"Socialist Self-Management: Yugoslav System" with Julie Mostov

Summary

Julie Mostov delves into the intricate history and development of the Yugoslav system of socialist self-management. This experiment, which spanned several decades, was marked by the ambitions of integrating a multi-ethnic federation through a distinct model of socialism that blended elements of collective action, workers' councils, and decentralization, while distancing itself from Soviet orthodoxies. Despite initial successes, the system faced numerous challenges, primarily from nationalistic tensions and economic pressures that eventually contributed to Yugoslavia's disintegration.

Highlights

• Julie Mostov discusses the historical roots of the Yugoslav idea as an anti-imperial movement ⭐
• Self-management was seen as a democratic form of socialism, distinct from Soviet models ⚖️
• Despite decentralization efforts, ethnic and national tensions persisted 🌍
• Economic challenges and increasing nationalism led to the eventual breakdown of Yugoslavia 💔
• Tito's leadership played a significant role in Yugoslavia's international and domestic policies 🌾

Key Takeaways

• Yugoslavia's self-management was unique, integrating socialist principles with local governance ⭐
• The system aimed to balance democracy with centralized economic planning ⚖️
• Tito's leadership was critical to Yugoslavia's initial cohesion and international stance 🌍
• Decentralization was both a strength and a vulnerability, leading to national division 💔
• Economic strategies included self-management and attempts at cooperative agriculture 🌾

Overview

Julie Mostov guides us through the fascinating history of Yugoslavia's socialist self-management system, tracing its roots back to the anti-imperial movements of the late 19th century. She highlights how intellectuals aimed to unite various South Slav groups against empires like the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian. This led to a federation where self-management and workers councils were pivotal in distinguishing Yugoslavia from Soviet models.

Under Tito's pragmatic leadership, Yugoslavia enjoyed a unique position on the global stage, maintaining a degree of independence from Soviet influence. The system combined elements of decentralization and democratization with socialist principles. However, it faced ongoing challenges from within, primarily from nationalist sentiments and differing economic levels among the Republics.

Mostov's analysis underscores the vulnerabilities inherent in Yugoslavia’s structure. The self-management system, while democratically ambitious, was complicated by ethnic tensions and uneven resource distribution. These challenges eventually exacerbated national divides, culminating in Yugoslavia's disintegration, leaving a legacy of both ambitious experimentation and cautionary tales.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 20:00: Yugoslavia History Overview The chapter discusses the history of Yugoslavia, focusing on the general awareness and understanding of its breakdown. It mentions the varying perspectives from journalists and pundits regarding the causes and details of the dissolution. Additionally, it hints at some experimental aspects related to Yugoslavia, though these are not elaborated upon within the given transcript.
• 20:00 - 40:00: Formation of Yugoslav Republics The chapter titled 'Formation of Yugoslav Republics' discusses the history and the profound concept underlying the Yugoslav idea. The speaker clarifies that they are not a historian but a political theorist, suggesting a focus on broader theories and ideas rather than specific historical dates and names. The objective is to explore the deep roots and foundational concepts that contributed to the formation of the Yugoslav republics. The narrative begins with an emphasis on the significant ideas that have historically influenced this geopolitical formation.
• 40:00 - 60:00: Communist Rule and Reforms The chapter discusses the origins of the idea of uniting South Slavs, which dates back to the end of the 19th century. It highlights that some intellectual movements at the time aimed at resisting dominant powers and fostering unity among the South Slavic people.
• 60:00 - 80:00: Self-Management Socialism The chapter discusses the concept of self-management socialism within the context of resisting empires, particularly focusing on the political dynamics and intellectual movements among Slovene, Croat, and Serb intellectuals and leaders as they seek to unite against imperial powers like the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires.
• 80:00 - 100:00: Relations with Soviet Union The chapter discusses the varying perspectives on the concept of Yugoslavia, particularly around World War I. It highlights the notion of leveraging Yugoslav unity to break free from the empires of the time.
