Authority is an historical category whose necessity is conditioned by the very nature of social organization and social life. But in so far as social organizations are not eternal, neither are forms of authority relations. In this light, subordination to authority has been reasonable precisely to the extent that the structure of authority has left room for the development of human freedom, happiness, and dignity. And vice-versa: as soon as the authority relation has become void of this human content, subordination becomes senseless, since mere heteronomy as a basis for authoritarian power has no human support and therefore deserves to be wiped from the face of the earth. The sooner the better.

—Ljubomir Tadic, “Authority and Authoritarian Thinking”

Mihailo Marković, in a recent work, has distinguished between politics as it is and what he calls “political praxis,” or politics as it “could be.”¹ To a Marxist, this distinction must come as something of a surprise. Marx had nearly always spoken of politics not as a sphere of genuine praxis but as a sphere of alienated activity, in which a perfidious, artificial distinction is imposed between the actual life of man in society and his existence in the sphere of political convention. While in his everyday life an individual may subjugate others on the basis of his material power or himself be subjugated by others, in his political life he takes part in the fiction that he is an equal and autonomous member of society. These myths of the political sphere, Marx stressed, only perpetuate the existing relations of domination and subordination in society as a whole. Is not, then, the expression “political praxis” for a Marxist a senseless contradiction in terms?

A positive answer to this question would be in order only if we were to view politics narrowly as comprised solely of the sphere of political alienation criticized by Marx. It is possible, however—as indeed the great political theorists of the past have done in one manner or another—to distinguish between the practice of politics and the idea of politics. The latter is often represented through the medium of terms such as “community,” “justice,” “autonomy,” and the like; each of these terms deals with aspects of the idea of a right social order. And while Marx may have written little in a concrete way about socialism, it is difficult to deny (although Marx himself might have denied it vigorously) that his critique of past and present social formations was informed throughout by a vision of a right social order, a decent and humane society which would extend to all individuals a full opportunity for their complete development as human beings. Such a vision, too, has inspired the political writings of the Praxis Marxists.

It would thus seem unwarranted to dismiss the possibility of “political praxis” without first asking whether politics itself is necessarily a sphere of alienation or whether it contains certain elements which, although perhaps imperfectly, express authentic human needs and strivings. And just as all human praxis is capable of becoming alienated but is not destined to be, so political praxis, too, can become alienated activity under certain circumstances. Perhaps, indeed, one may even be justified in arguing that political praxis, by virtue of the great complexity of the ends to which it aspires and the instrumentalities through which it is pursued, is more likely to become alienated than other types of praxis. But this is far from asserting that “politics” has no place in a Marxian theory of praxis, or that the ends of politics are somehow irrelevant to Marxism as a whole, or that they are necessarily ideological in character. To be sure, concepts such as community, justice, and autonomy may be (and are) manipulated ideologically for inhuman ends, but it is difficult to conceive of a great social theory that would dispense with them entirely for that reason alone.

This chapter is devoted to a clarification of the concepts of politics and political alienation suggested by the above distinction, with special attention to the way in which these concepts have appeared in the writings of the Praxis Marxists. The first section will attempt briefly to sketch the theme of political alienation through Marx's thought and to use this framework to gain an understanding of the thought of several of the Praxis Marxists about the nature of the world of politics. The second section considers Stalinism as a social system which, for the Praxis Marxists, represents the historically most extreme form of alienated politics. Indeed it was the insistence of the Praxis Marxists on subjecting Stalinism itself to a rigorous and critical political analysis, an analysis based on a profoundly humanist view of life in society, that decisively molded the character of all their subsequent social criticism and was most responsible for placing them among the most ardent foes of power relationships in all areas of Yugoslav life.

Political Alienation and the Crisis of Politics

In Our Present Crisis, a book of essays published during the now famous “Prague Spring,” the Czech philosopher Karel Kosĺk indicates that the question, “What is politics?” is of vital importance for the modern age. Our present crisis, Kosĺk warns, is less a political crisis than a crisis of politics itself, a crisis whose resolution hinges on socialism's ability to endow politics with new meaning and substance, and specifically on the fate of socialist democracy in its struggle with bureaucratic dictatorship. In the latter, Kosĺk argues, the roles of leadership and guidance have been confused with the role of ruling:

The identification of leading and ruling roles has been the source of one of the greatest mystifications in the history of socialism. Politicians talk about the leading role of the party, but think about the ruling position of a group in power.²

Certainly the crisis of politics of which Kosĺk writes is not peculiar to existing socialist societies alone. Modern political theory tends to speak in terms of two conflicting modes of political life: the participatory and the instrumental.³ The first is concerned primarily with the type and degree of contribution which each member of society makes toward decisions affecting the general welfare and the quality of life in society, while the second studies the means by which decisions are implemented and given goals—whether of an individual, a group, a nation, or cross-national entity—are achieved. While the emphasis of the first tends to fall on community as a normative and operative concept, the latter model may be said to be more oriented toward problems of control. At first glance it would seem sensible to view the contrast between these two models in terms of an antinomy between ends and means; yet it is well to note, as proponents of the participatory model often point out, that the problem with the instrumental model is precisely that it tends to convert what should be only a means—the pursuit of power— into an end in itself. What is worse, the instrumental model, while taking specific goals into account, does so only by uncritically accepting them as given and abandoning itself to the study of strategy and tactics, indifferent to whatever moral content these goals themselves may involve. The less subject to question are the goals of a given society or of its component groups, moreover, the more appropriate and attractive the second model of politics seems to become to conservatives and radicals alike. Sheldon Wolin has observed:

Today the tactical manipulative approach defines the politics of those who would sell presidents as well as of those who would “make” revolutions. What unites these apparent opposite tendencies is an exploitive approach toward things, relationships, and persons that make up the political world. The revolutionary and the mainstream politician are alike in viewing the political world as composed of manipulable objects. Political knowledge signifies the techniques of manipulation that will bring power to the manipulator.⁴

With this in mind, it is possible to characterize the crisis of politics above all as the radical separation of politics as an instrumentality from the true ends of politics and its hypostatization into a mode of political life which develops principles and goals of its own entirely of, and often opposed to, those ends. And those ends are none other than the pursuit of “the good life” on the part of the whole community for each of its members.⁵

It was on the basis of this gap between the reality and the idea of politics, it may be argued, that Marx founded his conception of politics as alienated social activity. Marx's state, as the illusory and purely formal locus of human community, stands opposed to the individual in civil society, where private interest dominates all human relationships. In drawing this distinction between the state and civil society Marx of course displayed his intellectual debt to Hegel, for whom the state represented the concrete embodiment of the Idea and as such the real universality of social life. But for Marx, Hegel's conception represented one of the latter's characteristic total inversions of social reality, in which the real subject—man in society—becomes a mere predicate and the real predicate—the state—becomes an illusory subject dictating its own requirements to man:

Instead of having subjects objectifying themselves in public affairs Hegel has public affairs becoming the subject. Subjects do not need public affairs as their true affairs, but public affairs needs subjects for its formal existence. It is an affair of public affairs that it exists as subject.

