Soviet Policy Toward National Communism: The Limits of Diversity

On one thing the Soviet and Yugoslav Communists agree: “national communism” is a contradiction in terms. “The very expression ‘national communism’,” say the Soviet theoreticians, “is a logical absurdity. By itself communism is really international and it cannot be conceived otherwise.” Tito was just as emphatic when he told New York Times commentator, C. L. Sulzberger, that “national communism doesn't exist. Yugoslav Communists too are internationalists.” That the Soviet and Yugoslav positions appear to agree on this point is no accident. Marxist theory has never acknowledged a genuine alternative to socialism or capitalism, and socialism was a profoundly international idea. But in its effort to abolish national strife, create a world-wide economic and social order, and establish political and social internationalism, the socialist movement had to start within the framework of the nation-state. In practice, therefore, socialism was mainly a national affair. The gulf between the necessary national starting point of the socialist movement and its international ideal was, to put it mildly, considerable. Though the international working class solidarity of the Communist Manifesto has been emptied of plausibility by the events of the last hundred years—not least of all by the abandonment in practice of internationalism in 1914 by the socialist movement—internationalism is a fetish to which even the right-wing socialist makes his obeisance.