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During the Cold War, Yugoslav socialist Tito tried to chart a course apart from the Soviets. But his actions enraged Stalin — putting Tito on the unlikely path of seeking Western support and revealing the difficulties of nonalignment amid great power politics.

Josip Broz Tito with US House Speaker Carl Albert in the 1970s. (Carl Albert Research and Studies Center, Congressional Collection via Wikimedia Commons)

In his memoir Conversations With Stalin, apparatchik-turned-dissident Milovan Djilas reports an awkward interaction with a Soviet handler during a 1948 trip to Leningrad. “In no Party in Eastern Europe,” the handler intimated, “is there such a closely watched foursome as yours.” The party was the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY), and the foursome was Djilas, Edvard Kardelj, Aleksandar Ranković, and Tito. These were the CPY’s four most powerful members in the late 1940s, but Tito — the nom de guerre of Josip Broz — stood above the rest as the unquestioned leader of Communist Yugoslavia.

Why did the Soviets keep such a close eye on their ostensible comrades in the Balkans? After all, the Yugoslavs were, as the Marxist writer Isaac Deutscher describes them in his biography of Stalin, “up till 1948, considered to be the most dogmatic and fanatical of all European Stalinists.” After they took power in 1945, Tito and his comrades quickly and diligently constructed a new state along impeccably Soviet lines. According to historian Ivo Banac,

The Yugoslavs were not only the first to abolish monarchy in Eastern Europe, they were also the first to adopt a Soviet-style constitution (January 1946), the first to institute legal procedures against church dignitaries of episcopal rank (the trial of Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac in October 1946) and the “opposition within the united front,” the first to use rigged trials against their own wayward members (the Dachau trials of April and August of 1948 and July 1949), the first to introduce Soviet-style planning (First Five-Year Plan of April 1947 with the highest rate of state investment of 27 percent of GNP in Eastern Europe) and the first to establish collective farms (1,318 by the end of 1948).

The Soviets supplied Yugoslavia with substantial economic and military aid, and the Yugoslavs were an important part of the “socialist camp” in its burgeoning confrontation with its former allies in the war against Hitler. Many of Tito’s leading military officers were trained in the Soviet Union, and he did not hesitate to hide his loyalty to the Kremlin. “If the Red Army needs us to lead its march toward the English Channel,” Tito declared in 1946, “we’ll be there tomorrow!”

Just two years later, however, Stalin expelled the CPY from the Cominform (the Communist Information Bureau, the successor to the Communist International, or Comintern); ruling parties in the Soviet satellite states waged a vicious purge campaign against alleged followers of “Tito-fascism” in their ranks; and well-founded fears of a Soviet invasion had Tito turning to the United States and the newly established NATO alliance for a lifeline.

What happened? According to Deutscher, the “years of armed revolutionary struggle” against the Nazis and their collaborators transformed Tito from a “puppet into a man and leader”; Stalin “sensed the change, and grew suspicious” of Tito’s stature and autonomy. The Yugoslavs charted their own course during the Partisan war, and they were not about to give that up despite their fundamental alignment with the Soviet system. Tito became accustomed to occupying a position of command, and enjoyed enormous prestige as the leader of a national liberation movement that won its victory largely on its own strength. Stalin could not suffer a potential rival with an independent spirit in the Communist bloc, and he acted accordingly.

The conflict ran deeper, however, than a personal rivalry between two extremely strong-willed leaders. The Spanish Marxist Fernando Claudín, in his two-volume history The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform, identified the fundamental question underlying the breach: Was “Yugoslavia to be an independent country or a ‘socialist’ colony? This conflict was the underground war in which the Soviet and Yugoslav secret services engaged in from 1945.”

Tito emerged from the Partisan war and revolution as a leader who wanted to chart his own course, not just at home but in world politics.

Tito was a fervent Communist who owed his position at the head of the CPY to the Soviets, who purged the previous party leadership amid the great terror of 1937. But he emerged from the Partisan war and revolution as a leader who wanted to chart his own course, not just at home but in world politics. This impulse clashed not just with Stalin’s ego, but with Stalin’s calculations of what would best ensure the security interests of the Soviet state in the postwar order. This put the erstwhile comrades on a collision course, which in turn compelled Tito to look to the capitalist West for help against the Kremlin — a turn that would have been unthinkable for the Yugoslav Communists just a short time before.

It is difficult to revisit this history and not see certain parallels with current tensions in Russia’s “near abroad,” including the war in Ukraine. In both instances, the regional power’s search for security against the West (first by the Soviet state, then its Russian successor) led it to seek an imperial relationship with its intended subordinate, only to see the strategy backfire.

In Yugoslavia’s case, Soviet attempts to restrict its sovereignty pushed Tito to establish closer economic and military relations with the West, thereby helping NATO consolidate its position in southeastern Europe. In Ukraine’s case, Russian attempts to keep the country in its orbit by indirect means failed. The full-scale invasion aimed at installing a pliant regime in Kyiv has been a strategic disaster for Russia by accelerating Ukraine’s westward turn. As Russia continues to decimate Ukraine, Ukrainian support for NATO membership and a generally pro-Western orientation has risen to an all-time high, and it may end up pushing away former Soviet republics in central Asia and the Caucasus too.

Realism came in for a beating in the wake of Russia’s invasion, not least because some leading realist scholars, namely John Mearsheimer, appeared to justify or excuse it. But in both the Yugoslav and Ukrainian cases, the players involved all behaved the way certain realist theories, including Mearsheimer’s, would have predicted. The Soviets, then the Russians, sought to restrict the sovereignty of smaller neighbors; those states resisted, and in doing so turned toward outside powers with their own interest in coming to those smaller states’ aid. In both cases, the fundamental problem for the Soviets and Russians was a lack of hegemonic capacity and an overreliance on coercion to achieve strategic goals.