Not only does this picture of public affairs assume the divorce of the state from society; it also tends to make the conduct of public affairs the affair of a private few. Hegel's allgemeine Stande—the bureaucracy—was revealed by Marx to be nothing more than a hierarchy of self-interested careerists who represent their private interests as the public interest. The bureaucracy, moreover, makes inaccessible the conduct of public affairs to the public by its jealous watch over knowledge relating to those affairs, as Marx (anticipating Kafka, it would seem) described in the following passage:

The aims of the state are transformed into aims of bureaus, or the aims of bureaus into the aims of the state. The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. . . . As a result everything has a double meaning, one real and one bureaucratic. . . . The general spirit of the bureaucracy is the secret, the mystery, preserved inwardly by means of the hierarchy and externally as a closed corporation. To make public the mind and the disposition of the state appears therefore to the bureaucracy as a betrayal of its mystery.⁶

In the end, Hegel's state makes the “being of the state”—the conduct of public affairs—into its own “private property.”⁷

In his subsequent writings, Marx seems to have taken Hegel's conception of the state as paradigmatic of the real alienation of the state from civil society in bourgeois politics. Indeed even as early as in the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx asserted that “Hegel is not to be blamed for depicting the nature of the modern state as it is, but rather for presenting what is as the essence of the state.”⁸ Especially after 1844 Marx came to believe that the “essence of the state” would be realized not through the introduction of such formal steps as universal suffrage and legislation (which would only represent a perfection of Hegel's formalistic model of the state), but rather through basic and far-reaching changes in the structure of civil society itself. Accordingly, Marx turned from his critique of the state to a critique of civil society. Where Hegel had seen particular interest alone reigning in civil society, Marx saw decisive changes occurring in the heart of that society prefiguring a new era of social relationships based on the principle of community. The agent of this change was to be the revolutionary proletariat, “a sphere of society which . . . cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all the other spheres of society, without, therefore, emancipating all these other spheres,” a social class whose total emancipation would be predicated on the totality of the conscious self-alienation of its individual members.⁹

Marx's critique of civil society, however, rested on more than a purely philosophical vision of the proletariat, as the above lines might seem to suggest. His critique of the conception of civil society held by classical political economy (and shared by Hegel) rested on the premise that beneath the veil of private interest and the model of an atomistic society lay relations of production that are inherently social in nature. The illusion of complete personal independence had been created by the capitalist system of exchange, in which the products of human labor (itself social in character) stood opposed to the producer in the form of commodities to be bought and sold on the market:

The general exchange of activities and products, which has become a vital condition for each individual—their mutual interconnection—here appears as something alien to them, autonomous, as a thing. In exchange value, the social connection between persons is transformed into a social relation between things. . . . Exchange . . . presupposes the all-round dependence of the producers on one another, together with the total isolation of their private interests from one another, as well as a division of social labour.¹⁰

The development of the forces of production under capitalism, in Marx's view, tends to create conditions that increasingly emphasize the social nature of production and the powerful social bonds inexorably binding the workers ever more closely together into a tightly knit community. The concentration of capital, accompanied by the development of monopolies, the emergence of a global economic market, and the creation of new technologies involving the application of many hands and minds to a single process of production, all tend to create a “working class . . . disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.” In the place of the competitive and falsely individualistic relations of capitlist production, Marx perceived the simultaneous development of new, cooperative social relations which no longer set that which is common to all men apart from them in another sphere, be it that of community exchange or the state. In place of the “illusory community”¹¹ of the state and the deceptive atomism of civil society, Marx envisioned the development of a new form of authentic community having its roots firmly planted in the productive process itself.

The foregoing interpretive sketch makes it possible to appreciate the observations of many Praxis Marxists about Marx's critique of politics. For them, first and foremost in this critique is the concept of human community. Indeed Rudi Supek states that the aspiration toward “an authentic community of equal and free people” is the “existential” element in the definition of communism. The alienation of man from his product, Supek argues, is in the final analysis nothing less than man's self-alienation “as a being of community,” as that ideal totality of society for whose existence society is an historical and logical precondition.¹² True community, in contrast to the “illusory community” of class society, is in turn the precondition for total human emancipation, as Marx himself argued in The German Ideology:

The transformation, through the division of labour, of personal powers (relationships) into material powers, cannot be dispelled by dismissing the general ideal of it from one's mind, but only by the action of individuals in again subjecting these material powers to themselves and abolishing the division of labour. This is not possible without the community. Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.¹³

It is precisely this quest for community that the Belgrade political philosopher Ljubomir Tadic sees as constituting the main thrust of Marx's writings on society. Socialism, in Tadic's view, draws critically upon both the classical idea of the polis and the liberal ideas of individual freedom and equality, molding them into “the contours of a new socialist community as an objectively possible model of the new world order.”¹⁴ Tadic argues that for Marx (and Hegel) the beauty of the polis was that in it, at least in theory, the political and civil lives of the citizen became indistinguishable; in ancient Greece, as Marx wrote, “the political state as political was the true and sole content of the citizen's life and will.” In bourgeois society, the realm of the political becomes sharply set apart from civil society, the realm of community existing in one purely formal sphere of activity while flesh-and-blood human beings seem to pursue their private ends in the brutal reality of their social and economic relations:

Man, in his most intimate reality, in civil society, is a profane being. Here, where he appears both to himself and to others as a real individual he is an illusory phenomenon. In the state, on the contrary, where he is regarded as a species-being, man is the imaginary member of an imaginary sovereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and infused with an unreal universality.

Even the abstract political community represented by the bourgeois state is flawed, however, since if is colored by the separation of the state from civil society. The rights of man guaranteed by the bourgeois state “are simply the rights of a member of civil society, that is, of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community. . . . It is the right of such separation.”¹⁵

Thus it may be said that while in one sense Marx embraced the idea of community as one of the primary goals of human activity, he rejected the idea of community when used in an ideological sense to manipulate perceptions of the existing state of social relations. Marx's dualistic attitude toward this central problem of politics is also reflected in his approach toward the Aristotelian idea of man as a “political animal.” Supek points out that Marx rejected such a conception insofar as it implies that men associate into society merely in order to pursue their several particular ends and that the polis ought to be conceived of as existing independently of other types of human associations and superior to them.¹⁶ On the other hand, it was also Marx who wrote in the Grundrisse that man “is in the most literal sense a zoon politikon, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society”—a social being by virtue of the social relations necessarily involved in all human praxis.¹⁷ What distinguishes these two conceptions of the political nature of man is that in the first an artificial boundary, one which Marx felt is a necessary outgrowth of a specific stage of historical development, is drawn between general and particular interests, each of which are assigned to separate sectors of social activity. In bourgeois society in particular, production— the objectification of man's species-powers—takes on the character of being pursued only for private ends, while the pursuit of public ends is made to appear indifferent to the actually differing social positions of men in society. The state seeks to represent man to himself as a social being, to abstract from the social relations of production and to enshrine the goal of human community in a realm distinct from that of man's activity as an immediate producer. The idea that the latter is governed solely by egoistic private interest was seen by Marx as the great mystification of bourgeois society and one that had to be destroyed before human freedom could truly be realized. At the end of his essay on “The Jewish Question,” Marx asserted:

Human emancipation will only be complete when the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organized his own powers (forces propres) as social powers so that he no longer separates this social power from himself aspoliticai power.¹⁸

Socialism, therefore, becomes nothing less than the dissolution of the boundary between the state and civil society, the transcendence of the most comprehensive aspect of human alienation—the alienation of man from himself as a social being of praxis. Politics disappears as a special sphere of activity reserved only for the few in which decisions concerning the social life of the many are made in a context divorced from the social activity of production; the core of the new community consists of the “associated producers” collectively subjecting nature and history to rational control. Politics, as the pursuit of the genuine human community, is thus returned to human beings as they actually live in society and not to the “political man” of bourgeois society, whom Marx sees as merely “abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, moral person.”¹⁹

In the course of this revolutionary process, the very categories in which politics is conceived undergo radical change.²⁰ For instance, where civil society and political society become identical, Marx holds, the traditional concept of representation is given new meaning:

The legislature is a representation in the same sense in which every function is representative. For example, the shoemaker is my representative in so far as he fulfills a social need, just as every definite social activity, because it is a species-activity, represents only the species; that is to say, it represents a determination of my own essence the way every man is the representative of the other. Here, he is representative not by virtue of something other than himself which he represents, but by virtue of what he is and does.²¹

In the modern political state, however, the concept of representation affirms a framework of alienated social life: the professional politician takes it upon himself to represent his constitutents' social powers on their behalf, while the citizens themselves are assumed to follow their own private interests in their everyday lives. In the Final analysis, the realm of political affairs emancipates itself from its constituents, adopting a manipulative attitude toward them: as with Hegel's bureaucracy, public affairs comes to “need subjects for its formal existence,” and the question of the actual community of the real subjects of politics becomes the private concern of the stratum of “public servants.”