• 100:00 - 120:00: Economic Challenges and Changes The chapter titled 'Economic Challenges and Changes' discusses the historical context of decisions made at the end of the Balkan Wars. It explores how the idea of Yugoslavia was perceived, not only as a romantic notion of South Slav unity or resistance to the Empire, but also as a platform for nationalist aspirations. The narrative delves into the complexities and conflicts that arose during this period, illustrating the intertwining of idealistic and nationalistic motives.
• 120:00 - 140:00: Internal Political Dynamics The chapter 'Internal Political Dynamics' discusses the movements of smaller and larger national groups aiming to break free from various empires. It highlights the Serbs' desire for unification and the Croatians' challenge in achieving independence without sufficient strength or a military, referring to their long-standing aspiration for statehood.
• 140:00 - 160:00: Regional Autonomy Dispute The chapter titled 'Regional Autonomy Dispute' discusses the involvement of Slovenians, who were relatively small in number, in the broader movement for regional autonomy. These Slovenians, along with other Slavic groups in the vicinity, were often considered to be assimilated or overshadowed within larger imperial structures. Despite their size, they were part of different movements aiming for recognition and autonomy. The narrative highlights the complexities and challenges faced by these ethnic groups as they navigated relationships with larger powers and their aspirations for self-determination.
• 160:00 - 180:00: Legacy of Yugoslavia The chapter titled 'Legacy of Yugoslavia' explores the complex political landscape following World War One. It highlights the diverse political factions and negotiations that occurred across regions. Agrarian and Radical parties played significant roles, particularly in key capital cities such as Zagreb and Belgorod. These interactions and struggles among different political leaders were pivotal in shaping the post-war socio-political environment of Yugoslavia.

"Socialist Self-Management: Yugoslav System" with Julie Mostov Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 so Julie please you start us and then okay great so I don't know how many people know about Yugoslavia I mean a lot of people know about the breakdown of Yugoslavia right and and I've heard a lot from journalists or from various different pundits and so forth about what the reasons and so on and so forth and some people may have heard about you know this experiment and so forth about
• 00:30 - 01:00 self management but um so I thought I would just do you know I talked to after a little bit about this and I thought I would just do a little quick history I'm not a historian I'm a political theorist so you know we generally ignore all of those details of dates and names and so on and so forth and I'll start with the big ideas well let's start with the big idea so the yuccas love idea actually has some very deep roots it roots people
• 01:00 - 01:30 would say were it as early as the end of the 19th century there are some who talk about it in terms of a illyrian movement the uniting of all South Slavs and so on but it definitely was a part of this sort of 19th century end of 19th century intellectual movement resistance to some
• 01:30 - 02:00 m2 Empire let's say Ottoman Empire huffs burg Empire and the common ideas among intellectuals left and others to find some way to bring people together to resist empires and let's say leading figures were among Slovenes Croats and Serbs various different degrees various
• 02:00 - 02:30 different understandings of what that might mean and by the time we get to the period let's say a world around World War one already the idea of Yugoslavia is very much a part of this idea of how do we get out of the empires that were part of how do we gain some sort of leverage in World
• 02:30 - 03:00 War one how do we resist certain decisions that were made really at the end of the balkan wars and so on and so in some way already the idea of Yugoslavia seen not just to be the sort of romantic idea of South Slavs or resistance to Empire but they were also nationalists strivings and of course as you know at that time there was a lot of
• 03:00 - 03:30 movement of small national groups or larger national groups who are trying to throw off the yoke let's say of the various empires and so you might you know you might have even heard it's like you know finding a way to have all serbs under one roof Croatians saying this is a way we're not were to meet we're not strong enough to be able to have our thousand-year dream of an independent state and without an army without some
• 03:30 - 04:00 other support and slovenians who actually very small and likely to be taken oh you know sort of fit and emerge or submerged in empire were also part of this idea and to lesser degree some of the other slobs who were in the neighborhood were also connected as part of these sort of various movements so
• 04:00 - 04:30 World War one there were various periods of negotiations among the people who were let's say different leaders of many parties so there are agrarian parties there were Radical parties in all of these areas around the capitals so Gianna Crowe has is on CREB the Belgorod and for the most part some of the other areas as well and so they were trying to
• 04:30 - 05:00 hash out an agreement and of course it was it he's engaged in a huge amount of back-and-forth and struggles and each within the Serbs there were a lot of conflict compressions there were conflicts and so and so forth it's really interesting period you know if you're interested in history that interwar period is fascinating I think from all the countries in the area who were trying to find a where I'm sure and to you know this time was particularly interesting and hungry you know sort of
• 05:00 - 05:30 them and various other places in the region but out of all of this and out of these various different negotiations and so forth they came to a kind of an agreement in 1924 a constitution constitutional parliamentary monarchy which would be headed by the courage or German dynasty which was the Serbian dynasty and it would be the kingdom of
• 05:30 - 06:00 the serbs croats and slovenes it would so that sort of the three major branches of the South Slav people's and two languages Croatian and slow being three religions Orthodox Christianity Catholicism and the Muslims from Bosnia and okay so that was sort of where they were they are through the Paris Peace
• 06:00 - 06:30 Pro Paris peace agreement they came up with this the agreement in 1921 and nobody was happy okay that's important to remember because in later days people say oh it was a you know it was a made-up country or that it was imposed from the you know sort of allies in order to sort of settle the peace and so for that it was created in their side
• 06:30 - 07:00 there were a lot of different phrases that later day nationalists or of who were against the idea of first Yugoslavia argue but in fact it really was and if you look at the historians from the region even once were from different regions and later disagreed on many things that it definitely was in an indigenous movement let's say to create this state which even at the time that
• 07:00 - 07:30 it was finally created it nobody was happy with it Serbs one happy Croatians weren't happy slow means less you know and so on and yet the Serbs were a larger number but also here's the key point while they're Croatians were already wealthier in terms of their economy and more developed they the only the only group that was independent already was Serbia they were already independent from the Ottoman Empire and
• 07:30 - 08:00 the other two were you know sort of slightly to get out of the house per capita or the austro-hungarian Empire and also the sorts of the only one had a military and you know established King at the time so that's how that ended up the Communist Party which is interesting for us was very active at the time and in the 20s and but it had wasn't that
• 08:00 - 08:30 large in terms of its numbers I've been getting different numbers something like 12,000 some 17,000 very large actually in terms of the youth movement though so in any case they of course did not agree with one another either and those agreements went across her national lines and also sort of more or less more more in turn in in line with Soviets and so forth but those divisions were
• 08:30 - 09:00 typical at the time and and there was a pretty strong Soviet about Soviet influence obviously just one that one is in the war and also in their revolutions and so on so there were a lot of peasant and you know the high peasantry in Serbia more let's say working-class in the industrial in in Croatia Slovenia some trade union movements already and
• 09:00 - 09:30 so on and and of course as I said there were a lot of factions within the party so that's going to be interesting and that's also something that one might you know study at a certain point but one of the other things I think it's interesting dimension is it in the 20s there it was also an incredibly lively cultural space in Ballarat Zagreb and
• 09:30 - 10:00 Ljubljana so already there were many newspapers theater film they were even you know connected sort of following the Hollywood films you know and so on then but a lot of theater a lot of theater I love music and as I said journals literary journals and newspapers some of them were nationalist oriented so you
• 10:00 - 10:30 know obviously there was already that you know sort of literary journals some of them were on the left like Satanists you may remember the name curtilage andrew and they probably heard of some of those people who would go through the Belgrad felt a little bit more cosmopolitan in some way it was the capital of the kingdom of the serbs croats and slovenes but the university was lively scene but zagreb and
• 10:30 - 11:00 ljubljana looked and felt more european so you know so that's the scene at the time as I said there were a lot of different factions in the Communist Party by 1928 it had the leadership of the Ubisoft Communist Party had already moved out of Serbia and the leader was Josip Broz Tito Tito is his nickname you know his name nom de Geer so anyway so
• 11:00 - 11:30 he was sort from the left and let's say action and coming out of the trade union movements and so on in in Zagreb so this is kind of fun stuff to give there but if you what we did he we saw a lot of conflicts so in that period up until I think I was in somewhere in the 20s one of the
• 11:30 - 12:00 Macedonian left let's say part of the Communist Party or no I think it was a boss again yeah Bosnia miloradovitch anyway he was part of the Communist Party but of one of the left factions actually assassinated assassinate oh he assassinated the minister and he was a
• 12:00 - 12:30 minister of police yeah in any case the party was banned so the Communist Party gets banned up until then it participated in lively let's say inter-party debates and so on but the inner party debates weren't in fact so let's say vicious that three members 3 radical radicals from this radical Serbian Serbian Radical Party shot three members of the crew one of the Croatian
• 12:30 - 13:00 parties and the major Croatian leader skip and ravage in Parliament you know people love you referred to that so ok so using that and other kind of struggles that were going on in 1929 the they repeal the constitutional Parliament and really was a period of the kingdom of Yugoslavia 29 to 34 so that was a period of consolidation of
• 13:00 - 13:30 power and it was a complicated period in that in a wartime it's really interesting to think about in terms of what happened later in Yugoslavia and that is the fact that they had three rail race systems I think they had three currencies they had you know all of these economic obstacles plus many other kinds of you know certain nationalism and then the party party politics and so
• 13:30 - 14:00 on so now that period was a very complicated period and at the same time there were some very interesting sort of relationships developed over that time so there was an assassination of alexander ii ii in marseille and by Croatian terrorists so they say yeah yeah and but at the time 1934 what was
• 14:00 - 14:30 interesting is is that after that period there is a period of relaxation and an attempt for everybody to sort of try again with the multi-party system and so there were elections in 1935 but of course at the same time we're seeing the threats from the neighborhood in terms of the Nazis on one side and Mussolini on the other so with the annexation of
• 14:30 - 15:00 Hungary in 1938 that's an immediate neighbor you have that tension and then Mussolini is claiming the Adriatic and the Axis powers will stay hungry Bulgaria you know sort of joined so body 1941 there's a huge amount of pressure on the region Paul to join the axis
• 15:00 - 15:30 otherwise they will be obliterated and one of the most famous sayings that wasn't one of the first things I learned when I was learning the language was Paul yath lego pot bouillon girl a bowl you're a grub roll which basically means better war than the pact and better the brave them to be a slave so anyway this was a big statement people
• 15:30 - 16:00 resisted the signing of this pact and through principle out and they established you know sort of a coup another he was government and then the Nazis decided that that was a really bad example to allow to go forward and of course they went in so on and they capitulated two weeks later on in 1941 in April so in that right period right
• 16:00 - 16:30 after that of course then they began various different groups in resistance and there were two let's say were three things that are going on so there were the Chetniks Royalists and and at first got support from the West let's say Churchill and some of those folks who were jammie Karlovich that they were you know sort of along with allies against
• 16:30 - 17:00 both communists and against against Ted the Nazis and and they were like sort of guerrilla fighters very romantic-looking in terms of that year you know their most moustaches and so on and so forth on the other hand there were the hosts ah she who were the Croatian let's say extremists who nationalists who believed that they were going to get an independent state supported by the
• 17:00 - 17:30 Germans and and then there were the partisans and the partisans actually had the broad broadest reach across the country under the leadership of tito at the communist party and they were very and she amazing lee shrewd and very pragmatic and that they developed the anti-fascist alliance so that it brought everybody who was against the fascists who were against invaders who are
• 17:30 - 18:00 against Outsiders together and they you know sort of actually did an admirable job and it's very impressive job and one funny against the Chetniks or of course thinking to themselves you know if the Allies win and you know we want to be the ones who are in position to rule and we don't want and then we'll get the King back and so on and then we don't want to have these communists in our way so they actually became maybe more violent against the communists then
• 18:00 - 18:30 against fascists and of course then you had the host a she who were pretty brutal and there's a lot of brutality in throughout the country well killing a lot of really ugly killing and so on and then at the same time you have the broad-based anti-fascist Union alliance
• 18:30 - 19:00 and that under Tito's leadership and the slogan of brotherhood and unity and so forth and the idea that once the Communists would once the there was a victory of the anti-fascist Union that alliance that in fact the Communists would come you know would would rule but everybody would have a part and that all nations would be respected all different nationalities would be respected and and
• 19:00 - 19:30 so out of the war this becomes sort of leading the the leaders and slowly tito gained the support of slowly gained the support of the allies as well at the end in the war and so they had two meetings of what was called as noi and the newest
• 19:30 - 20:00 love would be this federation under the war the alliance and one was in 1942 one was in 1943 1943 is celebrated is the formation of the Federation of the second Juba Slavia and what's important to remember about as no you might see it written somewhere ad and OJ is that when talking about the borders of us la vía
• 20:00 - 20:30 they often will refer to the ethmoid borders so those were the borders were established at that time in the midst of the war and often when people are talking about you know sort of recognizing the Republic's as independent countries today after the war the breakdown of Yugoslavia the idea wasn't said all of the let's say Europe and the United States did not want changing of those borders and so there was this whole argument about
• 20:30 - 21:00 recognizing they have my borders of course nationalists were never happy with those borders because they didn't you know they didn't in the end you know under Yugoslavia they succeeded in some way of providing all serbs under one roof of recognizing croatia as it spread all over into Bosnia Herzegovina and dealing with all those people who were not one of the three constituent nations to begin with oh it's Serbs and Slovenes
• 21:00 - 21:30 so at first it looked like the best solution to everybody the abnormal legit and and the ethmoid borders but of course Frank even the very start their work irredentist and others who did not accept my borders and called them coming US borders so it is it you know sort of interesting moment okay so after that and with you know
• 21:30 - 22:00 sort of the all of the opening up of some I mean after the end of the war and so on the Communists had the majority because of the broad-based anti-fascist alliance they had the majority so they did allow for multi-party system this was what she don't had promised so that all the nations would be recognized in Yugoslavia all the Republic's would represent the different nations and nationalities and that there would be
• 22:00 - 22:30 this opportunity for Brotherhood unity and it lasted for a couple years except for that of course multi-party system hearkened back to the years of earlier where I mentioned to you that you know sort of three members of parliament were shocked and so on so there was a lot of into party battle and this is one of the reasons later on that some of the those people who constructed who designed the universal Constitution designed it with this idea of a no party
• 22:30 - 23:00 system not one party system by the no party system ie that the League of Communists was a leading subjective force but that it was not a dictatorship of the party but the idea was a multi-party system had always led to difficulties in Yugoslavia and so that's something that they always back to that either party system led to nationalists defying parties or would or interesting battles and so that was one of those
• 23:00 - 23:30 reasons so of course what happens the beginning of you was second Yugoslavia is in many ways like the beginning of the first one significant economic differences significant economic challenges enormous you know hurdles that all countries face after the war and but really you know ravages that and of course unbelievably violence internet
• 23:30 - 24:00 in intra Rubin nationalism massacres and other kinds of bloodletting that happened with sort of the groups that I mentioned so techniques especially and then partisans you know claimed not to be to be free of that and for the most part they were but there were some followed immediately following the war some retribution the expulsion of the
• 24:00 - 24:30 Germans from from voivode inna and parts of the country and so on and so you know there was a period in which it was fairly unstable but the idea was is that we're all coming together in a second Yugoslavia this is an opportunity for all of us once again and with the spirit of the anti-fascist Alliance and Brotherhood unity we should be able to get over those and indeed they did
• 24:30 - 25:00 some really amazing things but of course they still had the problem that they have been they have made an agreement to support Soviets and allow Soviet help during their resistance to the Nazis but do you know have been very clear but yes you know and then also allowed the Soviets to go over Yugoslavia music space in their fighting but with the idea that they would have to leave and would have no part stay actually lived
• 25:00 - 25:30 up to that for the most part however immediately wanted to sort of you know control with the common form they wanted to control of the the independent practice of the Communist Party uh here is another area which Tito proved to be quite slick one would say he was able through his own experience of having been in jail and his own experience of his Soviet Union and some other of the
