REGAINING
There is also the question of the white community, and especially the fate of the layer of "small whites. " The MPLA has already taken a position for a multiracial Angola, a position that ÜNITA immediately attacked as "objectively neocolonialist. " Ignoring the white community and the mestizo petty-bourgeoisie would be absurd. But these layers could opt for a Rhodesian-type solution just as easily as for independence with an African majority. They will definitively choose the solution that in their view guarantees their remaining an African soil without losing their small property. The MPLA has always addressed these layers with a view to avoiding their being swept into the camp of the hardliners. But it remains true that these layers occupy a special place in social relations, and sooner or later this position will be challenged by the African majority. Such a challenge will force the MPLA to detail exactly what it means by "a society in which exploitation of man by man no longer exists." Finally, there is also the question of the Cape Verde Islands, which has been at the center of the London negotiations. As imperialist bases, these islands do not yet have a military Implantation by the PAIGC, which must be in position to impose a common status for Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands. The fate of this small archipelago will play a decisive role during the negotiations, and the PAIC has until now taken a position for indissoluble links between Guinea and the Islands. A conclusion In this article we have stressed certain features of the liberafion movements: * their definitive break with the right-wing and reformist YUGOSLAVIA by C. VERLA "The socialist society of self-management, a "transitional stage, ' is an aspect of the dictatorship of the proletariat. While the dictatorship of the proletariat has taken an altered form corresponding to our special conditions, let no one overlook the fact that the Yugosiav system is still a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. ... Without consciousness of this content, the door is left open to elitism, technocratism, and bureaucratism, which open the way to nationalism, liberalism, ete." -- Platform of the Tenth Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. The Tenth Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY), held May 27-30, 1974, was designed to "regain a grip" on Yugoslav society. More precisely, it marked the culmination of three years of internal struggles (during which some 50,000 members were purged) against all currents that rejected a return to centralization of the LCY. These strugnationalism that held sway in the British, Belgian, and French colonies; * their uneven penetration by Stalinist theses; * the revolutionary-nationalist character of their multic lassist conceptions; * their heterogeneity as to the social goals of the struggle; * their deep empiricism, which opens the door sometimes to right opportunist positions, sometimes to a nontheoretical approach to the process of the socialist revolution. To this must be added the profound poverty of international support extended to the liberation movements by the humanists, Social Democrats, and Stalinists. Such a situation con only bolster erroneous analyses of the international political field among the liberation movements. In the final analysis, then, the MPLA, the PAIGC, and FRELIMO constitute specificities in the history of the African revolution. Given the backdrop of the particularities of Portuguese colonialism, political movements have been constituted within the confines of petty-bourgeois nationalism and on the outskirts of the revolutionary workers movement. The period now opening up will accelerate the tendencies we have described above. The clarification will be uneven, intensified by the current heterogeneity. Undoubtedly, during the revolutionary process now unfolding only a part of these movements will take the definitive step to a Marxist formulation of their struggle and will come to an integrated conception of the African revolution. Recompositions, divisions, splits, and regroupments -- perhaps even after independence has been achieved - will mark the construction of the vanguard party of the African socialist revolution. D A CRIP gles, waged against all those who rejected making the LCY a political force monopolizing state power and controlling all decisive aspects of cultural, social, and economic life, resulted in silencing all opposition to the official line. At the same time, the prestige the Titoist leadership commands among the Yugoslav masses and the importance of that prestige in its international balancing acts made it difficult to return to a pure Stalinist "model" combining political centralization, centralized bureaucratic planning, and the consequent suppression of all self-management. The political and economic form of the orientation adopted and the institutions set up in Yugoslavia - not only by the Tenth Congress, but also by the new constitution adopted last February -- will therefore amount to a conflict-laden combination of accentuated political centralization effected through a tight interweaving of the leadership of the party, army, and state with an extension of the constitutional possibilities of the workers' participating in the management of factories.
The workers will be granted local powers, but of the same time these powers will be rendered largely formal by the LCY's
19
the president for life addresses the tenth congress
YUGOSLAVIA grip and bureaucratic control. It is not a matter of a radical change in the previous policy, whether internal or internafional, but rather of a serious slowdown in the process of economic "liberalization" accompanied by the forcible "bottling up" of social tensions. Three years of regaining a grip In Decembor 1971, after the massive strike launched by the student in Zagreb (Croatia) and the development of a Croatian nationalist movement ("Matica Hrvatska"), a massive wave of arrests, trials, resignations, and firings directed primarily against the main Croation leaders of the LCY was begun. On September 29, 1972, President Tito and Stane Dolanc, secretary of the LCY executive bureau, went over the heads of the leading bodies of the LCY, the majorities of which were far from having been lined up behind Tito, and addressed a "letter, " known as the "Letter from Tito, "all the organizations and all the members of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. " This letter began by criticizing the "weaknesses" that had appeared within the LCY and that were preventing it from "exercising a decisive influence on social events" and by attacking "lamentably bureaucratic influence, small-scale proprietary attitudes . . . widespread implantation of opportunism... phenomena of ideological and political disunity ... factional activities and the power struggles of cliques. It was therefore necessary, Tito maintained, to straighten things out so that "corrupt, petty-bourgeois individuals, advocates of bureaucratic arbitrariness, opportunists, careerists, and other ultraleftists, liberals, nationalists, and so on, who by their behavior are damaging the LY's reputation" could be "removed from tile ranks" of the LCY. "There cannot be any place in the LCY, " Tito wrote, "for those whose incomes have been acquired by means that are contrary to socialist norms and laws. " On the basis of this straightening out process, accompanied by the greatest "theorefical and ideological rigor,: "the leoding bodies of the LCY should oct directly and concretely so that responsibility for managing social offairs and affairs of state may be consigned to persons who will acquit themselves in the interests of the working class and the development of socialist self-management.... For months this letter was reprinted in the press and read, commented on, and discussed on the radio and television. 20
This was accompanied by a small-scale "cultural revolution" during which everyone expressed his complaints and those who had enriched themselves too blatantly had to account for their resources; some were even brought to trial. The egalitarian aspirations that permeate Yugoslav society had some chance to come to the surface. But what was the real effect? If was negligible, for the system that is at the very root of the existing privileges and social inequality was not challenged. A few scapegoats were brought to trial, but there was scarcely any confiscation of the goods they had accumulated. Many factories are temporarily without managers, and for a few months many persons with petty-bourgeois and bourgeois aspirations had to pack their bags, fearful of some kind of forced collectivization. But that did not happen. Nor is it on the agenda today. But the campaign wos able to ease social fensions. The open public debate on the new constitution and the preparations for new elections provided a respite enabling the bureaucracy to draw a balance sheet on the whole "campaign against the billionaires." Concurrently, the Titoist leadership fired enough officials to install teams faithfully devoted to the new policy in all leading posts. The new leaders were often not "apparatchiks" of the usual Eastern European type, but people who had been prestigious leaders during the second world war. This indicates a continuity of the grouping that stimulated the break with Stalin, the initiation of self-management, and the Reform. Lang-standing political leaders like Kardeli, Bakaric, Stane Dolanc, etc. remain at the head of the team that is now in power and leoding the party. Those who were shunted aside did not necessarily have great disagreements with the orientation being applied in economic, social, and foreign policy. Often it was those who had been the most faithful advocates of what had been the official policy of the present leaders until the turn taken in 1971-74. The major point of division was over the new role assigned to the LCY. But even here there may be a few surprises. The party "liberals" who were fired might have been afraid that the "hard" neo-Stalinist wing would take advantage of the recentralization to carry the day. Such a wing does seem to exist, especially within the army among a few Serbian bastions in Croatia. These currents (some have even spoken of a "faction"') seized on the "Croation crisis" of 1971 to demand that the process of "regaining a grip" be pushed forward toward a total political and economic centralization that would have involved a more ferocious repression against dissidents and
even leaders who were still holding their posts but were regarded by the neo-Stalinist current as too "liberal" or "nofionalist, " Bakaric being an example. The last Croatian cangress, held in preparation for the Tenth Congress of the LCY, indicated that this "hard" wing had been defeated. The Tenth Congress confirmed this. Hence, it is not surprising that in a recent speech (see Politika, June 8) Tito was able to raise the possibility of rehabilitating some of those who were purged. These "former comrades