Thus the crisis of politics is at least in part a crisis of political meanings, generated by a society which artificially distinguishes between public and private spheres of activity. This crisis of meanings is illustrated by Tadic in the way in which contemporary social science approaches the problem of power. Whereas classical Greek political thought had as its goal the conceptualization of the good state founded on a notion of justice, Tadic criticizes modern elite theory for its primary orientation toward power and authority and its preoccupation with political efficacy rather than political virtue. Tadic bases his critique of modern elite theory on the argument that ever since Hobbes, political theory has used an undifferentiated concept of power which presents the drive for power (conceived in terms of the ability to manipulate one's human environment) as an historical constant grounded in the human psyche. This concept of power is for Tadic an ideological one in several senses. First of all, as in Hobbes, it fails to distinguish between power as the human capacity to transform the world (including “natural” human abilities such as strength and wisdom) and power as an instrumentality used to manipulate other people (Hobbes thus also spoke of wealth, friends, reputation, and servants as “powers”).²² Secondly, in its psychological reductionism, this ahistorical concept of power severs the cooperative life of human beings in society from any rational grounds: obedience and compliance come to be seen as dictated by expediency rather than by any genuine consideration of the common good. Finally, the modern concept of power conceals the domination of man by man in the realm of social production by presenting that relationship as an entirely normal feature of all social life,²³ calling ‘political' all phenomena that have the common feature of the struggle for power. Thus the artificial distinction between political and economic relations²⁴ is shown to be a consequence of the ideological tendency to neutralize the moral implications of market society.

Tadic's argument certainly places him in implicit agreement with the proposition, put forward by Robert C. Tucker, that the merit of Marx as a political theorist is that he drew attention to the “political” aspects of economic relations (i.e., as authority relations).²⁵ Tadic is also saying more, however: that the very idea that politics is, or should be, primarily concerned with power and authority is an idea characteristic of a society in which the conduct of social relations is not subject to the control of the individual but is instead divorced from his actual life as a producer and imposed on him externally. It is, in short, a concept characteristic of the bourgeois distinction between state and society. A political science with “power” as its basic term of reference, Tadic argues, is better conceived of as a science of political pathology:

Need there be any doubt that they [elite theorists such as Weber and Pareto] must make that extraordinary, exceptional state of siege into the usual or normal political state, and the normal state of peace into an exception? Is it really surprising that political pathology is preached as the normal order, political life presented as a military camp, and war as utopia? The military camp and the concentration camp, as the tangible and obvious symbols of naked power and of the struggle of man with man, perhaps ought to be placed at the top of the hierarchy of legal (if it is permissable to speak of law at all) institutions.

Once political theory and the problem of power are seen in this light, Tadic concludes, the question is no longer how to destroy power but

precisely the return of alienated forces propres as social forces to the realm of true democracy, which is solely in a position to prepare the paths and conditions for the establishment of the classless society.²⁶

Another concept of cardinal importance in modern elite theory is that of the “mass.” The “mass” is a term reserved for the large majority of the population, the “non-elite,” which elite theory perceives as atomized by the private concerns of its individual members, people incapable of formulating on their own any public demands beyond the horizons of their immediate experience and who are thereby made susceptible to manipulation and demagogy. The concept of the mass, Tadic points out, was first put forward in its modern form in the profoundly conservative sociology of theorists such as De Maistre, De Bonauld, and Le Bon, who saw the mass as “a dangerous crowd that could be subdued by force, be it with the aid of deceit, faith, prejudice, obedience, or fanaticism.”²⁷ “Public opinion” for these theorists represented no more than the spontaneous, uneducated, and dangerous ravings of those incapable of assuming public responsibilities of any kind. In essence, Tadic argues, there is little difference between this notion of public opinion and that held by modern social science. The public opinion survey approaches its respondents as a faceless multitude whose views on public affairs are to be sampled at random; it is concerned only with the relative frequency with which certain responses occur rather than the reasons for which those responses are given. In the case of theorists like De Maistre, the capacity of the citizens for rational participation in public affairs is radically discounted; for modern social science, it is simply not of interest. In both cases, “public opinion” is turned back on the public for purposes of manipulation. The problem with public opinion, Tadic writes, is precisely that it is “only opinion”:

The very concept of “opinion” . . . relates to something private, particular, and politically irrelevant, as opposed to “thought,” which has the character of publicity, universality and officiality. At best it has . . . the meaning of “being publicized.” Opinion does not contain in itself an intelligibly expressed judgment, but rather an undefined, unobligatory, and unarticulated voice, which is closer to a whisper or a ripple. Opinion is the voice of the multitude, the crowd, the mass. It has always been the voice of those who are ruled.²⁸

To be sure, many Praxis Marxists, including Tadic, do not dispute the applicability of the model of mass society to contemporary Yugoslav reality, especially with respect to the fragmentation and atomization of public opinion. Indeed it is Yugoslavia's unique mixture of bureaucratic centralism (be it located primarily in the federation or in the individual republics) and market spontaneity in which they see powerful forces contributing to the heteronomy and privatization of the social consciousness of the Yugoslav public. While they may reluctantly concede the descriptive validity of the concept of the “mass” for the existing Yugoslav public, however, they certainly do not see a society characterized by elites and masses as a healthy one, much less as one that is either socialist or democratic. “True or direct democracy,” Tadic writes,

cannot be imagined without an imperative mandate and the possibility of recall, or the “permanent agitation” (Rudi Dutschke) of those who execute public functions. The condition for the existence of democracy, furthermore, is solidly founded only in a climate of popular mistrust toward the executors of public functions or, which is one and the same, the permanent verification of their public activity. Therefore democracy will tolerate no form of paternalistic guardianship and bases itself upon the coming to age of the citizens in public life.²⁹

Thus if socialism is truly to be the realization of democracy, it cannot tolerate the atomization of public opinion, but must instead promote and encourage a vigorous, critical public opinion—perhaps, indeed, through the “struggle of opinions”— which resists all attempts to deprive it of its autonomy. As Tadic writes in another essay, socialism

cannot view the popular masses as an amorphous crowd which is fatalistically subordinated to active leaders. The primary task of socialism is the political activization of the people and democratic public opinion. The role of the proletarian party also changes in an essential respect. As opposed to all bourgeois parties, its aim is not to organize the masses which blindly follow it, but to be the concrete mediator between man and history.³⁰

To a certain extent, this characteristic emphasis on the “subjective” as opposed to the “objective,” or structural, preconditions of socialism has led the Praxis Marxists to a natural skepticism of all institutional frameworks, including that of workers' self-management, as sufficient guarantees of the elimination of human self-alienation. “The ‘Yugoslav path to socialism,'” Supek writes, “constitutes above all a rehabilitation of the category of community (with workers' self-management and social self-government) and of the category of the personality (with the freedom of scientific and artistic creation).” But he also warns that the

best ideas and intentions, fixed at the level of social institutions, can be disfigured, altered, and alienated in the guise of social pragmatism and routine if they are not supported by the personal character of human relations from day to day.³¹

Supek's suspicion of institutional forms that suppress the authentic content of human relations is shared by several of the Praxis Marxists who have directed their attention to social problems. Stojanović, for instance, sees no necessary reason to assume that “the socialist character of decisions is ensured by the fact that they are made by organs of self-government,” while Tadic asserts:

In workers' self-management I see the sole social form capable of guaranteeing the preservation of these values [human dignity and solidarity], but I strictly distinguish between relations of self-management and organs of self-management and view critically the tendency to institutionalize the latter as a rigid mechanism in our society.³²

Perhaps the crux of the problem is to be found in an antinomy pointed out by Ernst Bloch to which Tadic refers in his felicitously entitled book, Order and Freedom. Socialism, writes Bloch, is both a “realm of freedom” and a “realm of freedom.”³³ In this unity of opposites is expressed succinctly one of the most difficult questions that Marxian theory and practice has had to face ever since Marx's writings on the Paris Commune and Engels' essay on the role of authority in industrial organizations: the problems of conceiving a mode of social organization that is consistent with the emancipatory goals of the revolutionary movement. For institutions are indifferent to the adjectives attached to them. Be they described as “bourgeois,” “socialist,” or even “communist,” they all share the common features of routinizing human relations, imposing organizational goals distinct from those of their members and often opposed to them, and providing certain external standards of human behavior that tend to dull human creativity and to transform active political subjects into objects of manipulation. Surely these effects of institutionalization are in themselves inconsonant with the basic humanistic vision of Marxian theory.

