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From Labor Action, Vol. 12 No. 28, 12 July 1948, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
New evidence has been accumulating in the past week to indicate that the Tito split in the Stalinist empire has opened up a deep crack in its monolithic structure into which growing forces of disintegration are rushing.
This is not at all to say that the Russian colossus is on the verge of cracking up. Such rosy optimism would be as foolish as the Daily Worker’s official claim that the Cominform denunciation shows the strength of the Kremlin. Nor is it necessary to insist that Tito is strong enough to “get away with it.” The damage – to the Iron Curtain – has been done.
Two wedges have been inserted into the crack, one from each side of the Iron Curtain. On the one side, Russia’s imperialist rival, the United States, has taken advantage of the split to stiffen its opposition to Moscow’s squeeze play in Berlin. For the first time it has shifted its tactics from a holding operation to an open diplomatic offensive – from the air-show feeding demonstration to an implied ultimatum. Thus Washington uses the crisis to intensify its cold war, hoping that its own imperialism will benefit.
More important have been the repercussions on the other side of the curtain. As we go to press, two giant open demonstrations have taken place in Prague (July 6) in connection with the Sokol parade there, with pro-Tito and pro-U.S. cheers being used to express opposition to the new totalitarian masters. The election in Finland has dealt a smashing blow at the CP there, dropping it from first place to third. The Communist Party of Trieste has split into a pro-Stalin majority and a pro-Tito minority. A Hungarian CP member of Parliament, representing the Yugoslav minority in Hungary, has been expelled by the Stalinists for pro-Tito sympathies, while the New York Times correspondent reports growing unrest among workers there.
The Bulgarian Stalinist government has signed a treaty of cultural relations with Yugoslavia and protests that governmental relations between the two countries will remain unchanged. While in contrast little Albania has taken violently anti-Yugoslav action, there is little doubt that a sharp conflict is taking place in the former country. An otherwise unexplained news item reports a Swiss “Communist Party” supporting Tito.
The fundamental significance of these developments does not – repeat NOT – lie merely in the fact that all the little Stalinist fuehrers, sub-fuehrers and quislings are scrapping among themselves. It is such cracks on top which open the way to the mass pressures from below, the discontent and hatred of the little people. This is the lesson of history: mass stirrings and mass revolts are preceded by the appearance of these fissures in the oppressive superstructure. There will be new and wider cracks appearing even if the present ones are plugged up. The impressive power of the Russian-type prison states is in reality founded on shifting sand, because the masses of people who are oppressed can never cease their struggle against tyranny.
In these lands where the all-powerful state controls all economic life as well as all political life, the restoration of governmental power to the working people means not only political democracy but also economic democracy. The class struggle for the socialist revolution goes on behind the Iron Curtain, in the new channels enforced there, ultimately against both the Stalins and Titos.
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