"Tito said, "should not be left out of social life." Certain of them "could return to the fold of the revolution. .. - Let us help these people return fo our ranks. ... They were valuable cadres and we need such people for our future development and struggles. " To be sure, this speech was addressed to members of the League of Communists of Serbia who are especially discontented with the removal of their most popular leaders (Marko Nokezic and Latina Perovic, who were fired in 1972 and 1973, among others). But the speech was similar in tone to the one delivered by Kardeli (see Dela, May 1), who also spoke critically but fraternally of Rankovic. (1) Rankovic, Kardelj said, had made the mistake of "underestimating the means of state constraint and discipline" that "were pushing the LCY toward centralism, " and he was also guilty of an insufficiently developed sensitivity on the national question, " but he remained a "very competent cadre." In other words, it seems that since the positions of the leading groups have been assured, the political line has been voted on, discipline has been affirmed, and the new institufions have been set up, the Titoist leadership has everything to gain in forces and prestige -- in order better to struggle against the "extremists" who will confinue to be repressed -by reintegrating all those who when all is said and done do not stand so far from the political orientation passed at the Tenth Congress and who, it can be assumed, would eagerly return to the party fold. (Outside the ranks of the LCY they will have less and less of a political and professional future, of least over the short term.) Apart from the purely corrupt motivation that could push such people to rejoin the LCY, they will also be sensitive to the fact that the policy now being pursued is not one of pure obedience to the Kremlin, that it is in the final analysis preserving a certain equilibrium among the various nationalities, and that they are better off preparing for "post- Titoism" inside the LCY than from the Main features of the new policy *The foreign policy is aimed af seeking to maintain a balance among allies. There is no doubt that the critical reconsiderafion of the Sixth Congress (the 1952 congress, the first to be hold after the break with Stalin) and the so-called weaknesses of the congress ("imprecision" on the reality of the "dictatorship of the proletariat, "premature" proclamation of the withering away of the state, "premature" abandoning of the notion of the working class in favor of the notion of the "toiling people"-- weaknesses that were essentially aftributed to the revisionist Milovan Djilas) were viewed with favor by the Soviet bureaucracy. "We told you so, " the Soviet bureaucrats have responded. And, as if by accident, the last few months have seen a flourishing of adulatory articles about Yugoslavia in the press of the once-again "fraternal" parties. The French Communist party, forever at its post, has had the pleasure of organizing repeated trips to Yugoslavia. France Nouvelle, the CP weekly, reprinted major excerpts of the Letter from Tito in September 1972(2) and the CP monthly La Nouvelle Critique in April 1972 reproduced "Three Speeches by Tito" that were apparently speeches delivered during the "regaining a grip" campaign. The LCY's Ninth Congress, which was held in 1969, was boycorted by the "fraternal" parties, os were all the other congresses held since the second world war (except the Eighth Congress in 1964). Only the Rumanian CP showed up at the 1969 congress. But everyone was on hand for the Tenth Congress. The infervention of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia had introduced "a certain chill. " In foct, the Titoist leadership had called for armed resistance in the event of o Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia! An ounce of prevention ... And there is a deep enough tradition of resistance in Yugoslavia to suppose that a Soviet intervention there would have immediately touched off a civil war. The membership of the LCY suddenly swelled after August 1968 and the condemnation of the Soviet intervention by the Yugoslav leaders. On the other hand, the relative rapprochement with the Soviet bureaucracy after inifiation of the "regaining a grip" campaign clearly resulted in a decline In membership. (Apart from the 50,000 purged, about 90,000 people have not renewed their membership since 1968) Nevertheless, for the current leaders there is no question of returning to the bosom of the Soviets. They know this, and they scarcely have any illusions in the "proletarian internationalism" involved in relations with the Soviet bureaucracy. In addition, the maintenance of their independence is possible because of their balancing policy; and their own prestige in the eyes of the Yugoslav masses would drop drastically if they were to abandon this policy. The Soviet bureaucrats have certainly tried to exert some pressure through economic "aid. " Who wouldn't extend aid when a fraternal party is in crisis! There have been negotiations involving $1, 300 million of Soviet credits invested in various branches of industry. But to utilize these credits the Yugoslavs would have had to have enough money on hand! And besides, it is all the better for the Soviet bureocracy if the Yugoslays use Soviet material instead of developing their own infrastructure. So only 540 million was able to be used. On April 25 new negotiations were opened to try to reach agreement