Indeed it would hardly seem that this kind of alienation—the political alienation of social organizations from their members—could ever be definitively eliminated from human society, no matter what the stated goals of those organizations may be. While there is little reason to take issue with Vranicki when he writes that there are no necessary grounds to assume that alienation will be at the root of every social conflict in the future society, there is just as little reason to assume that institutions, with their naturally alienating attributes, will cease to find a place in the future as well. Indeed the conflict between the two modes of politics discussed earlier in this chapter, the participatory and the instrumental, has been a permanent feature of human society as long as “politics” itself—which the Praxis Marxist Andrija Krešić sees as originating with the decline of the primacy of natural communities and the introduction of the social division of labor³⁴—has been a subject of human concern. Given these generic conditions, the conflict does not seem likely to disappear.

Perhaps, however, we are misguided when we seek such a definitive solution to the problem of political alienation. The real point, as Petrović observes, is not so much to produce a society free of all alienation (which would only be to posit yet another “end of history”) or to agonize over the “permanence” of alienation, as to generate a society composed of individuals who will critically perceive their self-alienation and who will seek to revolutionize the society in which they live, thereby transcending their alienated condition. In his critique of Heidegger he writes:

Man is not man when he passively and patiently awaits the inescapable burden that time brings with us, but [only] when he acts and fights to realize his real human individual and social Being. And truly human Being is not the proud expectation of nothingness, but free creative activity through which man creates his world and himself.

Echoing his colleagues' skepticism toward instant institutional solutions, Petrović warns that

it is possible to create a social system that would enable and even stimulate the development of de-alienated individuals, but it is not possible to organize a society that would automatically produce such individuals.

In a similar vein, Tadic stresses the educational tasks of socialism. He writes that “in addition to the organization of freedom in the sphere of material production,” true politics also implies “the necessity of discussion and thought based on dialogue as necessary instruments for the reconstitution of democratic and socialist public opinion.”³⁵

Thus the Praxis Marxists have come to hold that the cultivation of man as a critical being of praxis is the sine qua non of socialism, without which the transcendence of alienation can be only a dangerous illusion. In this sense they see socialism as a society characterized by “permanent revolution,” not only in the traditional political sense of the term, but more importantly in the sense of a continual demystification of all social and political relationships which have been distorted by ideological thinking. This notion of permanent revolution, Tadic claims, was for Marx implicit “in the critique of all existing conditions in its basic expression, which extends from the letter to Ruge of 1843 to the Afterword to the Second Edition of Volume I of Capital.”³⁶ Any scheme in which communism is measured by the passage of individual “stages” is unacceptable to the Praxis Marxists insofar as the totality and continuity of the revolutionization of man and society are thereby overlooked.³⁷ Marković, endorsing Gramsci's insistence on the development of the revolutionary movement, warns that

If culture is vulgarly understood as a mere social superstructure, this would only serve to divide the revolution into phases: the first, political; then economic; and finally, cultural. Then the revolution is reduced to the seizure of power, and the cultural revolution is degraded to mere educational and ideological work in the framework of the peaceful construction of the new society.³⁸

At no point, then, can the socialist revolution—which is an ongoing process rather than a single event—afford to lose sight of its responsibility of transforming the human individual into a critical being capable of perceiving and overcoming alienation at the same time as it transforms social structure as a whole. And if “to be radical is to grasp things by the root” where “the root is man himself,” then socialism can never afford to neglect the human values on which it is founded, nor can its institutions repress a critical awareness of those values. “A society is socialist,” Petrović writes, “to the extent to which it opens possibilities for the free creative development of every man.”³⁹

How is it possible to judge whether these conditions have been fulfilled in any given society? For the Praxis Marxists, the most effective critical tool is none other than the concept of alienation. The existence of alienation in any of its forms— economic, political, cultural—is for them a clear indication that whatever may be said by the defenders of the existing order, that order is still subject to the same type of penetrating criticism which Marx directed against all social formations characterized by commodity production, class conflict, and ideological manipulation. By using alienation as their principal tool of social analysis, the Praxis Marxists consciously set themselves apart from the immediate practitioners of political power, whose interests are more bound up with the short-range success of various political programs and who tend to measure success in terms of the achievement of proclaimed goals. As Stojanović argues, the latter procedure, which he identifies with the Stalinist political mind (but which need not be limited exclusively to Stalinism), tends to neglect spheres of activity other than that of “material construction” and reduces itself to an extreme variant of the commodity fetishism characteristic of bourgeois society. He points out, moreover, that to compare achievements only with stated goals implicitly contains a strong ideological element as well:

Stalinists . . . avoid comparing practice with alternative goals and means . . . Consequently they conclude without much difficulty that practice, the highest criterion, has confirmed the correctness of their course, every measure of which supposedly represents a link in the chain of the historical necessity of progress. Because of the monopoly of the Stalinist oligarchy, however, other points of view have not had a chance to be verified in practice, much less to confront official policy theoretically. But the essential question is not whether there has been progress . . . but whether there has been the maximum possible degree of progress in existing conditions.⁴⁰

“Orthodox” Marxist theory seems well aware of the capacity of the concept of alienation to penetrate this and other mystifications. Soviet Marxism, for instance—when it does not dismiss outright the philosophical value of alienation for Marxian analysis—brings into play a second line of defense, asserting that alienation is a characteristic of bourgeois society alone and thus cannot be invoked in the analysis of socialist society. This argument is founded on the traditionalistic Soviet identification of socialism with the socialization of the means of production, as well as a further identification of the latter with the elimination of private ownership and the establishment of state control over the means of production.⁴¹ Of course, an objective reading of Marx's works will reveal that in his critique of “crude communism” he opposed the simple elimination of private property to what he called its “positive abolition,” comparing the former with the idea of the community of women as a type of universal prostitution. Instead of eliminating exploitation and alienation, this “crude and unreflective communism,” Marx warned, merely universalizes them.⁴² The main point, however, is that the elimination of private ownership, which in the Soviet view is sufficient for the elimination of alienation, is a purely formal and juridical act which in no way guarantees an end to human misery, exploitation, and alienation. In fact, in Stalinism, as Vranicki points out, alienation attains even higher levels than in bourgeois society, taking on new forms in the process:

Man as a producer finds himself again in the alienated position of hired labor if he has been wholly deprived of participation in the management of production and in the distribution of the resultant product under . . . a system consisting not only of total state planning, but also of the disposal of surplus value by the state. The only difference in this instance is that capitalist monopoly has been supplemented by the universal monopoly of the state. . . .

Since inhuman acts cannot be the consequence of a humane socialist movement, we can only say that the essential relation in all such countries is not socialist in nature. This is all to say that on the basis of the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the nationalization of the means of production, a new social relation was created, heretofore unknown in history, in which the system of political and social alienation has reached the highest possible level.