In both the Yugoslav and Ukrainian cases, the players involved all behaved the way certain realist theories would have predicted.

Despite these similarities, however, it is important to avoid essentializing the USSR and its Russian successor; there is not an unbroken continuity through all of history. The Soviets adopted different approaches to their neighbors in East Central Europe in different times and places.

In Finland, the USSR exercised something akin to hegemony by limiting the scope of Finnish foreign policy but largely staying out of domestic policy (an arrangement commonly known as “Finlandization”). In the later stages of World War II and the immediate postwar period, it flexed its power in countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia through its Communist allies’ participation in broader coalition governments, and later shifted to a strategy of full-blown Stalinist imperialism as the Cold War intensified.

The Yugoslavs were unique in their successful resistance to both Finlandization and imperialism, which was made possible by their relative geographic distance from the USSR and the capacities they built through freeing themselves from the Nazis without decisive Red Army intervention.

Collision Course

In the late 1920s, the CPY descended into intense factional struggles that dismayed the leaders of the Comintern. A Bosnian Communist of Czech descent known as Milan Gorkić led the party beginning in the early 1930s. He was an ardent Communist, but as Banac writes in With Stalin Against Tito, he was “not always an obedient underling: his impatience with discipline and with Moscow’s supremacy was an issue in several party rows during the mid-1930s.”

Gorkić’s pursuit of a more ideologically flexible party organization chimed with the new Popular Front line (the Soviet policy of supporting a broad coalition of anti-fascist forces), which he backed and implemented with aplomb. That did not sit well with opponents of the policy, many of whom were jailed in the notorious Mitrovica prison. From behind the prison walls, they waged a fierce struggle against Gorkić’s leadership, and at times each other. The Comintern grew fed up with the constant strife in the Yugoslav party, and in 1937 Gorkić was summoned to Moscow, where he was arrested, imprisoned, and eventually executed. Tito was appointed to lead the purged party and tasked with ending the rampant factionalism, disciplining the party’s ranks, and making it capable of executing the directives handed down from Moscow.

Tito stands with his cabinet ministers and staff at his mountain headquarters in Yugoslavia on May 14, 1944. (Imperial War Museums / Wikimedia Commons)

In 1941, the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia, defeated the king’s forces, and drove his government into exile in London. The Communists quickly took on a leading role in the resistance to Nazi-fascist occupation, which put them on a collision course with the Chetniks, Serbian nationalist rebels backed by the government-in-exile.

According to Banac, however, conflict with nationalist forces in the anti-Nazi resistance

was precisely what Moscow wanted to avoid. Stalin’s concept of the “Grand Alliance” against fascism not only set aside the long-term communist revolutionary aims, but actually implicitly obliged communists to support the restoration of previous regimes as a matter of national salvation.

In Stalin’s view, the CPY should concentrate only on carrying out a partisan war in the enemy’s rear, not making a social revolution that would risk antagonizing the United States, Britain, and other Allied powers.

Tito and his comrades disagreed. They pursued a two-front war against both the Nazi occupation and the old regime led by the exiled king in London, and for a social revolution in Yugoslavia. Moscow wanted the CPY to collaborate with the Chetniks against the Nazis, even as the Chetniks collaborated with the occupiers.

Georgi Dimitrov, the Bulgarian head of the Comintern, advised Tito not to establish new, Communist-dominated political organs to compete with the royal government-in-exile. But Tito went ahead with it anyway. In 1942, the CPY founded the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ), followed by the establishment of its own government in 1943. The Communist-led resistance forces won military victories and extended their territorial control. Meanwhile, the Chetniks tarnished themselves by collaborating with the Nazis and committing atrocities against the civilian population. As the Partisans’ fortunes rose, the British abandoned the royalist government in favor of Tito’s AVNOJ in 1944, effectively making it the legitimate government of Yugoslavia.

Tito and his comrades pursued a two-front war against both the Nazi occupation and the old regime led by the exiled king in London, and for a social revolution in Yugoslavia.

Despite the wartime disagreements over strategy, the Soviets and Yugoslavs were closely aligned at war’s end. As historian Jože Pirjevec recounts in Tito and His Comrades, the Soviets supplied the Yugoslavs “with arms, munitions, and other essentials via a long-term loan. In addition, the two countries reached an agreement on trade and substantial financial aid for Yugoslav industry,” including joint Soviet-Yugoslav economic enterprises.

But the postwar honeymoon quickly turned sour. While the Soviets portrayed their joint enterprises as a boon for both countries, the Yugoslavs came to suspect them as vehicles to keep their country an underdeveloped supplier of food and raw materials to the Soviet metropole. Moreover, the Kremlin’s guardians of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy thought the Yugoslavs to be insufficiently deferential to Stalin’s supreme genius. Pirjevec cites a Soviet central committee opinion of their erstwhile comrades along these lines:

Tito and the other leaders of the CPY do not mention Comrade Stalin in their declarations as the most important theorist of our times — a worthy successor to Marx, Engels and Lenin. In their speeches, there is no hint of the groundbreaking role played by the communist parties, especially of the All-Soviet Communist Party (Bolshevik). The glorious influence of the Soviet Union, the only country to have successfully built a communist society, and which nurtures all human progress, is ignored.”

The Tito-Stalin Split

The burgeoning Soviet-Yugoslav conflict had economic and ideological dimensions, but its roots were fundamentally geopolitical. A civil war broke out in Greece in 1946, pitting communist rebels against the Greek monarchy. The Soviets did not come to the rebels’ aid, because Stalin had agreed to cede Greece to the Western sphere of influence in the “percentages agreement” with Winston Churchill. He did want to risk a new war with the West so soon after the devastating war with Hitler.

