TITO'S MEN ADMIT 'GREAT MISTAKES'

Some of the basic problems facing the Yugoslav leaders were aired in public recently at a lengthy meeting between activists of the League of Yugoslay Communists and their national secretary, Stane Dolanc.

Dolanc was reporting to the Split and Dalmatia Party members on a recent meeting of the League's executive bureau which discussed the crisis situation facing Yugoslavia after almost a year of social upheavals.

Dolanc is a hard-line Tito functionary, equally hostile to the emerging right-wing danger and the threat of political revolution by the working class embodied in the development of clandestine revolutionary groups among the youth.

But his reply to discussion at the meeting revealed some of the main preoccupations of the Yugoslav bureaucracy and, above all, the fact that it has no answers to most of the questions.

According to Dolanc, the leaders of the League of Communists are proposing national campaign to reassert their badly-battered authority, sending teams of agitators round the country to all Party organizations to brief them on the leaders' plans.

The League secretary found it necessary to stress that the Party is in fact in power in Yugoslavia and admitted: 'We have already been through a time when it was shameful to admit this to anyone, and some people talked about the League of Communists being an ideological organization.?

Against these sceptics, Dolanc emphasized that the League of Communists is the 'sole political organization of the working class in Yugoslavia', adding that without 'this organization set up in this way I do not believe that this community could remain together'.

BUREAUCRATIC INCOMPETENCE In practice, however, the bureaucracy which actually holds the power is unable to put even basic policy decisions into effect. Dolanc gave an example: "The summer before last we had a session of the presidium at which we adopted stands concerning agrarian policy.

'We fixed a term of until the end of the year to work out a platform for the republics to reach agreement on price policy, development policy and on other things: however, as yet nothing has been done ... the absence of this agreement is borne only by the workers and by the working class whose life is hardest.' After this illuminating example of bureaucratic incompetence, Dolanc went on to discuss the training of Party officials, complaining that the young generation is being brought up by people who proceed from positions that are ideologically inimical to us'.

If this is the case, it is little wonder Dolanc regards the League's decision to abandon Tho, who is proparing further anti-working-class policies behind the 'clean-up Yugoslavia' smokescreen. its 'cadre policy' for educating new leaders as a 'great mistake' 'We cannot carry on like this,' he said.

One question which agitated many of his listeners was what Dolanc coyly termed 'the problem of social differentiation'. This refers to those sections which have amassed considerable fortunes by fair means or foul over the last few Dolanc admitted that despite decisions of the presidium to combat the growth of a layer of rich Yugoslavs 'things are moving very slowly or not at 'In our legislation there are certain loopholes which certain people are exploiting and becoming rich without violating the law,' he said.

Apparently the Yugoslav tax laws are even laxer than those in the capitalist countries: Dolanc advocated the American system of surtax to take away up to 80 per cent of large incomes.

The 'social differences' weigh most heavily on the working class, as Dolanc admitted: 'You tell me how a worker with a family of three and a salary of 100,000 or 200,000 (dinars a month can afford to spend ten days by the sea?..• "These three members of his family at 10,000 dinars a day make 30,000 a day which makes 300,000 dinars for ten days and his salary is 200,000 dinars. He still has another 20 days to live in that month.

holiday them nich We had enter- •We had many trade union holiday centres, but we abolprises in which the workers had an internal statutory right to a sum of money for their holidays, but on the whole we have now eliminated these things..:

In other words, the bureaucracy itself has steadily undermined the conquests of the working class in furthering the pursuit of its own privileges. Later in the discussion Dolanc referred to a Party meeting at which one leading member had expatiated about social differentiation' He added that over half the rank and file of the Party organization knew that this man was drawing wages from three sources! Yet no one at the meeting had the courage to get up and denounce him -indicating that the man question must have carried considerable weight in the Party organization.

He also referred to the swollen staffs of Yugoslav trade delegations abroad, particularly in Germany, where there are over 200 trade functionaries, 70 in Frankfurt alone. Among these people, Dolanc said, 'disloyal competiacquisition of riches and traud are all 'fairly widespread'.

'Many of our commercial representatives have foreign exchange accounts in foreign banks which nobody can check' Yet these representatives are flesh of the flesh and blood of the blood with Doland and all the other Tito THREAT TO WORKERS STATE The main source of the growing caste of wealthy and corrupt nouveaux riches in Yugoslavia is the bureaucracy itself-precisely the organism which Dolanc now claims is the only means of fighting this development.

No wonder nothing is done to implement the presidium decisions on taxation. No wonder the 'social differentiation' gets wider despite all the speeches of leading League of Communists members.

There is no need to ther for the causes of the growing and reactionary movement around nationalist demands in all the Yugoslav republics. Dolanc denounced nationalism of all shades as in esence 'directed against communism, against the working class' These movements are grist to the mill of the fascist émigrés who want to disintegrate and undermine the conquests of the Yugoslav workers. These fascists — who include the émigré Croat organization of the Ustachi -flourish only on the anti-working-class policies of the Tito bureaucracy.

Dolanc's speech is clear evidence that these policies threaten the basis of the workers' state. His catalogue of planned measures to combat their results is a worthless evasion by the representative of a thoroughly discredited leadership:

His parting shot, not unnaturally, was an almost incoherent warning to both right and left not to step outside the prescribed bounds of Titoite orthodoxy:

'That which goes beyond the line and which would present itself as being more left than the League of Communists is not more left, but further to the right of I do not know what political line, and the same goes for political extremism.

'In effect both political lines, based on radicalism of the left or the right, merge into one line and that is anti-communism and nothing else?

This attempt to smear the left is in the most contemptible Stalinist tradition and indicates that , behind the smokescreen talk of cleaning up Yugoslavia, the bureaucracy preparing further blows against the independent mobil ization of the working class.