In the final analysis, the reluctance of many regime ideologists to use the category of alienation in their social analysis is perhaps best accounted for by the simple proposition offered in a Praxis essay by the Hungarian Marxist Mihály Vajda: “Those who see socialist society as already humanized are forced to deny the existence of alienation in socialism.”⁴³

Thus there can be little doubt that the “crisis of politics” is at least in part a function of the blindness of the adherents of large-scale social organizations to all but institutional definitions of reality, which tend to be particularistic and self-serving rather than universalistic and in the interests of the larger social community. As noted above, however, the alternative to such social institutions is not at all clear. It does not seem altogether trivial to comment, with István Mészáros, that “the total abolition of human institutions would amount to. . . paradoxically, not the abolition of alienation but its maximization in the form of total anarchy.” What Mészáros proposes in place of the total deinstitutionalization of society is a critical attitude toward even the most apparently perfect of institutions.⁴⁴ It is this attitude of constant, watchful criticism that was most characteristic of the Praxis approach to Yugoslav political life. Whether by maintaining this posture the Praxis Marxists have been able to make a significant positive contribution to the quality of politics in Yugoslavia is a question which would seem to have important implications for the fate of all social experiments which sooner or later must confront the puzzling dilemma of the “realm of freedom.”

Stalinism and Its Legacy

If the concept of human community forms the positive basis for a Marxian critique of politics in the eyes of the Praxis Marxists, they find the antinomy of that community in the social structure commonly referred to as “Stalinism.” Andrija Krešić has observed that Stalinism, with its extreme centralization of social initiative and control, can be thought of as a grotesquely perverted form of the realization of the Hegelian idea, which Marx had so profoundly rejected as a total inversion of the right relationship between the individual and society:

Persecuted in words . . . Hegelianism factually reigned in the form of the tyranny of the absolute political mind-subject over the society-object. Society was so deprived of its sovereignty that one sovereign leader sincerely imagined that he was himself the personification of popular sovereignty.⁴⁵

The critique of Stalinism, for the Praxis Marxists, was from the very beginning the medium through which they developed the concept of alienation as a critical tool for examining questions of social significance in general, precisely because of the extreme forms which alienation assumed in Stalinist society; as Max Weber might have said, in Stalinism they felt they had discovered alienation in its “ideal” form. Their obsession with Stalinism sensitized them, moreover, to the legacy of Stalinism in their own society as well, endowing their critique of bureaucracy and class structure, the role of the Party, and charismatic leadership in Yugoslav social life with urgent implications. Indeed a proper understanding of the origins and character of the Praxis Marxists' long-standing conflict with the Yugoslav regime cannot be gained without a prior appreciation of the importance of the critique of Stalinism in their intellectual and political maturation.

The Praxis Marxists follow in the footsteps of a long tradition of radical communist criticism dating at least from Bakunin in locating the roots of bureaucratic authoritarianism in the structure of the revolutionary party itself. But unlike Bakunin and, more particularly, the later left-communist critics of Lenin, many of the Praxis Marxists have made certain concessions to the argument that the model of a vanguard party, characterized by tight organization and strict discipline, may be justified in light of the primary task of the seizure of power and concrete social conditions forcing the party into illegality and struggle.⁴⁶ They are also generally more cautious and moderate with respect to Lenin and Leninism than those who would seek to present Stalinism as the necessary consequence of Leninist practices. Vranicki, for instance, points out that despite his vision of a strictly disciplined organization of professional revolutionaries, Lenin did not take severe measures against Bukharin in reprisal for the latter's opposition to the peace strategy of Brest-Litovsk, while Tadic stresses the vast differences in method and scope between Leninist and Stalinist party purges.⁴⁷ At the same time, however, a suspicion of the political implications of the concept of the vanguard party is clearly present in the writings of the Praxis Marxists, closely paralleling their discomfort with Lenin's identification of truth and the party discussed in the previous chapter. “Because of the conditions in which the party operates,” writes Stojanović, “monolithism, discipline, hierarchy, duty, responsibility, and appointment [from above] develop at the cost of diversity, initiative, democracy, rights, and choice.”⁴⁸ Surely this is not a picture of an organization whose structure might serve as a model for the new society of free individuals.

Where the Praxis Marxists are unanimous is in their insistence that the Leninist party is inappropriate as a political structure once the political revolution has been accomplished. With Stojanović, they assert that after “the consolidation of power” there is the danger that the party will become a self-perpetuating institution which seeks to impose its own internal norms and structure over the rest of society. Stojanović describes this dilemma in the following terms:

The communist party is characterized by the division of professional leaders, who make decisions, from the membership which executes those decisions. This model of party life conflicts with the scheme for a society which itself makes decisions concerning itself. Communists, in order to triumph, must associate into an organization which is led by professional revolutionaries. But after their victory they become professional wielders of power. The dominant part of the communist party is composed precisely of the possessors of state power: political, economic, and military functionaries, civil servants, et al. Thus the party's social composition itself tends to create a statist society.⁴⁹

Both Stojanović and Marković, moreover, find a moral dimension as well in this problem, which they identify, in part, as a problem of the conduct of the members of the revolutionary elite. Stojanović sees one of the principal factors in the “degeneration” of the revolution in the “finalization of revolutionary means,” including revolutionary violence and organization, which tend to become ends in themselves. In a similar vein, Marković states that while socialism is in need of a transformational elite consisting of “rational, socialized, and human persons who understand the major aim of the social process,” the question of elite behavior after the revolution is also of utmost importance:

Will this elite, when these preconditions are realised, find within itself the moral strength and consistency to pass voluntarily to the basic element of the socialist revolution, i.e., the realisation of self-management and consequently the gradual setting aside of itself as a power elite. . .?⁵⁰

Where, precisely, is the threshold beyond which the party ceases to be a truly revolutionary organization and becomes the core of the new bureaucratic order? Clearly, to declare only post facto that the threshold has been transgressed is intellectually unsound as well as politically dangerous, as Trotsky and many others discovered only too late. Nor are the Praxis Marxists very clear on this point. Many historians of the Soviet political system have pointed to the Tenth Party Congress and the suppression of the Workers' Opposition as a crucial turning point; the Praxis Marxists' lingering and somewhat paradoxical attachment to Lenin as a maker of revolution, however, often seems to hinder them from taking a firm position in this respect. Apparently unable to reconcile Lenin's earlier support of the ‘fabzavkomy” (the factory committees, which Lenin viewed as important instruments for the radicalization of working-class consciousness) with the decisions of the Tenth Party Congress, “political” writers such as Stojanović and Tadic weakly appeal for further study of Lenin's role in the treatment of the Workers' Opposition, rather uncharacteristically refraining from passing judgment on this important issue.⁵¹ Thus we are left with the line drawn by Stojanović between the periods before and after the “consolidation of power.” But it would certainly seem that the structural consequences of the enormous growth of party-state bureaucracy during the period of the Civil War are adequate demonstration that to use such a vague historical standard as the “consolidation of power” creates more problems than it resolves.

A similar problem of historical interpretation is evident in the only study by a Praxis Marxist completely dedicated to the political history of the USSR, Andrija Kresić's Political Society and Political Mythology: Contribution to the Critique of the “Cult of Personality.” Kresić's main contention is that the Soviet critique of Stalin's “cult of personality” is inadequate since it ignores the serious structural and historical conditions which engendered bureaucratism throughout Soviet history, even during Lenin's lifetime.⁵² The exhaustion and decimation of the best elements of the Russian working class during the Civil War was in Krešić's view one of the primary factors in the growing alienation of the Party from the working class. The rule of the working class thus yielded by default to the rule of the Party, which “relatively quickly was itself transformed into a centralized bureaucratic machine.”⁵³ The revolutionary principle of democratic centralism gave way to the rule of a purely administrative type of centralism. Of the Stalinist thesis of the “sharpening of the class struggle” under socialism, Krešić comments that throughout the campaign for rapid industrialization the regime did indeed intensify the class struggle—between itself and the rest of Soviet society.⁵⁴ He suggests that the decisive turning point came at the time of the “Great Break” of 1929, once the Party had emerged as the unquestionable ruling factor in Soviet society:

. . . at the end of the period [i.e., approximately the first decade of Soviet power] there was no longer a social need for an extremely centralized state organization, for the concentration of enormous power at the top of the political organization, [in the same way] as this had been socially necessary when the revolutionary party was only organizing the new state for the sake of preserving the first achievements and for the fateful struggles of the future.