Tito and the Yugoslavs didn’t share their hesitations and provided extensive military aid to the Greek communists. The United States and Britain wanted to contain communism in the region, so they threw their weight behind the Greek monarchy.

With the Western presence in the eastern Mediterranean growing, Tito decided to resume discussions with the new Communist government in Bulgaria, led by former Comintern chief Dimitrov, about the possibility of establishing a Balkan federation. The British protested; Stalin agreed, and ordered the Yugoslavs to call off the talks.

Tito was ‘convinced that he could create a powerful state in the Balkans capable of achieving independence from the Soviet Union.’

Yet Tito not only persisted — he went further. As Pirjevec describes him, Tito was “convinced that he could create a powerful state in the Balkans capable of achieving independence from the Soviet Union and destabilizing the way in which the three great powers had divided the European southeast.” He sold the steps toward a Balkan federation primarily as a hedge against possible German aggression. But he also added, “We are not only against German imperialism, but against all those who wish to question our sovereignty” — a clear shot at his ostensible friends in Moscow. According to Pirjevec, the “final straw” for Stalin was Tito’s intention to turn neighboring Albania into a Yugoslav protectorate — a policy that Stalin did not actually oppose on its merits but rejected because Tito approached Tirana directly without consulting Moscow.

Stalin retaliated with a series of vituperative letters that attacked the Yugoslavs for various sins and errors, a campaign that culminated in the CPY’s expulsion from the Cominform in 1948. Fearing the possibility of a Soviet-engineered coup, Tito reacted by cracking down mercilessly on real and alleged “Cominformists” in the party. Somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the party’s membership was caught in the dragnet, and thousands were shipped to the notorious Goli Otok prison island in the Adriatic to recant their alleged crimes.

Cut off from the rest of the Communist world and besieged at home, Tito sought help from the only available source — the Western powers, above all the United States. Ironically, Tito moderated his foreign policy along the lines Stalin had demanded to win economic and military aid from the West against Stalin, as well as Western support for granting Yugoslavia a seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Gamal Abdel Naser, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Tito. (Stevan Kragujević / Tanja Kragujević / Wikimedia Commons)

Tito’s fears of Soviet aggression were not misplaced. At the same time they expelled the CPY from the Cominform, the Soviets were tightening their grip on the “people’s democracies” of Central and Eastern Europe and purging alleged followers of “Tito-fascism” from the Cominform parties. The outbreak of the Korean War further alarmed the Yugoslavs, especially since the Kremlin issued thinly veiled calls for regime change in Belgrade while giving the green light for North Korea’s attack on the South.

In the summer of 1950 Nikolai Bulganin, a member of the Soviet Politburo, gave a speech in Prague declaring: “The Yugoslav people deserve a better fate, and the day when they will overthrow the Fascist Tito-Ranković clique is probably not far away.” Stalin and the leaders of the Soviet satellite states made real plans to invade Yugoslavia and overthrow Tito’s government, which they considered to be a “chained dog” of the Western powers. Tito had a long memory, and he did not forget what happened in Moscow in 1937 to his immediate predecessors at the head of the CPY.

He understood very clearly who he was dealing with, and he prepared accordingly.

Tito, the United States, and NATO

In 1951, Tito moved to get arms from the United States, sending his top diplomat and chief of staff on a secret mission to Washington for direct talks with the Truman administration. Military and economic aid started flowed from the West, and Tito publicly offered praise for the support. The Truman administration, according to Pirjevec, even “seriously considered the inclusion of Yugoslavia in NATO.”

The Yugoslavs’ path to NATO membership was ultimately blocked because of Italian opposition, as well as Tito’s fear that joining the Western military alliance would have been a bridge too far. Instead, Tito engaged in a series of clever diplomatic maneuvers. He agreed to resolve lingering conflicts with Italy over Trieste on the Adriatic coast, clearing the way for further Western aid. And in a truly remarkable U-turn, he ended his support for the Greek communists, and, in 1953, joined a military pact with soon-to-be NATO members Greece and Turkey. This effectively gave Yugoslavia access to the Western alliance without actually joining it.

The cooperation between Tito and the West was certainly not rooted in ideological or political agreement, but in mutual geopolitical interest.

The cooperation between Tito and the West was certainly not rooted in ideological or political agreement, but in mutual geopolitical interest. The Yugoslavs had an interest in defending themselves from a potential Soviet invasion and securing economic aid — particularly massive shipments of wheat, without which the country would have struggled to feed itself. The United States and its NATO allies had an interest in driving a wedge into the “socialist camp,” and in strengthening its military position in the alliance’s southeastern flank.

As it turned to the West for military and economic aid, the CPY also sought new political allies like the social democratic and labor parties of Western Europe; after being expelled from the Cominform, it considered joining the Socialist International.

This momentum, however, was interrupted by one of the biggest international events of 1953: the death of Stalin. According to Pirjevec, the “inclusion of Yugoslavia in the Western world would probably have continued if, on 5 March 1953, Stalin had not suffered a fatal stroke. He had persevered in his propaganda against Tito until the end and it continued by force of inertia even after his death.”

Relations between the Soviets and the CPY began to thaw when Nikita Khrushchev took leadership of the Soviet party, a development that also set back the progress of Yugoslav democratization promoted by figures like Djilas. Djilas, for years one of Tito’s closest comrades, was ousted from his leading role in the renamed League of Yugoslav Communists (LCY) in 1954 and spent many years in jail for his outspoken criticism of the Communist government.

