From Trotsky to Tito
by James Klugmann
London: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd., 1951, 204pp.

reviewed by MC5, June 28, 2002

Klugmann was a communist who served in the British armed forces during World War II. He ended up with a job evaluating the situation in Yugoslavia where rebel partisans were attacking the Axis forces in guerrilla warfare.

Thanks to Klugmann's work and that of many others, the whole world knew that communist-led forces were fighting the Nazis hard while various bourgeois nationalists still whining to this day, kept their weapons at their sides. As with reactionaries in many other European countries, the Yugoslavian reactionaries had too much sympathy with Hitler to really fight on the Allied side.

Klugmann was especially qualified to write this book because of his role in British intelligence. By the end of World War II, Klugmann held the rank of major. He worked both in Cairo, Egypt and Bari, Italy. As Deputy Director of a branch of British Yugoslav intelligence called "Special Operations Executive," Klugmann has since attracted much attention by bourgeois/royalist nationalists who say that a Soviet mole in British intelligence was the reason that Churchill sided with Tito, and not the Chetniks. (Those going by the name of "Chetniks" today are the Serbs responsible for ethnic cleansing. See, http://www.royalfamily.org/press/press-det/press-64.htm) In actual fact, there were too many reports to ignore that the more radical partisans were actually fighting while the others were not.

Very detailed, this book goes into the history of English spying on the labor movement and follows with the history of U.$. spying and interference with the labor movement. Klugmann chides those who think this sort of thing does not happen in "democracies,"(p. 57) when all the government documents from the history of spying and infiltration is avaialable.

Spying and infiltration were very much on Stalin's mind at the time in 1951. Stalin recognized that the Soviet Union had collectivized agriculture and kept the imperialists at bay and had done so for 34 years by that point. After defeating a series of enemies, Stalin believed that there were new challenges raised by the international bourgeoisie. British and American spies topped the list.

Almost everything Mao was to say about Tito later in the early 1960s was already in this book. That includes all the classic quotes from Lenin and Stalin on how the class struggle intensifies under socialism and how the bourgeoisie forms in the countryside for example, where there is no collective agriculture.

Labor aristocracy

The second paragraph of the whole book says, "This is not the first time in history that there have been traitors in the labour movement, as those who have worked and fought in the British labour movement throughout its history have found out, indeed, to their cost. Capitalism always remains a force of corruption. By every method, from duress to bribery, from threats to cajolery, the capitalists seek and have sought to gain an influence inside the labour and progressive movement. Often they have failed, but sometimes in different countries and at different times they have met with a temporary success." (p. 7)

Later Mao was to write a succinct summary of the material roots of restoration of capitalism that pretty much sums up MIM's cardinal questions: In "Is Yugoslavia a Socialist Country," Mao said, "It shows us that not only is it possible for a working-class party to fall under the control of a labour aristocracy, degenerate into a bourgeois party and become a flunkey of imperialism before it seizes power." Furthermore, Mao said, "Old-line revisionism arose as a result of the imperialist policy of buying over and fostering a labour aristocracy. Modern revisionism has arisen in the same way. Sparing no cost, imperialism has now extended the scope of its operations and is buying over leading groups in socialist countries and pursues through them its desired policy of 'peaceful evolution.'" Hence, Mao always said the question of labor aristocracy is linked to the question of the restoration of capitalism. For a supposed Maoist to ignore the "labor aristocracy" of the imperialist countries is revisionism. For people to talk about upholding the Cultural Revolution and opposing Soviet revisionism without opposing the labor aristocracy as enemy is just pure hogwash.

Klugmann himself held that the labor aristocracy was held back from revolution and that this was especially relevant to Britain: "When British workers were held back for a time by the sops drawn from the fruits of colonial exploitation, all the weapons of espionage, provocation, penetration, were strengthened tenfold and used against the national liberation movements of the colonial peoples. Very long and ugly is the story of espionage and provocation carried out by the British authorities against the workers and people of Ireland, India, Burma, Ceylon, Africa, etc. In the whole 'art' of colonial repression, developed to its highest (or lowest) level by British imperialism, besides the weapons of bribery and of open repression, the weapons of espionage and provocation have always played a principal role."(p. 63) And Klugmann knew what he was talking about--having been an English spy himself!

The shifting class enemy under socialism

Again and again, Klugmann pointed out and italicized that what was new about what Tito was doing was accepting bribery from British imperialism and Amerikkkan imperialism while staying inside an alleged communist party. The point was that the defeated enemy changed its strategy to working within communist parties. (e.g., p. 39, p. 46)

Contrary to how some picture Stalin and his defenders of his day, Stalin knew the enemy was shifting strategies, and we believe he would have welcomed Mao's summation of Khruschev, the military leaders and factory directors who supported Khruschev. Klugmann described it this way: "First they tried through the open war of intervention to base themselves on the Tsarist White Guards, on the Russian landlords and capitalists, the old officers and police. When this failed, for a long period they tried to base their counter-revolutionary conspiracies on the kulaks, and agents of imperialism inside the Communist Party, the Trotskyite and other parallel 'opposition' groups hitherto a reserve, who became in the middle thirties their main hope, their main weapon, for the overthrow of socialism and the reversal of history."(p. 46)

After seeing Khruschev denounce Stalin and relax the atmosphere for the party elite to see to its interests however it pleased, Mao did not have far to go from the quote above to saying that there was a bourgeoisie in the party. Yet it is a sad fact of life that many calling themselves "Marxist-Leninist" or "Hoxhaite" cannot take that tiny step from what official Stalinists were already saying in 1951 to back the COMINFORM to what Mao said after Khruschev came to power. Others, such as former Maoist Ludo Martens say that Mao's thesis on class struggle and the "bourgeoisie in the party" is correct but they minimize it, at this time when capitalist restoration has taken from us all our movement's gains no less! For people like Ludo Martens, the question of geopolitical strategy is actually more important than the question of the "bourgeoisie in the party" and hence Ludo Martens, other former Maoists and various "Marxist-Leninists" do not hold Mao's thesis to be cardinal. This is convenient for those who still cannot admit in the year 2002 that the Brezhnev years were not "socialist" ones and for those who are otherwise frozen in time, as if the bourgeoisie did not change anything from when Stalin was alive or as if Mao did not live to see something that Stalin did not.

According to Mao, this bourgeoisie in the party was not simply some spies or bribed people bribed by external forces: Mao showed that there continued to be an internal basis for the bourgeoisie in the party because of the fragility of socialism at this time in history. It became possible to speak of thousands or millions of people who would support capitalist restoration. It was up to Mao to sum up what happened after Stalin died, the tragedy of capitalist restoration but an undeniable fact.

This book is a gigantic "I told you so." It does not deal much with the national question inside Yugoslavia, but it points out that Tito had summoned the demons of bourgeois nationalism. Today after the years of "ethnic cleansing" we see that Tito was the best of the bourgeois nationalists but that his allegedly socialist road was indeed false, a false hope misguiding people around the world. His work laid no economic basis for cooperation amongst the Yugoslav peoples, especially his focus on "local control," "democratic communism" and similar unicorns. Those tempted by such fantasies today would do very well to go back and study what Tito was saying then and how it ended up in huge bloodshed for the Yugoslav people.

Although Amazon does not carry this book at the moment, we give it our hearty endorsement. Rarely does a book have both this level of theoretical understanding and factual detail.