As
President of Yugoslavia,
Josip Broz Tito prided himself on
Yugoslavia's independence from the
Soviet Union, with Yugoslavia never accepting full membership in
Comecon and Tito's open rejection of many aspects of
Stalinism as the most obvious manifestations of this independence. The Soviets and their
satellite states often accused Yugoslavia of
Trotskyism and
social democracy, charges loosely based on Tito's form of
workers' self-management and the theory of associated labor (
profit sharing policies and worker-owned industries initiated by him,
Milovan Đilas and
Edvard Kardelj in 1950). It was in these things that the Soviet leadership accused Tito's Yugoslavia of harboring the seeds of
council communism or even
corporatism. In 1948, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia held its
Fifth Congress. The meeting was held shortly after Stalin accused Tito of being a
nationalist and moving to the
right, branding the latter's heresy
Titoism. This resulted in a break with the Soviet Union known as the
Informbiro period. Initially the Yugoslav communists, despite the
break with Stalin, remained as hardline as before but soon began to pursue a policy of independent socialism that experimented with the self-management of workers in
state-run enterprises, with
decentralization and other departures from the Soviet model of a communist state. Under the influence of reformers such as
Boris Kidrič and
Milovan Đilas, Yugoslavia experimented with ideas of workers' self-management where workers influenced the policies of the factories in which they worked and shared a portion of any surplus revenue. This resulted in a change in the party's role in society from holding a monopoly of power to being an ideological leader. As a result, the party name and the names of the regional branches respectively were changed to the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (, SKJ) in 1952 during its
Sixth Congress. ==Criticism==