Despite this thaw in relations, tensions between the Soviets and Yugoslavs did not die with Stalin. Tito was a leading founder of the Non-Aligned Movement to counter the influence of the two Cold War camps in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He continued to hedge against the Soviets in Europe by maintaining generally friendly relations with the West, particularly the United States and Britain. He was dismayed by Soviet military intervention against popular revolts in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968, though he did not always publicly voice his criticisms.

Tito with Nikita Khrushchev in Skopje, August 22, 1963. (The State Archives of the Republic of Macedonia / Wikimedia Commons)

Over two decades after Stalin’s death, well into his eighties, Tito was still vigilant against Soviet machinations. During a 1976 meeting with Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev in Belgrade, Tito reacted to Brezhnev’s insistence that he would not speak in front of a certain LCY central committee member in characteristic fashion. According to those present, Pirjevec recounts, Tito “ripped the cigarette from Brezhnev’s mouth, crushed it on the carpet and yelled ‘You ox! We are not in Czechoslovakia here, and I am not called Dubček!’” He rejected Brezhnev’s requests for military bases on the Adriatic coast, refused to cease criticizing the Soviets among the nonaligned countries, and resisted the Soviet push for a closer relationship between the two countries.

After meeting with Tito near the end of 1976 the French foreign minister related the Yugoslav leader’s resolve to his American, British, and West German counterparts: “They made it clear several times that they’re determined to resist the Russians. I have never heard Tito say this before. This time, we heard him for one or two hours. It was clear that they would defend very strongly their independence, their integrity.” In addition to the already-rising tide of ethnic chauvinism in the Yugoslav republics, Tito and his comrades considered resistance to Soviet power one of their main tasks in the era of the interventionist Brezhnev Doctrine.

Against Poles, Camps, and Blocs

Fernando Claudín’s verdict on the Yugoslav-Soviet split is unequivocal:

In the face of encirclement by Russian imperialism, camouflaged under the label “socialist,” and by the Communist movement, still totally alienated by Soviet “myths”, the only defensive move abroad still open to the Yugoslav revolution was to take advantage of the “cold war” between capitalist imperialism and the new imperialism which was beginning to appear.

The Soviets certainly did not see themselves as imperialists. Indeed, they considered their state the world’s anti-imperialist headquarters. Different conceptions of imperialism abound, particularly in the Marxist tradition, and a singular definition has never really been settled upon.

Leninist conceptions have been the most influential, and these revolve around competitive struggles between national blocs of finance capital. If one defines imperialism as an expression of capitalist development, then noncapitalist states by definition cannot be imperialist. This isn’t particularly satisfying, and it often amounts to special pleading. If imperialism is understood as the coercive restriction of sovereignty of one political unit by another, then Soviet relations with Yugoslavia and the “people’s democracies” were clearly imperialistic.

The devastation of the “Great Fatherland War” spurred Stalin to pursue a policy of defensive expansion in its wake. As Valerie Kivelson and Ronald Suny argue in Russia’s Empires, the postwar map of Central and Eastern Europe was “an unambiguously imperial one, with formerly independent polities subordinated through military conquest and control maintained through differentiated, more or less indirect rule, terror, and force. In the late Stalin years Moscow determined the political and foreign policy choices of its East Central European satellites” in an attempt to counter the Western alliance. It tried to subject Yugoslavia to similar treatment but failed. Stalin resorted to coercion and threats to compel Yugoslavia’s compliance, but only succeeded in pushing Tito to look for external help.

The Soviets did not formally absorb their satellite states, nor did the United States in its own sphere of influence. As Kivelson and Suny note, “Latin American states learned the lesson that they had to consider the interests of their powerful northern neighbor in their allegiances, programs, and choice of allies,” and the United States was not shy about intervening with force if the lesson wasn’t learned.

At the same time, however, Kivelson and Suny argue that the US empire in the Cold War era didn’t operate the same way as the Soviet version. In their view, the United States exercised “a looser but powerful influence that eschewed much interference in the domestic arena but demanded loyalty to the hegemonic state in foreign policy.” As Franklin Roosevelt colorfully described Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza: “he may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard.”

As the world careens toward a new era of great power rivalries, it is worth revisiting the history of Yugoslavia’s attempt to chart its own course.

The Soviets did not impose their will on their smaller neighbors immediately after the war’s end, and at first permitted a degree of local autonomy. But as the Cold War took hold in the late 1940s, Kivelson and Suny observe, “Stalin pitilessly installed Communist Party dictatorships in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria.” The Soviets generally lacked the kind of “soft power” resources the United States could marshal, which meant they often had to rely on naked coercion to achieve their goals. This is a major reason why Tito’s diplomatic initiatives in the emergent postcolonial world — where newly independent countries were wary of falling quickly under the sway of either the United States or the Soviets — were so successful.

As the world careens toward a new era of great power rivalries, it is worth revisiting the history of Yugoslavia’s attempt to chart its own course. One need not approve of Tito’s pharaonic tendencies, nor the anti-Stalinist Stalinism that defined the Yugoslav party and state, to appreciate the value of a project that seeks to overcome the logic of poles, camps, and blocs in the name of a wider solidarity.

Anxiety that automation is coming for workers’ jobs has reached a fever pitch. But talk of robots replacing humans often conceals a less complicated reality: management uses technology to undemocratically reorganize and intensify labor.

Machining of aluminum pistons at the Ford Motor Company’s Cleveland engine plant through automated equipment, 1955. (Bettmann / Getty Images)

Just last month, IBM’s chief executive warned that AI will automate white collar work, despite the fact that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that there is little evidence to support the claim that technology is accelerating job loss. Labor productivity, which should be skyrocketing if machines really were rapidly replacing workers, has been exemplary for below-average growth. This mismatch between automation’s hype and its reality has a history.

