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PARTISAN REVIEW
tween "socialized property"-what is produced in a factory whose
workers decide what is to be produced-and "state property" which
is administered by organs of government beyond the influence of
workers. There is a further distinction between "socialized property"
and the workers' own "individual property." There is a dialectical
relationship, according to Kardelj, "a unity of opposition," between
the socialized property of the worker and his own individual property
which if disrupted either transforms the worker into a slave of a
state capitalist system or leads to the abolition of social ownership
of the instruments of production.
For Kardelj, the key issue is to avoid the bureaucratization
of socialism. This is inevitable, according to him, unless there is
"active, direct and increasing participation of the producers in the
direction of state and industry." Those who like the Russian Soviet
apologists interpret this as undermining the dictatorship of the pro–
letariat are indifferent, he says, to the fact that "the dictatorship
which they characterize as 'proletarian' can be anything else in the
world except proletarian, precisely because it is not filled with a
democratic content."
Here again, I am not concerned with the motivation of this
theoretical departure from Stalinism, the extent to which it is ac–
tually embodied in Yugoslavian practice, and the political uses to
which it is put. Tito, for example, although professing to blame the
Hungarian Stalinists for refusing to follow the lead of the Hungarian
workers, inconsistently supports the Russian suppression of their coun–
cils. Similarly Krushchev, after blowing off about the Yugoslav de–
viation during
his
visit to Czechoslovakia, sings softly after his meet–
ing with Tito in Roumania. Considerations of
Staatsriison
obviously
determine the official reactions. But ideas, although not independent,
once launched upon the world may develop a life and an influence
of their own. It is the
direction
of the Yugoslav heresy which is im–
portant-not only its nationalism, its claim that all Communist states
are equal in dignity in a common cause, but its emphasis upon a
conception of workers' democracy which might turn out, once ma–
terial conditions are favorable to it, to be an ideological hydrogen
bomb.
It is not necessary to claim that this conception of decentralized
workers' control is economically viable or that the democratic ele-