on an additional $500 million. But on the whole, Yugoslav trade with the Comecon countries remains relatively weak (about 25 percent of imports and exports). The policy of opening Yugoslavia to investments by western capitalists is therefore continuing. It is aimed at introducing modern technology into Yugoslav industry and agriculture, whose productivity remains low. This is being done in the form of creation of "mixed companies" in which a maximum of 49 percent of the capital can be foreign-owned and the companies are subject to the control and regulations of self-management. (These controls are often more formal than real, for "pority" management committees have been set up in which the foreign investors can bend the legislation that is formally in effect.) The open crisis and the reorganization being pressed by the Titoist leadership have engendered a certain reticence among capitalist investors, who are naturally ill at case when a hunt for "billionaires" is going on. Nevertheless, the LCY's regaining a grip on the situation and the protective guarantees offered invested capital will again stimulate investment in Yugoslavia. The recent signing of agreements between Yugoslavia and U.S. companies, of which there were twenty-five in 1973, is proof of this. This policy of seeking allies "in both compo" has been accompanied on the internal political level by the ousting of the most hardened advocates of rapprochement with the Soviet Union. At the same time os foreign CP delegations were arriving in Yugoslavia and receiving warm welcomes, two important newspapers (Viesnik of February 27, 1974, and NIN of February 24, 1974) published articles criticizing the internal system in the USSR as a cause of the emergence of a Sol-
21
zhenitsyn. All the works of this author have been published in Yugoslavia, and two publishing houses have decided to publish his latest efforts. Thus, as we have stressed, the main thrust of development should not be sought in international politics; and what might appear as ideological "concessions" made to the Soviets in reality correspond much more to the internal problems of Yugoslav society in crisis. The principal response of the Titoist bureaucracy to that crisis has been the policy of centralization. * Toward a total control of political and cultural life by the LCY. This is evidenced by the leadership's will to regain control over the youth organizations (sometimes by merging organizations of dissident students with those of high-schoolers who are more tightly controlled, as has been proposed in Slovenio and Serbia) and to establish ideological control over education, philosophical reflection, and culture. For several months the professors working with the review Praxis, who favor democratic centralization of self-management as against the LCY's monopoly of political power, have been subjected to pressure: There have been threats, demands for their expulsion from the university, withdrawal of their passports. (See INPRECOR, No.2.) But because the organs of the faculty are not yet direct instruments of the LY's policy and because the professors are highly esteemed and quite popular, the bureaucracy hes not yet been able to remove them from their posts. But the pressure is continuing -- financial pressure on Praxis and the Korcula cadre school that is led by Praxis, administrative measures that will surely be intensified (Tito has just declared that it would be necessary to figure out how to take them), and measures of police repression against students (eleven indictments have been handed down against people in Lubljana, Zagreb, and Belgrade who held a meeting not only to defend the Belgrade professors, but also to affirm their desire to struggle against all bureaucratic privileges and for real self-management "from the bottom up"). It is not impossible that the bureaucracy will take advantage of the aftermath of the Tenth Congress (which has effectively guarded its rear) and the coming demobilization during vacotions to intensify this repression and possibly to combine it with pressures aimed at trying to corrupt the professors. But this political centralization is also asserting itself on the constitutional level through the new statutes adopted at the Tenth Congress, through the institutionalized interweaving of the party and the state. During the earlier period of decentralization and federalism (which also affected the LCY), party congresses forbid party leaders to simultancously hold leading positions in the state apparatus (with the exception of Tito). This was a corollary of the new conception of the role of the party that was introduced of the Sixth Congress, namely that the party was an adviser rather than the "vanguard of the working class in power. " To assert this new conception, the Communist party changed its name to the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. It was said that the state was starting to wither away. But the Tenth Congress analyzed the recent crisis as a serinus one marked by an intense class strug gle: "The role and power of the banks and the large commercial establishments was growing greater and greater, while the resources of the productive organizations were declining and their share in the division of the social product was diminishing still more. . .. The forces of self-management were running up against the union between the bureaucratic-technocratic and bourgeois-liberal forces. " (Platform of the Tenth
Congress,p. 17.) This was why there was a return to the "dictatorship of the proletariat, " which for the bureaucracy means dictatorship of the party.
