Uploaded August 2020 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
This video is a summary of the term "Titoism". I go into the historical person of Josip Broz Tito, explain his role in Yugoslavian politics as well as the Yugoslavian role in world politics at the time.
Patreon: patreon.com/viki1999
Subreddit: reddit.com/r/viki1999
Twitter: twitter.com/Viki1999Yt
E-Mail Address: viki1999mail@gmail.com
Sources:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titoism
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josip_Broz_Tito
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Federal_Republic_of_Yugoslavia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_self-management
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_self-management
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_state_funeral_of_Josip_Broz_Tito
Transcript:
Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of ideology explained. Today we are talking about the most requested ideology: Titoism. Titoism is a very broad term, it generally means that which the former Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz, usually called Tito was doing.
It’s a very hard to define term and to understand it we have to understand Tito himself. He was a leader of partisans in Yugoslavia during the second world war. That means he spent his time leading resistance fighters against the Nazi occupation of his country. At this time, he was best buddies with Stalin because they were fighting a common enemy. He was never on good footing with the western allies, at least not during the war.
TLDR: Tito became the prime minister and later president of Yugoslavia after the war. This was when he started to implement many of his ideas, most of which were communist because, fun fact, he was a communist. We will get into the economic parts of Titoism in a bit. After the war the alliance between Tito and Stalin broke down.
Stalin enforced similar forms of socialism to the centrally planned USSR in most eastern European countries. This was usually done by encouraging the local leftist parties to unite and as soon as they had the majority in parliament they would ban all non-leftist parties. Obviously the USSR made sure to mostly support parties that were USSR friendly.
This is why the eastern bloc counties were often called satellites of the USSR. This is debatable and as I’ve pointed out before, by that standard western Europe was American satellites but I won’t deny that the eastern bloc countries gave up some autonomy in order to work with the USSR more closely.
So it was notable that Yugoslavia, under the leadership of Tito refused to work with the Soviet union to such an extent. Most notably they didn’t join Comecon which, was an agreement by socialist nations about trade. And they didn’t join the Warsaw pact. That was the alliance created by the socialist states to counter NATO and it’s aggression.
Yugoslavia instead founded the non-aligned movement which was a collection of countries that did not wish to take part in the cold war. That means they were neither on the side of the USA and NATO nor on the side of the USSR and the Warsaw pact. This was a 3rd faction in the cold war and it’s usually overlooked. Probably because they weren’t pointing nuclear warheads on other countries.
Yugoslavia under Tito had good relations with both the west and the east, even going as far as to trade with both of them. Tito was very good at diplomacy and made lots of friends. This can be shown by what happened when Tito eventually died. His funeral was the largest state funeral in history.
It included four kings, 36 heads of state, six princes, 40 heads of government, eight Vice Presidents and 47 ministers of foreign affairs, from both sides of the Iron Curtain and beyond. In total, 128 countries were represented. That’s more than 2/3rd of all countries that existed at the time. That’s how beloved he was.
Let’s now have a look at the economy. It was notably different from the one of other socialist states at the time. This was because Tito believed that socialism would have to be achieved differently depending on which country it was established in instead of following a set list of steps written by another country. This again put him at odds with the USSR which had a list of steps it wanted Yugoslavia to follow.
The economy of most socialist states in Europe was a centrally planned state socialist economy which I’ve made a video about before. The Yugoslav economy was structured around the idea of self management which is this word (radničko samoupravljanje) which I will not try to pronounce because it has too many syllables which scares me.
This socialist self-management as it was known was intended to do multiple things. But the main goal was to reduce the prevalence of the state in the economy. A main step towards that was to empower worker’s councils. These councils where made up of all employees of socially owned companies.
This video is a summary of the term "Titoism". I go into the historical person of Josip Broz Tito, explain his role in Yugoslavian politics as well as the Yugoslavian role in world politics at the time.
Patreon: patreon.com/viki1999
Subreddit: reddit.com/r/viki1999
Twitter: twitter.com/Viki1999Yt
E-Mail Address: viki1999mail@gmail.com
Sources:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titoism
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josip_Broz_Tito
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Federal_Republic_of_Yugoslavia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_self-management
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_self-management
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_state_funeral_of_Josip_Broz_Tito
Transcript:
Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of ideology explained. Today we are talking about the most requested ideology: Titoism. Titoism is a very broad term, it generally means that which the former Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz, usually called Tito was doing.
It’s a very hard to define term and to understand it we have to understand Tito himself. He was a leader of partisans in Yugoslavia during the second world war. That means he spent his time leading resistance fighters against the Nazi occupation of his country. At this time, he was best buddies with Stalin because they were fighting a common enemy. He was never on good footing with the western allies, at least not during the war.
TLDR: Tito became the prime minister and later president of Yugoslavia after the war. This was when he started to implement many of his ideas, most of which were communist because, fun fact, he was a communist. We will get into the economic parts of Titoism in a bit. After the war the alliance between Tito and Stalin broke down.
Stalin enforced similar forms of socialism to the centrally planned USSR in most eastern European countries. This was usually done by encouraging the local leftist parties to unite and as soon as they had the majority in parliament they would ban all non-leftist parties. Obviously the USSR made sure to mostly support parties that were USSR friendly.
This is why the eastern bloc counties were often called satellites of the USSR. This is debatable and as I’ve pointed out before, by that standard western Europe was American satellites but I won’t deny that the eastern bloc countries gave up some autonomy in order to work with the USSR more closely.
So it was notable that Yugoslavia, under the leadership of Tito refused to work with the Soviet union to such an extent. Most notably they didn’t join Comecon which, was an agreement by socialist nations about trade. And they didn’t join the Warsaw pact. That was the alliance created by the socialist states to counter NATO and it’s aggression.
Yugoslavia instead founded the non-aligned movement which was a collection of countries that did not wish to take part in the cold war. That means they were neither on the side of the USA and NATO nor on the side of the USSR and the Warsaw pact. This was a 3rd faction in the cold war and it’s usually overlooked. Probably because they weren’t pointing nuclear warheads on other countries.
Yugoslavia under Tito had good relations with both the west and the east, even going as far as to trade with both of them. Tito was very good at diplomacy and made lots of friends. This can be shown by what happened when Tito eventually died. His funeral was the largest state funeral in history.
It included four kings, 36 heads of state, six princes, 40 heads of government, eight Vice Presidents and 47 ministers of foreign affairs, from both sides of the Iron Curtain and beyond. In total, 128 countries were represented. That’s more than 2/3rd of all countries that existed at the time. That’s how beloved he was.
Let’s now have a look at the economy. It was notably different from the one of other socialist states at the time. This was because Tito believed that socialism would have to be achieved differently depending on which country it was established in instead of following a set list of steps written by another country. This again put him at odds with the USSR which had a list of steps it wanted Yugoslavia to follow.
The economy of most socialist states in Europe was a centrally planned state socialist economy which I’ve made a video about before. The Yugoslav economy was structured around the idea of self management which is this word (radničko samoupravljanje) which I will not try to pronounce because it has too many syllables which scares me.
This socialist self-management as it was known was intended to do multiple things. But the main goal was to reduce the prevalence of the state in the economy. A main step towards that was to empower worker’s councils. These councils where made up of all employees of socially owned companies.
