COMMUNISTS: Not Worked Out

Marxist-Leninist holy writ explains almost everything. Last week, one of its serious omissions was trumpeted to the world by Marxist-Leninist Tito of Yugoslavia. The omission: what happens when Communist revolutions succeed in two countries independently. What is the relation between the two countries?

Speaking in Ljubljana, Tito took a new tack in his fight against the Cominform by appealing to leftists and liberals everywhere. In effect, he put his finger publicly on the unmentioned bogey of all Communist organizers: the rooted revulsion of the average man against abandoning his national patriotism and espousing so-called international classism.

Said Tito: “Progressive forces in the world are watching . . . the socialist [Communist] countries. But they are also carefully watching the kind of relations these countries are establishing among themselves . . . These relations must be an example, a stimulus to further development of socialism in the world, and not a brake.”

How should the Communist states set an example? Tito was not dogmatic (“The theoretical question . . . has not been worked out”), but he allowed vaguely that they should try to “draw together” toward eventual unification.

And what to do until the question is worked out? Here Tito struggled manfully. At best, there is a dilemma. Until the Communist states can “draw together,” he said, economic relations between them unfortunately “are still founded on a capitalist exchange of goods,” are “not a stimulus to increased drawing together.”

And, alas, this dilemma is compounded by the Cominform’s economic boycott of Yugoslavia. In the exchange of goods, Tito disclosed, “a stand is taken toward Yugoslavia by the people’s democracies which is worse than their stand toward capitalist countries.”

All this might look like a hinted threat by Tito to turn to the West. The West, however, kept its fingers crossed. The latest issue of the Cominform journal, for the first time since the Tito fission in June, had no article attacking Tito.