22
A nine-member collective body was placed in charge of the
This body was composed of the top officials of the state various republics and provinces plus the president of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, who is automatically a member. In practice, the eight other members of the current presidency also come from the presidium of the newly elected LCY central committee. This collective presidency of the state will permit the representation of the various nationalifies and help the struggle against the tendency of the federafion to fall apart after the death of Tito. But at the same time it synthesizes the de facto political centralization of the highest leading bodies of the state in the hands of the party. In addition, the republican and communal bodies will henceforth have three "chambers": one composed of delegates of producers, one of those citizens considered consumers (based on where they live), and one composed of representatives of "sociopolitical organizations" as such, namely the LCY, the trade unions, and the Socialist Alliance, which is more than ever controlled by the LCY. This means that members of the LCY will be represented as such within the state bodies, in addition to the fact that they will certainly be represented in the other delegations as well. Compulsory mandates have been instituted. Since the hardening up of the internal life of the LCY has meant forbidding any oppositional current to express itself, the delegates of the "sociopolitical chember" will be unconditional supporters of the leadership's policies. And at the same time, for any member of the LCY to be able to be delegated to express positions that might be supported by his work or neighborhood unit but be in contradiction with the LCY position, there would have to be at the very least o conflict with party discipline. We will see how this system works in practice. In sum, then, the affirmation of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in Yugoslavia today means in reality the control of the state by the party and the suppression of all opposition. But this policy is not enough. The only force that has remained relatively centralized and under Tito's control has been the army. Moreover, the army's traditions give it some prestige. So it is to the army that the Titoist leadership hos turned to assure "stabilization" of the situation. * Strengthening of the weight of the army within the party and the state, First, in the party: The Tenth Congress set up a Central Committee to replace the old Conference. This Central Committee was elected as follows: Apart from Tito (who is president for life), it has twenty members of the League of Communists organization in each of the six republics, fifteen delegates from the LC organization in the two autonomous provinces, and fifteen delegates of the LC organization in the army. This is an unprecedented innovation, and it must also be remembered that military men can be delegates from the republics and provinces as well. The Presidium of the Central Committee (which has thirty-nine members) will also have two delegates elected by the party organizations in the army. Finally, the president of the LC organizations within the army is automatically a member of the Central Committee. And for the first time in many years the Executive Committee of the Presidium includes an active-duty general, Ivan Kukoc. In all, about 12 percent of the members of the Central Committee are military men (whereas at the Ninth Congress there were two military men in the Conference, and at the
Eighth Congress, there were only 6 percent military men in the leodership). And this military presence has been institutionalized through the method of electing the leadership of The military presence is even further strengthened by the possibility of the army accumulating posts within the party and the state and by some recent decisions about the state appa-
ratus. On May 17, 1974, General Franjo Herljevic was elected minister of the interior. That means that the civil branch of the UDB, the State Security Service, comes under the control of the army. Moreover, during a recent speech celebrating the anniversary of the UDB, Tito criticized "errors" that had been committed previously, namely that the UDB had been "too federalist." He claimed that the UDB would have to adopt a new course in which the unity of the various services (civil and military) would become "essential" for the UDB to be able to fulfill its "political role." This general who is now minister of the interior is also a member of the new Central Committee of the party. The minister of defense, Liubicic, is also an active-duty general and a member of the The army is thus the force that will ossure cohesion and defense agoinst "the internal or foreign enemy" in times of crisis. And this is exactly whet Tito meant when, during the Croation crisis, he referred to the possible role of the army in the event of a civil war. But this "harmonious" fusion of the powers of the party, the army, and the state is not enough to assure social stabilization. In Yugoslavia it is not possible to assert the central role of the party by explicitly challenging self-management. Nobody thinks that there is real self-management, but it is a formal right that the workers have won, In addition, self-management has some advantages from the standpoint of the bureaucracy. So long os self-management remains decentralized, if allows for much more flexible links with the workers and lets the bureaucracy maintain all sorts of intermediary "officials" between the factories and the summits of state power in order to muffle outbreaks of discontent. And it also allows the bureaucracy to base itself on an atomized working class in order to control the development of technocratic forces that are simultaneously "enemies of self-management" and opponents of centralized bureaucratic power. * Strengthening of the party's political and economic control through the extension of self-management. This is clearly a contradictory process. The role of self-management and the participation of the workers in the managing bodies not only of the factories but of the state apparatus as well cannot be expanded willy-nilly without this having an effect on the demands raised by these some workers, even if the expansion occurs under the strict control of the party and outside the realms of real power. The proof of this is that there have been many strikes waged around the explicit or implicit themes of the struggle to really carry out the decisions of the self-management bodies and the struggle against "abuses" of power committed by factory leaderships or