• 25:30 - 26:00 leaders and so forth they were able in fact to realize that he was going to be assassinated at one of his visits to Bulgaria and in 1948 and then in 1949 they broke and fully in 49 with Stalin that was not easy and there were a lot of internal Stalinists who are not happy about that so members of the Communist Party who are not happy about it Tito was able to do that because he had that broad-based support and also there
• 26:00 - 26:30 on the west they were interested in having you know Slavia the sort of neutral and and so there was you know a lot of vying for their support their support or their neutrality or their breaking with the Soviets people did not expect it and it was interesting there was a lot of repercussion that were Stalinists you know in the party who are not happy about it and and so then later we found out let's
• 26:30 - 27:00 say beginning of 4950 that in fact there were was a certain prison called the goalie all talk we're for it for people who were against the break was fallen and other people who had to be sort of you know considered internal enemies which is remained even until the end of Yugoslavia a sort of a sore spot for the Communists so what happens in their early days the early fifties they
• 27:00 - 27:30 still were pretty influenced by the Soviet Union and right after the war didn't have the resources so they moved for pretty extreme measures in terms of collectivization great film when father was away on a business trip post loves me anyway it's a great film about that early period where everybody had been
• 27:30 - 28:00 sort of together the peasants weren't expecting it and then there were these sort of attempts at collectivization did not work and was abandoned soon afterwards but it was pretty pretty Orthodox pretty rigid in those first years and of course there there were a paranoia distrust you know a sort of demoralisation that you know sort of disappointment and so it for many it was
• 28:00 - 28:30 a very complicated time at the same time for instance there was a revenge going on so the Yugoslavia sided that they would kill the leader of us they of course he had triumphed I love each and he was a leader of the Chetniks and he was sentenced to death yet West was not happy as they liked him because originally remember he had been an ally Churchill's and and at the same time as Stampa nuts who was a Croatian bishop he
• 28:30 - 29:00 was jailed and then later you know some people wanted him recently to be a saint but he was a pretty bad guy in terms of collaboration with the Nazis and but anyway Croatians some Croatian nationalists were very upset he was in prison not put to death okay so that gives us you know where are they Yuba sauce well so after they grow broken with Stalin and you know they're it's beginning of the fifty they have to
• 29:00 - 29:30 figure out some of these things like you know so the rigidity of collectivization didn't work and so forth they were surprisingly as I said pragmatic and so they started thinking about where would they you know sort of how would they distinguish themselves and that's where we get to self-management socialism and going back to earlier roots of this sort of left intellectuals who are many of them interested in influenced by early
• 29:30 - 30:00 and Arco single syndicalists or the idea of workers collectives and so in the 50s they realize a need for some discussion around democratization they weren't gonna have party politics but they needed to sort of break with the scholars and distinguished themselves in one hand allow for this support for the different nationalities and so forth and
• 30:00 - 30:30 respect a sort of tradition of the local and an earlier sort of workers notions browser worker self-management and so forth and so they actually began and one of the people was really forward-thinking in this of this finding and Ricardo obviously Alexander G loss and some of the others were all partisans part of this sort of internal group from different Republic's which is interesting they had this idea that they
• 30:30 - 31:00 would promote a kind of more humanist more democratic idea drawing on their past which would be based in self managing units of the workers themselves and so this was you know certain 1952 there was a kind of reform G us as sort of more liberal review
• 31:00 - 31:30 Jews came to for Cardinal goes to visit visit ah Scandinavia he's impressed by this and so on and they start talking about it's not just the party but the stay you know withering away and so forth and that there would be you know sort of the space for the trade unions space for all of these different groups that have one time been part of this broad alliance of the anti-fascist alliance so so these are sort of going on at the same time of course that gos
• 31:30 - 32:00 becomes a little bit too confident in there's a little bit too critical of the bureaucracy and so forth and the solidification teto began getting nervous about losing control of the center and so from then on you begin to see an interesting sort of pattern in which the party would relax a little bit there would be these reforms that would even be this sort of you know theoretically the mention very