In reality, automation has always been more ideology than technology. Coined in the 1940s, the idea of automation was first articulated by managers. Its purpose was to provide rhetorical cover for union busting by depicting human labor as technologically obsolete, even as workers continued to toil under degraded conditions. In the not-too-distant past, some on the Left have called for an automated and workless society, while others have warned of impending doom for working people at risk of replacement by machines.

What unites techno-optimists and dystopians about automation is that both look at the workplace from the perspective of management. From the corner office they equate increases to productivity — made possible by technologies that speed up and intensify the pace and quality of work — with laborsaving technology. But if the history of automation discourse is any indication, the Left has not benefitted from uncritically embracing the notion of automation to understand the investment and managerial decisions of capitalists. A clear-eyed look at the history of the term reveals that behind its rhetorical justifications, automation is simply another way of explaining away the control that capitalists have over the conditions and compensation of workers.

Automation: An Anti-Union Philosophy

In 1950, over a thousand workers struck the Ford Motor Company’s Buffalo stamping plant to protest a factory-wide speedup that forced workers to complete more tasks per hour than in any other factory in the Ford empire. In many ways, the strike was unremarkable; speedup was the rule in the postwar automobile industry, and workers everywhere hated it. What set the action apart was the fact that, in theory, no one was supposed to be working in the Buffalo plant at all. According to Ford, the factory possessed a revolutionary new technology: automation.

The word automation stood in for a story: that all technological development inevitably bent toward the elimination of human labor.

In 1950, the word automation was brand new, and like the Buffalo plant, it was a Ford product. The word’s first public use dated from 1947, when Ford opened its Automation Department. There, managers used automation to describe the introduction of the transfer machine, a mechanism that bored holes in engine blocks.

However, the transfer machine was not a new technology; it dated from the 1880s. What was actually new at Ford in 1947 was the industrial labor movement, in the form of the United Auto Workers (UAW). Famously hostile to organized labor, Ford had only recognized the union in 1941, and was the last major American automobile manufacturer to do so. Forced to bargain with the UAW, Ford executives sought to limit the union’s power, and they used the widespread technological enthusiasm following World War II to do so.

After the war, American industry appeared not only to have overcome the economic disaster of the Great Depression (“The capitalist dog has returned to his old vomit,” the historian Lewis Mumford rued in 1944), but also to have issued victory ready-made from its factories and laboratories. Breakthroughs like the development of the electronic digital computer and the splitting of the atom seemed to promise a new world where technology could solve even the most difficult problems of human existence. Ford vice president of production D. S. Harder called automation “a new concept — a new philosophy — of manufacturing.” According to management, technological progress itself, and not the profit motive, required that shop-floor power shift away from the worker (along with the unions employers were now legally compelled to recognize) and into the hands of the engineer and the manager.

The word automation stood in for a story: that all technological development inevitably bent toward the elimination of human labor, and that production would demand more technical skill than physical effort from the workforce of the future.

Automation and the Degradation of Work

So compelling was this new narrative of automation that even union officials took it for granted that the organization of the workforce had become as much a technical, as a political, issue. Deferring to the discourse in 1955, Walter Reuther, president of the UAW, remarked that “we stand on the threshold of a development of science and technology that will enable us to solve the problems that have plagued the human family for these many thousands of years. . . . We welcome any development that will lighten the burden of human labor.”

The rest of the automobile industry would follow Ford, using the pretext of automation not to abolish human labor, but to degrade and cheapen it.

But what management and union leaders called automation, workers described as a speedup.

When Soviet engineers visited Ford’s “automated” engine plant in Cleveland (which employed seven thousand people), they reported that the machinery was standard, but that the speed with which workers labored was unparalleled. Watching workers, they said, was “like looking at a speeding motion picture.” The work was degraded in other ways, too. The Cleveland engine plant paid workers, on average, eleven cents less an hour than their coworkers at the famous River Rouge facility in Dearborn, Michigan. “[A]utomation and down-grading as a result of job-dilution had gone hand-in-hand at the Cleveland plant,” the UAW found. According to labor organizer Nat Ganley, despite the fanfare around “the most modern push button machines, the most wonderful technical improvements,” workers were “compelled to turn out more production on the same machines, and the same job, than they were a dozen years ago.”

The rest of the automobile industry would follow Ford, using the pretext of automation not to abolish human labor, but to degrade and cheapen it. In the words of Simon Owens, a longtime worker at Chrysler, “automation has not reduced the drudgery of labor. Whatever Automation means to management, labor bureaucrat, or engineer, to the production worker it means a return to sweatshop conditions, increased speedup and gearing the man to the machine.”

Managers sped up and degraded black workers with particular intensity. Leaders of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers found that for “the black worker the pressure of production never ceases . . . . [they] are now producing at least twice as much as auto workers twenty years ago.” In particular, because of the “super exploitation of black labor, profits in auto have soared. . . . Often new black workers are forced to do the work of two white men.” (The postwar automation discourse in fact universalized an older, racist argument, applying it to the entire industrial working class: white supremacists a century earlier had depicted black labor as necessarily menial, and therefore prone to mechanization. Slavery and steam, said a former US Commissioner of Patents in 1859, were practical equivalents.)

None of what was going on at Ford was unprecedented in the history of industrial capitalism. When contemporary economists write about automation, it is usually as shorthand for labor productivity, or the amount produced per hour worked. The more productive labor, the argument goes, the more work vested capital — technology — must be contributing to production. There were certainly increases in productivity during the postwar period. Machines can increase productivity by speeding up labor, intensifying it, and even, at times, yes, replacing it. For that matter, managers compelling workers through nonmechanical means — like coercion, fear of unemployment, or wage theft — also wrest more “productivity” out of their employees. The postwar automation discourse, however, was distinct from the specific dynamics of capitalist competition that drive the relentless transformation of productive forces.