The state ultimately became “an end in itself and preserved itself against the social forces which it had at one time served.”⁵⁵

Krešić's peculiar historical determinism—his insistence that by 1927-29 the centralized Soviet state apparatus had clearly outlived its usefulness—is in itself hardly more convincing than the equally deterministic arguments of those who have insisted, however regretfully, on the necessity for Stalin's dictatorial rule in the context of rapid economic industrialization. The “social necessities” of the day were not nearly as clear to the participants in the struggles of the 1920s as Krešic would have it seem. Perhaps the major significance of this line of argument, however, lies in the political and moral implications drawn from it by Krešićand his colleagues for future generations of communists who would have the advantage of hindsight which the Russian Bolsheviks lacked. The ability of Krešić's model to account in concrete terms for the enormous growth of the power of the Soviet state after 1929, in any event, is certainly not one of its strongest points.

Perhaps, however, these shortcomings are not as serious as they might seem. Just as in the previous chapter we have seen that the philosophical emphasis of the Praxis Marxists tends to fall on the “subjective” rather than the “objective” dimension of the revolutionary experience, so here it might be more instructive to turn to their thoughts on the transformation of party norms in the postrevolutionary period as an indication of where the crucial turning point is to be found. On this score, the Praxis Marxists are much less ambiguous. A constantly recurring theme in their writings is that the “great break” between the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary⁵⁶ phases of Party hegemony—in the case of the USSR, between Leninism and Stalinism—occurs in the moment that criticism is excluded from the ranks of the revolutionary movement itself. The responsibility for Stalinism in the USSR is placed by Tadic not with Leninism and the Tenth Party Congress per se, but with Lenin's heirs' lack of sensitivity to the new demands of the postrevolutionary era:

Above all, Lenin's followers completely overlooked the necessity of changing the function of the Party in the sociohistorical conditions which arose after the political victory. The principles of illegal work and tactics which were necessary in the period of “direct assault” were totally inappropriate for resolving the key problems of socialist construction. . . . In the new conditions, the emphasis should have shifted from centralism to democracy, along with the simultaneous use of all those democratic instruments which the old revolutionary democracy had created (introduction of the binding mandate, public control and criticism of all political activities. . .). . .Instead of all these measures, Stalinism literally transposed the principles of military discipline into the political movement, along with the binding imposition of theoretical principles in the event of even the slightest disagreement with the policy of the “general staff,” as Stalin used to refer to his leading cadres.⁵⁷

With this in mind, it was suggested at the June 1974 Novi Sad symposium by a young legal theorist from Sarajevo (who would later briefly become an occasional contributor to Praxis) that the break between Leninism and Stalinism should be dated to 1924, the year of Lenin's death and of the Thirteenth Party Congress.⁵⁸ “In 1924,” Robert Daniels has written,

official Communist politics and thinking became both monolithic and monotonous. The very dullness of the Thirteenth Congress and those that followed . . . was indicative of the rapid change in the Soviet intellectual climate. The empty platitudes, the dogmatic assumption of the infallibility of the party, and the insistence on absolute unity have remained constant features of Communist thought. The substance of party doctrine has changed, but its permanent forms date recognizably from this time.⁵⁹

While the historical accuracy of Daniels' argument may be open to question, it is this image of routinization, embodied in the doctrine of ideological unity as the precondition for decisive action, that the Praxis Marxists see at the root of the revolution's degeneration. “In such conditions,” writes Tadic, “the party increasingly transforms itself from a revolutionary and democratic organization into a bureaucratic-centralist apparatus with police functions.”⁶⁰

Turning to the Praxis critique of Stalinism itself, one of its most striking features is its apparent similarity to Western interpretations of Stalinism as a “totalitarian” society. Tadic, for instance, decries the “total politicization of social life” under Stalinism, while Vranicki devotes much attention in his History of Marxism and elsewhere to Stalin's “tragic” identification of socialism with the state and his insistence on the political direction “from above” of all types of social activity. In his critique of Stalinism, Krešić claims that Stalinism can best be understood as a “political society” characterized by a total alienation of the institutions of politics from the producers and the voluntaristic rule of those institutions in what Krešić calls—in the most literal sense—a “political economy.”⁶¹ By the same token, many of the most important themes of totalitarian theory do not appear in the Praxis theory of Stalinism, such as the basic identity between “communism” (Stalinism) and fascism (principally Nazism), as well as the elite-mass model of society which totalitarian theory presupposes in preference to a model of class struggle. Instead, the Praxis Marxists argue that Stalinism—and in this they see its real tragedy—was the product of a genuine class revolution gone sour, a revolution overpowered by its own instruments. Moreover, they insist that the class model of society may continue to be valid even after the revolution has run its course. This latter point, in particular, is a source of continual irritation for the apologists of existing “socialist” societies.

As we have already noted, many representatives of “official” Marxist theory, in the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia as well, have argued that socialism should be considered immune to the phenomenon of alienation. An even more widely shared, but related, position among orthodox Marxists holds that the traditional Marxian method of class analysis is by definition inapplicable to socialist societies since, in this view, class conflict presupposes the existence of private property, which is presumably abolished in the new socialist order. Indeed, Edvard Kardelj, the regime's chief theoretician, has gone so far as to assert that to view the struggle for socialism in the postrevolutionary period through the prism of the struggle of two basic classes is both ideologically absurd and politically reactionary.⁶² In a somewhat more moderate tone Miroslav Peɩujlić, a political theorist and former member of the LCY Executive Committee, has insisted that class conflict is an historically specific form of social conflict. With the dissolution of private property in socialism, Peɩujlić asserts, the nature of social conflict changes accordingly. With respect to bureaucracy in particular, Peɩujlic writes that as a “phase” of socialism, it is an

historically specific, sui generis category; it is not identical with “class.” The bureaucracy has a monopoly of rule, but this monopoly is based on the delegation of rights instead of the right to property. The bureaucracy does not have an independent economic base in private property. . . . The fact that its power is based on representation (delegation) puts it in a different relation to those whom it rules. It must be more cognizant of their consensus and interest. The bureaucracy enjoys privilege not as a consequence of its own legitimate right as a property-owner, but as a result of the abuse of power.⁶³

The difficulties with Peɩujlić's position are readily evident. If, as he states, its “emancipation from its class basis (the working class), of which it is the representative, is . . . the essential constitutive element of bureaucracy as a system of social relations,”⁶⁴ then the delegation of rights in fact ceases to be the real basis of bureaucratic power in any but the purely chronological sense. The bureaucracy's pretensions to represent the social consensus, or even the consensus of the working class alone, then simply become elements of bureaucratic ideology. Indeed it should not be forgotten that the bourgeois state also derives formal authority from the principle of representation through delegation, and it certainly does not publicly found its legitimacy on any specific right proceeding from the possession of private property, as Peɩujlić suggests. But there are even more powerful reasons for skepticism toward Peɩujlic's line of reasoning, relating to the nature of property itself. The category of property, as noted earlier in this chapter, is not exhausted by the existence of formal legal title to a particular material object. Property is, more fundamentally, a social relationship inhering in the exclusive monopoly over the exercise of a particular function or the use of a specific resource; a relationship, furthermore, which is generically and ontologically bound up with the existence of alienation and which indeed presupposes alienation, as Marx himself observed.⁶⁵ In principle, as Tadic writes, there is no reason to rule out the possibility that “state property can become a specific type of private property.” “Not only does the wage relationship not disappear under the rule of state ownership in stagnation,” he observes; “this rule can become a most brutal form of exploitation.”⁶⁶