• 32:00 - 32:30 strongly of the early marks early works of Marx and so forth and sort of been opening up and then getting very nervous about that opening up and a closing starts and fits whenever the movement of these sort of revisions reforms and democratization would look like it was getting out of hand there you know there would be a sort of a stop so from about 50 mid 50s after gee let's have been in prison for going
• 32:30 - 33:00 too far then there was a sort of a back went back to some reforms let's say 58 to 60 you know onwards there was a new revisionist reform movement and at the same time this is a typical tiel he began to see that he had to keep the balance of all the leadership of the Republic's because the Republic's were you know sort of the constituent parts
• 33:00 - 33:30 of the Federation and very interesting designed so that every every constituent people had its own Republic so you had you know the Slovenians had Slovenia and yet serbs heads 30 had the Croatians had Croatia and then the Montenegrins got Montenegro Macedonians which are very complicated very interesting story about I said only have not to discuss now because of their relationship with Bulgaria and so on that they got nice donea so they became
• 33:30 - 34:00 the Constituent peoples of the wasabi they each have their own Republic what to do about Bosnia so Bosnia the largest purse the largest number of people there were I'll say the majority were not a not a heavy majority but a large large number people were bossy and Muslims and and so Croatians
• 34:00 - 34:30 had wanted to take over be Nia there were parts of it that were Serb stock because they were heavily populated by serfs but the idea was is that this would be the only of the Republic's that would somehow rather be represented by bossy hands as a constituent people it didn't happen yet that happens 74 confirmed them but it begins to be sort of the outline and then some of these smaller nationalities as they called em gnarled mystique would have provinces
• 34:30 - 35:00 and those were the problems is avoid Wadena and and Kosovo which were the Albanians and they became part they were part of Serbia larger Serbia but you know but then in Serbia proper was you know was part of that assembly so that sort of was the way in which the Republic was being developed but you don't have to sort of play this balancing game because each one of these
• 35:00 - 35:30 Republic's had its own Communist Party its own leadership and obviously as I said before they all had their own economies they had their own traditions and so on and internal struggles so what Tina would do is sort of play one side off the other so there were important moments for instance in the 60s there was the Ronco Beach affair so he was the head of the secret police and people were getting upset that Serbia was getting too much power
• 35:30 - 36:00 that was always the concern Branca which was still a hardliner and and it turns out this is sort of the gossip if you live in Belgrade you would hear all these kind of gossip this was the one that wrong kovitch went so far as to even wiretap Tito and that was the end of that anyway he was purged and but because they have perched on Ovid she was a server band leading the servant on his part they had to sort of begin thinking about the purge on the other side and so then the Croatians had had
• 36:00 - 36:30 this sort of moment with more reform and openness so forth had something that's later called my spoke which was his sort of movement mass movement and a lot of young people involved in it some of it became pretty nationalist and so there was a clamping down on the leaders of the mass so there's again that sort of balancing act and just to make sure that no one party felt like it wasn't you know it's very beginning it wasn't in
• 36:30 - 37:00 line okay a lot of economic problems still and difficulties in sort of getting moving forward there was some money from the West Tito was also building his foreign policy to sort of gain strong relationships with non-aligned movement and so forth and in the mid to late 60s though there were a
• 37:00 - 37:30 number of strikes okay so there was a lot of there was unrest and some of the strikes were handled better than others the trade union still an uneasy relationship what's the relationship of the trade union party with regard to the other organizations of society and and the beginning of self-management this idea that the workers were going to really have a say and define the workings of you know the country in their selves where they lived in work
• 37:30 - 38:00 this was certainly the way of talking about it and that there would be equal rights for all people else and so forth what's really developing as an idea but wasn't exactly happening in place and of course 68 so 68 is a period in all over Europe where young people were were looking at their firstly began in the Universities and there was issues around the pay the cost of universities then it
• 38:00 - 38:30 was the question that they weren't being listened to then it was the fact that there were all kinds of inconsistencies the bureaucracy was Richard that it wasn't living up to its ideals and all of these things so 68 blew up and it had to do with dormitory issues in Bell Braun and then this spread to Croatia imagine they spread in like two days everything of this movement from one town to another and they didn't even have internet it was
