SFR Yugoslavia

[Ole]

I'm interested in learning about the economic history of Yugoslavia in this era and am looking for literature recommendations from someone, keeping in mind I don't have any background knowledge. When listening to economists and academics speak about worker's self-management I don't hear any references to the Yugoslavian experiment, which is strange. I feel sure something can be learned from it, and I'd like to get a decent idea what that might be. Thanks.

 

[Idris2002]

My perception is that it was an idea from the party leadership, not from the masses, and that it still fostered the growth of a bureaucratic layer in the society as a whole, and it was unable to overcome the stark regional inequalities that helped tear Yugoslavia apart.

butchersapron will give you a better answer, I suspect.

 

[Favelado]

http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/economy-of-yugoslavia.181382/

 

[Ole]

My perception is that it was an idea from the party leadership, not from the masses, and that it still fostered the growth of a bureaucratic layer in the society as a whole, and it was unable to overcome the stark regional inequalities that helped tear Yugoslavia apart.

butchersapron will give you a better answer, I suspect.

I have a similar perception based on the little I've read around it. I still find it curious that even a reference to Yugoslavia at all is so rare to hear in my experience, but it's possible this is more of a reflection on my gaps in reading.

Cheers for the link to the thread, Favelado. There was only one pamphlet specifically referenced in there, but interestingly this was in its introduction:

Amazingly enough, there's almost nothing of any real value on Yugoslavia in the English language. The best, by Fredy Perlman ("Birth of a Revolutionary Movement" Black and Red, Detroit) appeared in 1969. But it's limited by too much emphasis on the student movement; although to judge from the text, possibly the best critique of capitalist alienation (east and west) in the Eastern bloc came from within the Yugoslav student movement. Which was hardly surprising as Yugoslav Bolshevism was the most westernised of all. The other text published here on Yugoslavia was produced in a limited supply of 35 or so by an individual from the now discontinued Red Menace. In that sense it is unknown. The same person has produced a long pamphlet on Russia - 'Notes on class struggle in the USSR - again in limited supply - which is the best so far in English on contemporary Russia situated in its historical context. A further reprint will be forthcoming.

The same user mentioned Hillel Ticktin's journal 'Critique' having stuff on it which I'll try to pursue.

 

[butchersapron]

Yugoslav Self-Management: Capitalism Under the Red Banner

Yugoslav self-management is a unique historical experiment. Furthermore, it is one of the most interesting formations of, so called, real-socialism up to today, as Yugoslavia broke with the Soviet Union and initiated its own specific economic, political and ideological way. It was a system which publicly criticized “bureaucratic deviations” of the Soviet Union, which shouted “workplaces to the workers,” which “abolished” its own Communist Party and set its own path in Cold War politics. But it was also a system of its own contradictions, a system that criticized the bureaucracy of others while its own was growing, a system that stood for workers’ self-management only on paper while technocrats and managers ran the economy in practice, a system that “abolished” the One Party by just renaming it and a system that raged against imperialism while it took an active role in it.

Well worth the read. With some tips for further reading as well.

Btw the individual mentioned in the post above later expanded that Notes on Class struggle in the USSR into the really useful book Capitalism and Class Struggle in the USSR.

 

[butchersapron]

Oh yeah, the Critique stuff will be from the 70s/early 80s when they were writing about self-management under the rubric of market-socialism, i have hard copies of these and will check what's useful or not when i get home tmw.

 

[butchersapron]

And, for the actual economy see:

Socialist Unemployment:The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945-1990 by Susan Woodward

She had a shorter version of her reading in Socialist Register a few years back as well.

 

[frogwoman]

I'm reading that Susan Woodward book now, cheers butchers.

 

[butchersapron]

I forgot, there's also chapter in the book Ours to Master and to Own: Workers' Control from the Commune to the Present that covers Yugoslavia and others that cover other aspects of workers control under state-capitalism in the old eastern bloc states.

 

[Ole]

Fantastic shares. Nice one butchersapron.

 

[gorski]

None of it is "fantastic" for as long as they peddle this utterly uninformed nonsense of "state capitalism"...

 

[butchersapron]

Go away you silly man.

 

[butchersapron]

None of it is "fantastic" for as long as they peddle this utterly uninformed nonsense of "state capitalism"...

I am the prof - shut up and agree. To dissent is to be 'uninformed' by definition - at least in gorskis' weird closed down authoritarian world view.

You've not read a single one of the links/books/chapters referenced above - not one, gorkers.

 

[gorski]

You deluded, self-aggrandising, poor, poor tortured soul in search of some kind of relevance... Must be really painful - from your own standpoint - to be "without any wide social relevance and have no influence on anything or anybody"...

I read that shite "literature" while studying and laughed my head off, when I wasn't angry with it, its incredible arrogance and intransigence, coming into the issues from a narrow-minded, simplistic dogma that "explained everything to everybody"... The really infuriating bit is their utter ignorance on the issues, as was laughably obvious to any of us studying the matters in any depth and having actually experienced it on our own skin, ergo not easily fooled, like eejuts of your type, living in the West and pontificating to the gullible and uninformed about stuff you will never understand...

To be blunt: I gave you THE insight from the inside, from the best minds of the countries you have never lived in, you have not the first clue of, as opposed to me - my professors', at the heart of Praxis school of thought and everything related to it... We (the rest of the world) had enough of you dogmatic twats from the West telling us what to think of ourselves... We can do that pretty darn well ourselves (check out the Praxis contributors and Korculanska ljetna skola members and so on) - and from this prism alone, this dogmatic and arrogant BS you are spouting here is really pathetic to anyone with any info and experience of ex-YU!

So, kindly fuck off, you arrogant and - as far as ex-YU is concerned - ignorant poseur of the Stalinist kind!!!

 

[butchersapron]

There's just been a new book published in the Historical Materialism book series that should be useful for anyone still pursuing this subject:

Splendour, Misery, and Possibilities: An X-Ray of Socialist Yugoslavia

Suvin's X-Ray of Socialist Yugoslavia offers an indispensable overview of a unique and often overlooked twentieth-century socialism. It shows that the plebeian surge of revolutionary self-determination was halted in SFR Yugoslavia by 1965; that between 1965-72 there was a confused and hidden but still open-ended clash; and that by 1972 the oligarchy in power was closed and static, leading to failure. The underlying reasons of this failure are analysed in a melding of semiotics and political history, which points beyond Yugoslavia including its achievements and degeneration to show how political and economic democracy fail when pursued in isolation. The emphasis on socialist Yugoslavia is at various points embedded into a wider historical and theoretical frame, including Left debates about the party, sociological debates about classes, and Marx s great foray against a religious State doctrine in The Jewish Question."

Here's a collection of translations from Praxis as well as i'm here again:

Praxis: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia.