Titoism

Titoism is the name given to the version of communism practiced in Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito, who led the country from the end of the Second World War until his death in 1980. It emerged after Yugoslavia broke with Joseph Stalin in 1948. Its main features were independence from Moscow, an economic system based on workers' self-management and social ownership rather than direct state control, a growing role for markets, and a foreign policy of nonalignment between the Cold War blocs. Yugoslavia remained a one-party state led by the League of Communists. The term was first used as an accusation by Soviet-aligned parties.

Tito's Partisans led resistance to the Axis occupation and took power in 1945. Tensions with Stalin over foreign policy and Yugoslav independence led to Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Cominform in 1948. In Soviet-aligned states, communists accused of Titoism were purged, sometimes through show trials. In 1950 a law introduced workers' self-management of enterprises, designed largely by Edvard Kardelj and Boris Kidrič. The party was renamed the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in 1952. Tito worked with Jawaharlal Nehru and Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Belgrade hosted the first conference of nonaligned countries in 1961. Market reforms in 1965 gave firms more freedom. The 1974 constitution decentralized power to the republics and provinces. After Tito's death in 1980, economic crisis and nationalist tensions grew, and Yugoslavia broke apart in wars during the 1990s.

Within Yugoslavia, reformers favored more market freedom and decentralization, while others wanted stronger central control. Milovan Djilas, once a close ally of Tito, came to criticize the party elite as a new class and was imprisoned. Ideas of self-management influenced socialists in Western Europe and some developing countries.

Liberal critics point out that Yugoslavia remained a one-party state that imprisoned dissidents, including Djilas, and held political prisoners on the Goli Otok island camp after the break with Stalin. Economists argue that self-managed firms tended to favor wages over investment and that the system relied on foreign borrowing, leading to debt and inflation in the 1980s. Soviet-aligned communists accused Titoism of revisionism and of drifting toward capitalism. Some historians argue that the decentralization of the 1974 constitution, without democratic institutions, contributed to the rise of nationalism.

Yugoslavia under Tito enjoyed more personal freedom, open borders for travel and work abroad, and higher consumer living standards than most communist states. It played a leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement. The system did not survive the economic and political crises of the 1980s, and Yugoslavia dissolved between 1991 and 1992.