in the early 1970s. Instead of turning to the Marxist classics, Althusser returned to the Florentine thinker Machiavelli, who helped him point out one of the innermost ‘limits’ of Marx: the theory of the politics of ‘rupture’ and ‘state’ from the point of view of reproduction.² Instead of looking towards Marx or Lenin as the key theoreticians of the modern concept of revolution, Althusser turned to Machiavelli, who had worked and written in the extreme circumstances of political division and wild macro conflicts between the pontificate, France, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, and the city-states on the one hand, and class conflicts between popolo grosso and popolo minuto on the other hand. These extreme circumstances and impossible conditions for the emergence of anything new were of key importance for Machiavelli’s theoretical invention as well as for answering the question of transcending the existing coordinates and starting to think and act politically without resorting to the classic ‘guidance’ to the ruler or to an apology of the theological doctrine of ‘divine providence’. According to Althusser, Machiavelli was the one who stumbled upon something that seemed practically and – until Machiavelli – even theoretically impossible: the establishment of Italy as an entirely new political entity.³ The novelty or the beginning of the new politics was Machiavelli’s central problem, by far transcending the clichéd syntagm of ‘the end justifying the means’ and the realist definition of politics as a residue of the Machiavellian legacy. In contrast, Althusser correctly demonstrated that the politics of a new beginning, of a rupture that transcends the coordinates of the existing – which in turn, even if merely provisionally, suspends the objective circumstances of the possible – is immanent to the realistic thought. Machiavelli undermined the existing traditions and performed a double rupture: one regarding the theorisation of the concrete field of politics, and the other within the social formation – a cut that leads us beyond the concrete situation. For Althusser, Machiavelli was a thinker of the ‘materialism of the encounter’,

[…] thought by way of politics, and which, as such, does not take anything for granted. It is in the political void that the encounter must come about, and that national unity must ‘take hold’. But this political void is first a philosophical void … No Cause that precedes its effects is to be found in it, no Principle of morality or theology. (Althusser 2006: 113).

To think of a political void in impossible circumstances is not merely an exercise in thinking or a utopic thought experiment.⁴ Through Machiavelli, Althusser extracted the main essence of the thought of a void,⁵ which emerges and speaks from the position of the ‘non-accomplished fact’ rather than the already accomplished fact. This non-accomplished fact concerns the new position of politics and revolutionary temporality, thus significantly distinguishing Machiavelli’s conception from the prevailing traditions of theology in that period. The theology of temporality of that time was rooted in the Aristotelian universe and the doctrine of ‘divine providence’, where the position of politics was strongly intertwined with religion. Another aspect of the prevailing ‘thought’ in politics during that era was embodied in a type of moral humanism, performed by Renaissance thinkers, particularly through the genre of ‘advising the prince’, which interlaced the position of politics with morality. Both prevailing traditions – theology as well as moral philosophy – always assigned the position of the ‘accomplished fact’ that had been given in advance to the origin and goal of power, thus attesting to the inevitability of the ‘end’ of development. In order to consider politics in this way, we do not need to think politically, but merely take a wide and final turn at the bastion of religion and morality. Althusser’s Machiavelli speaks about a different kind of politics that he placed at the beginning, without any original foundations that could be deduced from the moral norms or divine providence. According to Althusser, this new politics is defined as a revolutionary encounter, ‘aleatory in its effects, in that nothing in the elements of the encounter prefigures, before the actual encounter’ (2006: 193). Thus, with regard to the politics of rupture, we speak about self-reference or the substantiation of the revolutionary encounter in itself, which results in an elementary equation politics = politics.⁶ This tautological formula deals with politics in its interiority, from within and through its rupture, which pierces the presupposed morality, religion, and even the historically objective imperatives. The politics of rupture is contingent, which means that it has its own temporal modality and it does not follow any other imperatives, not even the economic one. One needs to act as if the rupture has already occurred, which indicates a specific revolutionary temporality (a concrete example of this can be seen in the next chapter, see also Žižek 2008: 460). Therefore, the politics of rupture is impossible to foresee or predict merely on the basis of the existing social circumstances or the clichéd apocalyptic prophecies: the worse the situation, the better for the revolution.⁷ As I intend to demonstrate, this does not mean that the social in itself is structured as a contingency, which would reflect in a somewhat weaker version of the chaos theory. Instead, the focus will be on the point and the mechanisms that drive the contingent rupture in the moment when it becomes necessary, i.e. when it produces material consequences.

The Althusserian consideration of novelty in politics does not remain at the level of utopia that supports politics as an exercise in thought and normativisation of the Event. Instead, it measures the materiality of rupture, which influences the broader objective social circumstances. Machiavelli himself transcended purely ‘utopian ideas’ (Habermas 1973) and rather backed a new political figure – Cesare Borgia – in impossible circumstances. With his political ingenuity, Machiavelli was the first to suggest the political project of a unified Italy that stood against internal divisions and external imperial interests. Machiavelli’s solitude in thought and politics does not mean that he remained merely on the theoretical level, lonely and misunderstood in his time. He drew an important lesson for politics from this solitude of thought: the key problems of politics are revealed and settled within the political practice itself – or, in other words, they cannot be solved in the kingdom of ideas.⁸ Every revolutionary politics advances theoretically as well as in practice – through political work, which is the only way to ensure that even the most meticulous plans and ideas about the new community do not remain merely abstract, without any effects.⁹ This thesis is characteristic of Althusser already in his early period, when he considered politics (and theory itself) beyond the strict division into political theory and political practice.¹⁰

The politics of rupture primarily addresses self-foundation – namely, the beginning of something new, supported by nothing but the rupture itself. Althusser claimed that the most important matters come after the rupture: a genuine revolutionary encounter has long-term consequences.¹¹ Instead of a dichotomy between political organisation and political theory, the consideration of the consequences of rupture aims to place theoretical inventions in specific historical spaces within the political practice itself – and vice versa when establishing how the mere theorisation of the new is materially connected with political struggles. Revolutionary theory and practice can never exist without each other, and they can also not be understood in a purely instrumental-linear manner: we need an idea that can be implemented in practice; or, conversely, we can wait for a revolution and then reflect upon it. These positions can be used as caricatures of the anti-intellectual and aristocrat philosophers’ standpoints but will not be able to provide us with the complex relationship between theoretical and political practice. The politics of rupture follows the path of theoretical and political struggles, as it is impossible to speak of revolutionary politics otherwise. The subsequent analysis will focus primarily on the partisan rupture, which affected, with varying intensity, the political, ideological, and economic formations of the later socialist transition. This thesis tries to demythologise the ‘purity’ of the PLS, which appeals to the revolutionary immaculacy, as it is only interested in the impact that the PLS had on the emerging political forms.

In the current theoretical discussions that focus on the revolutionary rupture and politics of emancipation, various theoreticians no longer refer to the concept of revolution or the possibility of future socialism. Quite the opposite: many new radical theoreticians underline the ‘ultimate’ exhaustion and inoperability of these concepts. They prefer discussing the more tangible hegemonic populist struggles on the one hand and ‘pure politics’/‘the idea of communism’ on the other hand.¹² Despite the important contributions of the radical theories of politics, a part of these theories is sworn to Laclau and Mouffe’s project of ‘radical democracy’ that strives for an increasingly open and democratic society through the ‘chain of equivalence’ and the accumulation of various struggles that result in the diverse co-existence of all positions and groups; on the other hand Badiou’s paradigm of the Event refers to a clean cut that completely severs the historical time.

Just like Althusser’s rupture, Badiou’s ‘event’ also focuses on the fundamental overthrow¹³ that changes the world; an event that is by definition always infrequent and short-term. If Althusser might have agreed with Badiou’s criticism of the teleology of time and the return to communism, he would definitely not agree with him regarding the non-thought of the transition into communism: the blind spot of socialism. Within the multitude of Marxist theories, significant contradictions occur regarding the pivotal questions. On the one hand we witness teleological conceptions of the end of history; while, on the other hand, messianic conceptions of revolutionary time frequently become popular. The latter are more suggestive of the theory of apocal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction: Beyond the Spectrum of Partisan and Socialist Yugoslavia
• 1. On Partisan Rupture as a Revolutionary Process: Tito Versus Schmitt
• 2. A Brief Outline of the End of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the Partisan Beginnings of World War II
• 3. Partisan Rupture I: The People’s Liberation Struggle
• 4. Split with Stalin: A New Road to Socialism?
• 5. Partisan Rupture II: The Road to the Non-Aligned Movement
• 6. Partisan Rupture III: Yugoslav Road to Self-Management Socialism
• 7. A Short Introduction to the Recent Studies of Socialist Yugoslavia
• 8. The Main Characteristics of Early Yugoslav Socialism
• 9. The 1965 Market Reform: From Decentralised Planning to the Logic of Capital
• 10. Separation I: Split within Companies, or Class Struggles from Below
• 11. Separation II: Competition between Companies and Financialisation, or Class Struggles from Above
• 12. Socialist Reproduction and Self-Management Ideology in Yugoslavia in 1968 and Beyond
• 13. The Contradictory Movement of Socialist Civil Society in Slovenia during the 1980s: The Beginning of the End of Yugoslavia
• Conclusion: After the 1991 Yugoslav Deluge, the Rise of the New Europe
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index