the management bodies. At the same time, it is certain that in a society in which the LCY is the only force that has the right to organize, decentralized self-management as it presently exists is also a means by which the bureaucracy can take the edge off conflicts and keep control of the situation. The new constitution dumped the earlier "parliamentary-type" electoral system. From now on the delegate system will hold sway in all areas (except on the scale of the central state power!). The Base Units of Associated Labor (BUAL, Yugoslav iargon denoting one or several workshops or related factories and the whole labor community) will form a General Assembly that will make decisions, elect and control delegates, and will be able to recall them. Any worker is eligible, regardless of age. Those who are not working must be of least eighteen years old to be part of a local delegation. Elected delegates retain their positions on the job. (This is aimed at increasing the number of workers participating in the communal, republican, and federal General Assemblies and reducing the number of full-timers.) A delegate can be re-elected only once, and no one can be a delegate of two or more General Assemblies simultaneously (as a producer, a consumer, and LCY member, for example). In other words, self-managemenf is no longer restricted to the factory level; it will also go into effect in state bodies (but not in the highest bodies), which will become varieties of assemblies of delegates. The immediate effect of this is that the number of workers in the Federal Assembly, for example, will rise from about 1 percent (6 out of 620) to about 30 percent (some 100 out of 320)Thus, a whole series of demands of the left opposition have been adopted by the present leadership and coopted by the LCY's political monopoly. On the economic level, some measures (still imprecise) will be taken to counter the "spontaneous" effects of the laws of the market. Without eliminating the Reform, the Tenth Congress stressed the underestimation of the effects that the market would have: "It is only through conscious social action, through creating the economic and sociopolitical conditions, through placing the highest priority on the concerted common conception of self-management development... that this situation (of disintegration of the economy) can be overcome." (Platform of the Tenth Congress, p. 20.) But such assertions remain vague. There is talk of "suppression of the anonymous funds of the banks, " of "concentrated coordination of the organs of self-monagement from the viewpoint of both price policy and investment and income policy." The "natural omnipotence" of the laws of the market is being referred to again. But only the left opposition is speaking of real centralization and self-management as a means of carrying out democratic planning. In the minds of many, the word "planning" is still associated with "bureaucratic, "even though the lessons of decentralization are being increasingly drawn. The "solutions" being put forward by the Yugoslav bureaucracy tend to assign a certain centralizing role to the central economic decisions made by the LCY through the trade unions, the more "political" election of factory managers (which probably means that only members of the LCY will be elected), the presence of the LCY in the organs of self-management, and the strengthened control over banks and commercial enterprises. (There is talk of "self-management" of banks! But by whom? Those who have deposited money? The employees? And with what national ties? This has not been explained.) In other words, it will take several months to test the reality of the LY's economic control of the situation and the degree of control that it really wants to exert (in price policy, foreign trade, etc.). A provisional conclusion None of the cconomic and social problems related to the recent crisis have been resolved. Social inequality and inequalities among regions have been aggravated by decentralization, and it would take a completely different economic centralization to resolve these problems. Productivity of labor remains generally low and this ceaselessly increases dependence on imports, creating a permanent deficit in the balance of trade. Price increases, unemployment, and the large number of Yugoslav workers abroad (there are more than a million Yugoslav workers now subjected to the vagaries of the economic situation in the capitalist countries) remain fundamental sources of discontent, particularly since the workers are beginning to understand the demagogy and ineffectiveness of the "campaign against billionaires. " A brake has been put on the spontaneous assertion of the laws of the market, but that is not enough. To be sure, the technocratic forces in charge of the banks and the export and commercial industries have been denounced os "enemies of self-management, " but they re-
national union: third
But it is likely that the totality of constitutional measures taken and the changes made in the structure of the LCY represent elements of a conjunctural political stabilization in
Yugoslavia. The death of Tito is the real test that the LCY will have to undergo to find out if it is really capable of keeping control of a situation in which various contradictory forces will inevitably arise to take advantage of the disequilibrium. That will be true of those who favor a "hard" policy as well as of the technocratic "liberals. " In this context, the possibility of a convergence of the Marxist intelligentsia, especially the revolutionary Yugoslav students, and the workers who have asserted their demands by launcling strikes will be a decisive element for the future of Yugoslav socialism.
LAOS government of by PIERRE ROUSSET.
"The Pathet Lao is already running the country, " a Western diplomat recently told a correspondent of the Far Eastern
Economic Review. "All the initiative is coming from their side. The Pathet Lao is making all the decisions and the Vientiane side is doing nothing. I haven't seen one so- called unanimous decision of this new cabinet that hasn't stemmed from something the Pathet Lao wonted and pushed for. The rightists have no leoder, no one to follow. That may be changing slowly -- there are signs that they are beginning to collect their wits and think about who they should have as a leader -- but it does describe the situation at the moment. "(1)
That seems to be the opinion of many "observers" in Indochina since the formation April 5, 1974, of the bipartite VientianePathet Lao government a little more than a year after the signing of the February 21, 1973, accords. And yef, Laos has had two previous governments of "