Since the dawn of industrialization, technological changes have, paradoxically, both increased productivity and generated work under newly degraded conditions. Increases in productivity have not resulted in less human effort, because the “work” of capitalism is limitless, and no breakthrough in productivity will persuade capitalists to let a resource to sit idle. It will both overuse human labor in one place and let it go to seed somewhere else; it will countenance huge reserves of untapped human potential for a time while working it to the bone moments later.

Rather than a general decline in human labor and the rise of a leisure society — a through line to some endgame where human labor will be pointless — we see a circular trend, where capital rushes from place to place, exploiting labor for a time, using it up, and then moving on to use it somewhere else. (“The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India,” the British statesman William Bentinck averred in the 1830s, as English factory owners mechanized textile production and accelerated the expansion of English wage laborers, that proletariat of proletariats.) This fact is perhaps the most important difference between the enlargement of humanity’s powers to manipulate the natural world, and the realities of working under conditions of capitalism: no amount of power is ever enough.

By the 1950s, employers across the United States deployed the automation discourse to degrade working conditions. At the same time, union leaders, unable or unwilling to resist claims that human labor was becoming obsolete, attempted to bargain under the terms of automation, often with poor results. When the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) embraced the containerization of shipping in the infamous 1960 Mechanization and Modernization Agreement, it signed off on the creation of a bifurcated workforce of A-men who enjoyed full union benefits and B-men who did not, foreshadowing what by the turn of the twenty-first century would become typical in unionized industrial workplaces.

Rather than a decline in labor and the rise of a leisure society, we see a circular trend, where capital rushes from place to place, exploiting labor for a time, using it up, and then moving on to use it somewhere else.

Similarly, John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers (UMW) supported the introduction of the continuous miner in the 1950s under the assumption that technological change would lead to better-paid, secure jobs. It did not. And the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) understood the introduction of power tools to the disassembly line as “automation” (and therefore inevitable), only to discover in the early 1960s that the Automation Committee set up between the Amalgamated Meat Cutters (AMCBW), the UPWA, and Armour and Company had been, in the words of the UPWA’s president, a “façade of humaneness and decency that would conceal a ruthless program of mass termination of employees of long service and cynical manipulation of the natural fears of its employees to accomplish drastic cuts in wages and working conditions.”

Today, far from laborless, the meatpacking industry depends on an army of workers, whose jobs are in fact among some of the most fast-paced and dangerous in the United States.

The Left Adopts the Automation Discourse

While it may have begun as a story told by management, the automation discourse appealed to many on the American left. While classic liberal political thought had held that a free person might work, so long as they worked their own property, the mass dispossession of ordinary people through industrial capitalism now meant that the vast majority worked for wages on property they did not, and would never, own. The automation discourse solved this problem by erasing half of the equation: workers did not need to overcome the alienation caused by industrial modernity by finding freedom in their work, because control over the organization and distribution of labor was decided by the constant progress of science and technology.

But when left tendencies folded the idea of “automation” into their politics, the result was often that the labor process itself, as well as the workplace, lost a great deal of political importance in their analyses and activism. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) set up cells in northern cities to organize what they believed would be masses of white youth unemployed by automation. When they failed to appear, SDS adopted the “New Working Class” theory, calling for its members on college campuses to organize what it believed would be the workers of the future — skilled white collar professionals who would service the machines that replaced industrial workers. (The idea has had staying power as a liberal nostrum, with centrists calling for job-training and “learn-to-code” panaceas under the mistaken assumption that technological change inevitably creates demand for skilled labor.)

James and Grace Lee Boggs, closer to the labor movement than SDS, argued that “automation” would put the lever of revolution into the hands of black Americans by upskilling the white working class and marginalizing black workers to low-paying “scavenger” jobs. People who sought to bring about the revolution by organizing the workplace, the Boggses argued, had misplaced their energies. “These militants who are so advanced,” James Boggs wrote, “are really behind the average worker who has reconciled himself to eventual oblivion.”

Among some radical feminists, the allure of “cybernation” (a late-1960s synonym for automation) premised women’s liberation on an escape from biological reproduction. According to Shulamith Firestone, biology was the cause of sexism, and to liberate women from oppression, society needed first to “free humanity from the tyranny of its biology.” The demands of the body itself, rather than social relations, needed to be mechanized away. A political revolution, according to this view, required a technological one, shifting the site of struggle from the present to the future.

When left tendencies folded the idea of ‘automation’ into their politics, the result was often that the labor process itself, as well as the workplace, lost a great deal of political importance in their analyses and activism.

While Firestone called for escaping reproduction, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) took a different tack. It called on the federal government to compensate mothers for their labor raising the next generation of Americans. Rather than dismiss reproductive labor as inherently degraded, activist Johnnie Tillmon called on President Richard Nixon to issue “a proclamation that women’s work is real work.” If motherhood was properly acknowledged and remunerated, it could be made coherent with a liberated subject. The NWRO, at least, could imagine a social revolution that did not require a technological breakthrough ushered into existence by capital.

A misplaced faith in technological process left both unions and revolutionaries intellectually disarmed. It absolved them of the admittedly difficult task of imagining how to reconcile work and freedom. This remains the task of the Left today, which like the rest of the culture has (understandably) become increasingly dystopian. Technological dystopianism, like technological utopianism, is a kind of fetish and a distraction. It treats capital like a capitalist would — as the decisive force in history.