“The working class,” wrote Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy,

in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society.⁶⁷

In the Praxis view of the Stalinist bureaucratic society, however, this antagonism, rather than disappearing, was only intensified. The existence of political power was no longer only an “expression” of class conflict; it now became its direct form. And with respect to the fact of class conflict, a form of conflict based on the extraction of surplus value from the producer in conditions of commodity production, Marković writes:

It does not matter whether the surplus of labour of the working class is usurped by capitalists in the form of profits and on the basis of ownership of the means of production, or by bureaucrats in the form of excessive salaries and privilege on the basis of unrestricted control of social objectified work.⁶⁸

Lest it be thought that a mere fine point of social theory is at issue here, it should not be forgotten that in the history of the communist movement, insistence upon the validity of a class model for the analysis of conflict in postrevolutionary socialist societies has almost always been interpreted by those in power as a political provocation of serious proportions. The celebrated case of Milovan Djilas is instructive in this respect. Along lines very similar to those followed by many Praxis Marxists, he argued in a famous passage that

ownership is nothing other than the right of profit and control. If one defines class benefits by this right, the Communist states have seen, in the final analysis, the origin of a new form of ownership or of a new ruling and exploiting class.⁶⁹

To this it should quickly be added that the Praxis Marxists have strenuously dissociated themselves from several aspects of Djilas' political program, especially his advocacy of multi-partism;⁷⁰ and certainly their continuing commitment to the ideals of the socialist revolution and to Marxian theory markedly sets them apart from Djilas' own sense of embittered realism. For all this, however, in their social analysis the basic Djilasist thesis about class and social structure has remained intact, retaining, as with Djilas, ominous political overtones.

To what extent this is true was illustrated by the sharp debate touched off by the appearance of Stojanović's 1967 essay, “The Statist Myth of Socialism,” which stands among the clearest and most uncompromising statements of the Praxis Marxists on the existence of class antagonism in socialist society. Throughout “The Statist Myth” ran a simple thread of demystification graphically summarized in this passage:

Beginning with the bloody collectivization of the peasantry in the U.S.S.R. at the end of the 1920s, through the mass extermination of Communists in the 1930s, the Stalinist offensive against Yugoslavia from 1948 on, the military intervention in Hungary in 1956, and concluding with the occupation of Czechoslovakia . . . Marxists have despairingly asked themselves the same question time and again: How is all this possible in socialism? . . . “Socialism” in which debureaucratization, economic decentralization, the elimination of political terror and censorship, the introduction of workers' self-management, the attainment of national sovereignty, and so on—in which all this represents counterrevolution, can hardly be called socialism in Marx's sense of the term.

Rather than speaking of what he claimed to be such self-contradictory ideas as “state socialism” or “bureaucratic socialism” (two of Kardelj's favorite euphemisms) or even “statist communism,” Stojanović suggested that a new category must be added to the traditional framework of Marxian class analysis— that of “statism”:

In statist society . . . the ruling class is the collective owner of the means of production. The share of surplus value appropriated by its members is defined by their position in the state hierarchy. Actually, the nature and degree of their participation in all decisions about production and the distribution of surplus value is defined in this manner. . . . In the specific case of the statism which developed in the wake of the degeneration of the socialist revolution, the state apparatus coalesced with those of the communist party and the other political organizations constituting its transmission mechanisms. As the collective owner of the means of production, this apparatus employs the labor force and exploits it.

To be sure, this concept of “statism” is itself quite problematical. Its chief theoretical shortcoming, it would seem, lies in its very comprehensiveness. It is not at all clear at first glance, for instance, how various societies characterized by state domination—from “oriental despotism” to many modern African political systems, for instance—would usefully, if at all, be distinguished from the sort of statism typified by Stalinism. But perhaps this is not the point. As Stojanović himself suggested in this essay, one of the most important aspects of the concept of statism is the conclusion for practice that it suggests in the context of Marxian theory: “With respect to the statist class, as well, we must speak in the true Marxist spirit of the prospects for expropriating the expropriators and for socializing the means of production.”⁷¹

Words such as these could not but evoke sharp reactions from Party leaders, and these were not long in coming. Miroslav Peɩujlić disputed Stojanović's thesis in an article given broad circulation through the official journal Socijalizam, in which he repeated his assertion that state property is only a transitional form of ownership and that bureaucracy, far from being a class, is a “sui generis category and in its essence contains elements of the transcendence of class rule.”⁷² On this basis he concluded that “bureaucratized state socialism” should still be considered a “type of socialism.” Shortly thereafter, Kardelj himself joined in the rebuttal, characteristically choosing to emphasize the practical side of the problem. After reiterating his accustomed position that the bureaucracy is a mere “fraction” of the working class, he issued what might well be interpreted, in the light of future events, as a veiled threat to the proponents of a class analysis of socialism:

If we accept the thesis that antagonistic classes exist and that a political settling of accounts among them is unavoidable, then we orient ourselves toward a struggle for power among political cliques, toward the creation of a political society and toward the negation of the leading role of the working people. The development of the Hungarian political crisis in 1956 confirms that such a struggle for power eventually leads to the surrender of the socialist state to counterrevolutionary forces.⁷³

Still, Kardelj was in agreement with Stojanović on at least one important point: that the issue of conceptualizing social structure and conflict is as much a practical question as it is a theoretical one. Beyond this point, however, they diverged—as it would seem, irreconcilably.

From this exchange it should be more than evident that in Yugoslavia the question of class antagonism in socialism continues to hold the most serious political implications. For the legacy of the “statism” at issue here is, as nearly all Yugoslavs are well aware, one of the most important elements of the Yugoslav political culture and one which, as the Praxis Marxists have repeatedly emphasized, continues to be felt keenly in modern Yugoslav social life. With reference to the preceding discussion of the role of the party in the genesis of the Soviet bureaucratic class, it is especially interesting to note that as Praxis social criticism grew more intense over time, the question of the responsibility of the structure of the Yugoslav revolutionary vanguard for social divisions in contemporary Yugoslavia came increasingly to the fore. The open articulation of this issue in fact revealed a significant shift in the stance of Praxis Marxism as a whole not only toward the Leninist party as a form of prerevolutionary organization, but also toward the Yugoslav revolutionary experience itself.

For some Praxis Marxists, the new position seemed to represent only a slight change of emphasis. Stojanović, for instance, had written in the pre-1968 period about the Yugoslav revolution in quite positive terms, viewing the Leninist party as perhaps a necessary evil, but nonetheless an appropriate form of revolutionary organization in conditions of illegality. But after the disappointments of the aborted student revolts of 1968 and the increasing frustration of Stojanović and his colleagues with the effects of the economic reforms and the concurrent reappearance of the old “administrative methods” toward social criticis such as themselves, even the Partisan experience came to be viewed in a new light. While previously Stojanović and others had limited themselves to discussing the moral tragedy of the professional revolutionary,⁷⁴ in 1972 Stojanović addressed himself much more unequivocally to the lasting significance of the Party's Stalinist origins:

Unfortunately, we are still far from a true picture of the CPY and the Yugoslav revolution. . . . In the official version . . . there is hardly any evidence of the intimate connection between Stalinist forms of social organization and the Stalinist dimension of the CPY before and during the revolution. Therefore it is particularly urgent to examine the process of the “Bolshevization” of the Party. . . , sectarianism in the Party, the Party's policies toward the Left intelligentsia, the suppression of internal opposition to Stalinization within the Party, the relationships between Yugoslav communists who were in the USSR—particularly during the Stalinist purges—and revolutionary terror during the war and after victory.⁷⁵

The younger generation of Praxis Marxists has been even less cautious in subjecting the Yugoslav revolution to criticism. The Belgrade sociologist Nebojša Popov, a veteran of the student radicalism of June 1968 (but not, as some of his senior Praxis colleagues might point out, of the Partisan struggle), locates the burden of responsibility for the emergence of a political class— the “politocracy”—after the war with the institutional and manipulative nature of the Party's tactics, even at the height of the war, toward allies of the Partisan cause and the Party's crude orientation toward the seizure of power as the overriding political goal. The events of 1948, Popov contends, served only to stimulate a circulation of the political elite and effected no serious transformation in the relationship between the Party and the people; indeed, he points out that it was precisely in the wake of the “Cominform break” that the political police, under Aleksandar Ranković, managed to accumulate much of its power. Popov is also singularly unimpressed by one of the most spectacular events in postwar Yugoslav political history—the ouster of Rankovic in 1966—and claims that such events are upheavals only within the narrow council of the “politocracy,” their effects on society at large being felt only in the most indirect manner.⁷⁶ To be sure, this interpretation of Yugoslav history is itself “partisan” in many respects.⁷⁷ By the same token, it can itself be interpreted as one more indication of the extent of disillusionment and impatience of many Praxis thinkers with Yugoslav socialism toward the end of the first decade of their “critique of all existing conditions.”

But no better sign of their increased frustration with the this period—save, perhaps, their growing frustration with the practice of self-management in Yugoslavia, discussed below⁷⁸— can be found than in their changing view of the charismatic leader. The Praxis critique of Stalinism as a bureaucratic class society bears striking resemblance to Trotsky's theory of the bureaucratic Thermidor in many respects. One of the potential consequences of the Trotskyist argument is to diminish the role played by any single individual in the process of counterrevolutionary transformation. Krešić, for instance, argues in his counter-critique of the Soviet analysis of Stalinism that to confine the sources of Stalinism to a single personality is to overlook the systemic aspects of the monstrosity that grew out of the revolution's degeneration. Instead of a single cult of personality, Krešić asserts, Stalin's cult was merely the apex of an entire system of political-bureaucratic cults of personality—beginning with the principle of “edinonachalie” and culminating in the apotheosis of “the most general Director-Generalissimo.” While Krešić does concede that in its advanced stages the “Stalinist” political system was at times decisively influenced by the imprint of Stalin's own personality, he observes that “the idea that everything depends primarily upon the leadership is primarily the idea of the leadership about its own significance in society.” And Marković, even less equivocally, states that “the myth of Stalin was built up by a bureaucracy which needed him. . . . Thus, Stalin created [the] bureaucracy. And [the] bureaucracy created him.”⁷⁹

To be sure, even this “traditional” Praxis view of the role of the leader has its ambiguities. When Praxis thinkers such as Vranicki and Supek, for instance, decry the several serious errors in Stalin's political thought, they clearly imply that these personal views of one man carried enough weight, and that the individual who held them carried enough personal influence, for them to be of such fateful historical significance.⁸⁰ Tadic, on the other hand, characterizes Stalinism as a combination of bureaucratic and charismatic domination. But even here Tadic's use of the term “charismatic” is not unambiguous, for in the context in which he uses it, “charismatic” evidently refers in a Weberian sense to the irrationalism of a bureaucracy which considers itself above principles of legality, a contradiction which is often convenient to conceal by appealing to a deified leader as the fictitious representative of the political system as a whole.⁸¹ In this manner, Tadic points up one of the problems of the concept of “charisma” in general—that it is not necessarily an attribute of a person only, but might be thought of as a characteristic of an entire system (or collectivity) as well⁸²—and seems to suggest that the preeminence of one leader in the Stalinist system is little more than a necessary illusion fostered by the bureaucracy itself.

After the crucible of the years 1968-71, however, there was a significant if subtle shift in the attitude of some of the leading Praxis Marxists toward the problem of charisma and the charismatic leader. The new emphasis, exhibiting increased sensitivity in particular toward the problems posed in a period of political instability by the charismatic leadership of one man—Tito—for the immediate future of Yugoslavia, was indicative of a generally increased willingness to discuss ever more sensitive issues in an open and provocative manner. Characteristically, it was Stojanović who played the role of provocateur on this occasion, just as it was he who in 1963 broke open the issue of intra-Party democracy and who later formulated the question of statism in its most penetrating form.

Noting that “nearly nothing has been done in the real study of the phenomenon and role of charismatic leaders in socialist revolutions and post-revolutionary development,” and commenting on the difficulties involved in evaluating the role of the charismatic leader while he is still alive, Stojanović proceeded to treat the problem quite directly. Once again he articulated the theme of the charismatic leader as an artificial construction of the bureaucracy, but he now also struck much closer to home by stating rather perversely that “as distinguished from Stalin's charisma, which was to a certain extent spontaneously grounded in his association with the leadership of the October Revolution, the cults of the Eastern European leaders were totally fabricated.” “Fabricated or indigenous,” he conceded, “the cult of the leader . . . gradually becomes an enormous material force” in its own right. The nature of this material force is a function of the peculiar position occupied by the charismatic leader with respect to the rest of society: precisely in order to perpetuate the social rationale for charisma and to present society with a need for strong leadership from above, the charismatic leader is driven to create new social crises—so that he can resolve them. The position of the charismatic leader thus has an internal logic which is antithetical to the goal of democratization:

The charismatic summit accurately suspects that it would have no ground to stand on if, in the process of democratization, it would fail to secure for itself the role of savior. Therefore it will at times even stimulate tensions, disagreements, and even conflicts in the party-state hierarchy—and in society as well. . . . [Yet] the charismatic summit will try not to extinguish the seeds of future crises in the hierarchy by too radically doing away with these . . . conflicts, for only in such crises can it renew its charismatic power.⁸³

Stojanović seemed to suggest, in a thinly veiled way, that many of, the sharp zigzags in recent Yugoslav political life—as examples, one might mention the failure to transform economic into political liberalization, the deceptive political decentralization that culminated after 1971 in a drastic reassertion of Party discipline, or even more specifically the toleration of nationalistic expressions in Croatia until a clear crisis point had been reached in late 1971—could be attributed at least in part to the requirements of charismatic rule struggling to find a place for itself in a changing social universe. At the same time, Stojanović's argument itself implied that the view of the charismatic leader as a mere creature of the bureaucracy is inadequate insofar as it fails to take account of the possibility that the leader—who may indeed begin as the creature of the bureaucracy—may at some point overpower not only the bureaucracy but also the entire political system which gave birth to him.

From the discussion in this chapter it should be evident that the Praxis critique of Stalinism was a critique in movement rather than a static doctrine which, once set forth, was complete. As the views described here on the revolutionary party and the charismatic leader should remind us, the problem presented by Stalinism was not, for the Praxis Marxists, a purely theoretical one of historical or “Sovietological” interest. Many of modern Yugoslavia's political institutions did have their origins in Stalinist models, and the initially sporadic but now intensifying use of “administrative methods” to suppress critical thought both within and outside of the Party can only serve to illustrate the stubborn resistance which these vestiges of “the old” in Yugoslav political culture offer to attempts to excise them. By the same token, as the 1960s drew to a close and there was increasing evidence suggesting the evolution of Yugoslavia away from Stalinism toward a fundamentally new system of political, economic, and social relations, the orientation of the Praxis critique began to shift accordingly, from a critique of statism to a critique of market society. The focus of both critiques, however, was and always has been the problem of self-management and the fate this social ideal has suffered as a result of the contradictory strains to which it has been exposed since its introduction onto the Yugoslav political scene.