We do not require technological wonders and an escape from labor to make our world more just. A left politics of work must call not for new powers, but for a more equitable sharing of those powers it currently possesses. That isn’t a question of what the machines will do tomorrow, but what people should do today.

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Vladimir Putin promised to “denazify Ukraine,” but this week he suppressed Russia’s own watchdog monitoring the far right. Unable to crush Ukraine, his government has turned its fire on domestic critics of war and nationalism.

Police officers detain a protester during an unsanctioned rally in protest against the military invasion of Ukraine on September 24, 2022, in Moscow, Russia. (Contributor / Getty Images)

“How are things going for the Russian left? Really poorly,” says the young woman we’ll call Masha, smiling incredulously at what she clearly considers a bit of a stupid question. She’s standing in a Moscow basement, amid the overflowing bookshelves of the small, activist-run Cipollino Library. The collection covers the typical range of leftist literature, from the revolution in Rojava to feminist struggle and the history of the anarchist movement. The library’s name comes from a children’s story by Italian author Gianni Rodari that was popular in the Soviet Union. In Rodari’s tale, a revolutionary onion named Cipollino struggles against the unjust reign of fruits over vegetables. It’s a story of repression and resistance — one that’s become more relevant in today’s Russia than at any other time in Masha’s life.

Since Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, persecution of oppositional organizing, especially from the Left, has escalated dramatically. Given the central role Putin has played in the run-up to and since the invasion — acting the part of decisive commander in chief in several martial speeches to the nation — his government’s future is now intimately tied to the outcomes of his military misadventure in Ukraine. For him, failure in Ukraine is not an option. The genuine popularity Putin had enjoyed since the beginning of his tenure was largely thanks to the fact that he was seen as having returned a degree of stability and economic development to a country reeling from the chaos of the wild, post-socialist 1990s. Now that both stability and economic growth have been sacrificed to foreign-policy goals, the war must somehow be cast as a national triumph, and no criticism of it can be tolerated at home.

This was made clear from day one, as spontaneous antiwar protests were met with violence and mass arrests. Since then, the Russian antiwar movement has been subdued with draconian new laws, introduced swiftly last spring, that criminalize criticism of the invasion as “discreditation of the military” and “spreading of false information.” But despite all official jingoist propaganda, there is not much popular enthusiasm for the war. Although some polls have suggested that large segments of the population condone it, experts have cautioned that response rates are low, and respondents are likely reluctant to answer in ways they fear might be punishable by the newly passed laws. Anecdotal evidence confirms this skeptical interpretation: a year into the war, voluntary displays of pro-war zeal, in the form of Z-patches on clothes or stickers on cars, are so rare in Moscow’s bustling streets, that days can go by without any sightings.

With a clear military victory in Ukraine out of reach, and general moods toward the invasion ambivalent at best, Putin now seems set to at least crush his remaining internal enemies. And while the supposed goal of “denazifying” Ukraine is claimed as a key justification for the invasion, in Russia, it hasn’t been fascists, but rather those struggling for progressive change who have borne the brunt of the ensuing crackdown.

A year into the war, voluntary displays of pro-war zeal are so rare in Moscow’s bustling streets that days can go by without any sightings.

Harassed and Humiliated

It’s a development that the Cipollino Library collective, to which Masha belongs, has experienced firsthand. The library is located in a volunteer-run venue called Open Space, which welcomes initiatives and events considered undesirable by the state. It’s meant to be “a safe space for all,” as a rainbow-colored poster by the entrance proclaims.

In wartime Russia, however, no such safety remains. This became clear one evening in November, when police stormed the premises. It wasn’t just any police either, but what Masha, in Russian activist lingo, calls “cyborgs,” meaning masked men in black tactical outfits. They came for the activists who had gathered on the upper floor to write letters to anarchist political prisoners, but everyone inside, including those down in the library, were detained.

“Guys were made to lie facedown on the floor, women were lined up to face the wall, and everyone had to stay put that way for several hours,” Masha recalls with a shudder. According to her, the detained were forced, under threats of violence, to unlock and show the contents of their phones. A mutual support group for drug users, who happened to be there for their regular meeting, got so terrified by the ordeal that they’ve stopped gathering at the venue.

Since then, the mood at Open Space has remained tense. “We’re a little nervous again tonight,” Masha admits during a conversation one February evening; she continues, “the event currently taking place above is about conditions in the country’s women’s prisons.” But things remained quiet that night. Instead, the “cyborgs” returned last week, on March 19, during a presentation of comics by Sasha Skochilenko, an artist who is herself currently in pretrial detention on charges relating to an antiwar protest action.

Again, the cops were there to harass and humiliate. According to eyewitnesses, one attendee was beaten bloody, while others were forced to sing along to patriotic tunes. It’s a bizarre trend that seems to be spreading, as security officials have declared open season on undesirables: The same week, masked police had also stormed two Moscow bars, which they suspected of being pro-Ukrainian hangouts, and humiliated patrons with a similar enforced sing-along routine.

The more dangerous — that is, capable of political mobilization — those targeted are deemed to be, the harsher the intimidation tactics deployed against them. Take, for instance, the case of Moscow State University math instructor Mikhail Lobanov. In 2021, the self-described democratic socialist ran for his local district’s seat on the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament.

The more dangerous — that is, capable of political mobilization — those targeted are deemed to be, the harsher the intimidation tactics deployed against them.

Though Lobanov was an independent, his candidacy was coordinated with the Communist Party, or KPRF. While this party is loyal to the government on most topics, including foreign policy, its lower echelons have at times had leeway to mount more genuine opposition. Having previously made a name for himself as a union organizer at the university, Lobanov led a grassroots campaign with great success. After all physical ballots had been counted, he led by thousands of votes. Only once online votes came in — a process critics decried as untransparent — the ruling-party candidate, notorious TV-propagandist Yevgeny Popov, suddenly surged to victory.

In the wake of the invasion, Lobanov spoke out against the war, helping initiate, for example, an open letter titled “Socialists and communists against the fratricidal war,” which called on KPRF deputies to defy their party leadership’s complacency and condemn the invasion. Today, Lobanov belongs to the small — and shrinking — number of antiwar politicians remaining inside Russia who have not yet gone to prison. But he has had to pay a price. On December 29, police forced their way into his home, beat him, and detained him for fifteen days.

“The raid was a shock, of course, and very scary,” he says one February day, in the apartment he shares with his wife Aleksandra. On the floor are piles of books, on the wall behind him a handmade sign from a past protest, demanding freedom for a jailed union organizer. The harassment, he explains, is ongoing.

Returning home from a trip to friends in Armenia during the winter break, the couple found a nasty surprise waiting for them: the letter Z, symbolizing Putin’s war against Ukraine as well as against the government’s internal enemies, had been spray-painted on their apartment door. They suspect it’s the work not of random government supporters, but rather of the security services. Their neighbors, too, have been approached by strangers, with questions about the couple’s personal life and routines; recently Lobanov’s in-laws were rudely woken up early one morning by strangers, haranguing about ties they claimed he had to foreign intelligence services.

Enemies Silenced

In parallel to such physical harassment, authorities have also mobilized a range of bureaucratic means, using newly passed laws and new interpretations of existing legislation to shut down venues and organizations deemed enemies of the state.

One such case is the Sakharov Center, a half-hour stroll south from Open Space. The center, named after Soviet nuclear physicist, Nobel Prize laureate, and dissident Andrei Sakharov, has functioned as an archive, exhibition venue, and meeting place dedicated to human rights, democracy, and disarmament since it was established in the early 1990s. While it is generally associated with the liberal spirit that characterized much of the Soviet-era dissident movement, it has also been a hub for Russia’s democratic left. Among its board members is historian Ilya Budraitskis, a driving force behind the Russian Socialist Movement, or RSD.

Authorities have mobilized a range of bureaucratic means to shut down venues and organizations deemed enemies of the state.

“The center has been one of the most important public meeting places for oppositional, independent politics, including for the Left, for social movements, and for trade unions, who would arrange gatherings, conferences, and seminars there”, Budraitskis told Jacobin. Himself in exile since last spring, he adds, “The closing of the center is like a final nail in the coffin for independent politics and civic activity.”

The Sakharov Center’s death sentence came in January, when the city of Moscow — which owns the late dissident’s apartment and a nearby mansion, where the center has been based — terminated the rent-free deal that had made its work there possible. This follows legislation passed this winter, according to which “foreign agents,” meaning organizations that have received financing from foreign donors, must not receive Russian state support.

“This is a catastrophe, an immense loss,” says an elderly man with a background in the arts world, attending the opening ceremony of the center’s final exhibition, on February 15, when asked what the closing of the center meant for him. “It feels like Germany in 1939, what’s happening in our country,” he adds.

“We will continue our informational work in other ways, but exhibitions or events will no longer be possible,” the Sakharov Center’s chairperson, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, said in an address that night. He summed up the situation in today’s Russia: “we are surrounded by red lines, the violation of which is being punished to the full extent of the new laws.”

“Denazification” Versus Antifascism

In some cases, though, the government doesn’t even need to pass new laws to shut down undesirable groups — with the judiciary fully under its control since long ago, new interpretations of existing legislation can do the trick as well. That’s what is currently happening to a renowned think tank, called the SOVA Center. Since its foundation in 2002, it’s been Russia’s top independent watchdog of the domestic far right, monitoring and publishing reports on racism, violent nationalism, and hate crime. More recently, SOVA has also focused on the thousands of instances where Russia’s anti-extremism and hate-speech laws have been abused to silence government critics and opponents of Putin’s war. According to SOVA’s director, Aleksandr Verkhovsky, this is likely the reason it is being shut down.

On Monday, March 20, Russia’s Ministry of Justice officially petitioned Moscow city court to order SOVA’s immediate liquidation, citing the fact that in the past three years, the organization’s staff had participated in twenty-four public events, such as seminars and roundtables, outside the Moscow region. “The law says that a regional organization operates in the region of its registration, in our case Moscow. Now this is suddenly being interpreted literally, such that one must not operate outside this region. It’s ridiculous, of course,” Verkhovsky tells Jacobin. While the case will go to court, it’s unlikely SOVA will prevail. In January, a court in the Russian capital complied with a similar request on nearly identical grounds, and closed down the Moscow Helsinki Group, a human rights organization.

How Verkhovsky and his colleagues will proceed if, or, more likely when, their organization has been liquidated, is yet unclear. “Well, they cannot ban us as people. We will have to find a new juridical form, but we’ll come up with something,” he says defiantly. “After all, they cannot prevent anyone from working on whatever they like, other than by throwing them in jail, of course. So far though, we haven’t seen any such signals.”

Whether such defiant optimism is tenable, however, is another matter. Only a day after this conversation, on Tuesday, March 21, police raided the homes of several key figures of the already-liquidated human rights group Memorial, recipient of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, and charged them with criminal offenses including “discrediting” the Russian military. With the slaughter in Ukraine, that army has already done much to discredit itself. But Putin is at least winning the offensive against enemies closer to home.

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It was not a protest movement, it was an armed insurgency integrated by US-Israeli & allied supported “jihadist” death squads. From Day One, the Islamist “freedom fighters” were supported, trained & equipped by NATO & Turkey’s High Command.

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