• 38:30 - 39:00 really fantastic how they were able to sort of develop the student movement and of course they renamed the students renamed the University of Bell Road Karl Marx University because their argument was not against communism but they felt that they were being betrayed in those reforms that humanism that idea of workers self-management so forth which the party was disposing to distinguish
• 39:00 - 39:30 itself but they hadn't really seen it in practice and then they were siding with the workers and the strikes and then of course what happens everywhere the police responded brutally with two you know the students gathering together and then of course they all they develop quite an amazing Network strike since quite a long time that they occupy occupy the University which led to a flourishing of a lot of different cultural activity across Europe and opening at you as well okay so let me
• 39:30 - 40:00 just quickly join so this then pushed attack on one hand on the sort of traditional liberals who were then used in Serbia and so what legend parentage and so on as sort of the ones who are responsible for their sort of liberal bourgeois bad influences and others were seen as you know some concessions were made to the students who were seem to be you know sort of true having the left spirit but maybe
• 40:00 - 40:30 being sort of let down led astray and so forth and so on so that there was a kind of opening but under a very organized systematic design of the Constitution dealing with - you know I say two major issues one was confirming the role of the Republic's in the Constitution which started in the 60s and was formulated
• 40:30 - 41:00 completely in the 74 Constitution and then the system of human soft self management with all of its very complicated cards phone yes and so this that very complicated and elaborate system how people solve self management which didn't actually have some really very important factors in it also was matched with an opening of borders in
• 41:00 - 41:30 the 70s students moving and traveling getting full brides participating in Congress's across United States opening of Yugoslavia to tourists and to various different intellectuals and groups passports easily acquired a bank accounts personal bank accounts more newspapers journals and so forth and a very interesting time at the same time
• 41:30 - 42:00 always that moment of not knowing quite how far you could go so that once some people live little too far like what the Praxis grouped and so forth then and then they were criticized for undermining the system one of my closest friends never chapeau co-published tried to publish book in 78 which described the conflicts in society first starting with strikes and then of course the 68
• 42:00 - 42:30 student movement that book was shredded and then you know the cloaca that was burned taken off all the shelves and then he tried to publish it again in 83 them wasn't allowed and finally it was republished in 1990 so there was you know sort of always this opening and closing opening and closing which then led to through that period though a lot of prosperity at the same time that in
• 42:30 - 43:00 developing them sort of market socialist model that you see just part of the design of he was lost self management is that you you also had the heel of government taking on a lot of debt because as they were developing and growing and reaching out and the non-aligned movement and so on they also were getting credit from IMS and workday which put them in a very difficult position with if economic crises later
• 43:00 - 43:30 in the 80s and then demands in the late 80s for that money to be returned and which exacerbated the tensions of the wealthier parts of Yugoslavia and the poorer parts of Yugoslavia with growing nationalism and then the split of the country and one of the things that I wanted to know when I wrote this article in early eighties that there were already problems wild the system of
• 43:30 - 44:00 Yunus love self management had great potential it also had been set up in such a way that intentionally you know non unintentionally but then there were the consequences were that it actually led to further centrifugal force that they used to say disintegration in terms of political and a lack of political integration of the people across
• 44:00 - 44:30 Republic's and interest groups they have this thing about self-management pluralism of interests but all of those interests were harmonized in Republican or regional and then Republican fashion and so that any kind of integrative her nation of interests even if done by or with the leadership of the Communist Party and the Socialists and so forth and through these mechanisms of
• 44:30 - 45:00 self-management where people lived and were rich at the local level actually we're pretty good that there were these disintegrated forces at the same time and by the time the country had broken up there were economies such that for instance a pharmaceutical country company in in Croatia did more business with Germany or Austria than with the other Republic's within the so there was a lot of disincentive the in the economy
• 45:00 - 45:30 and then disincentives in the political system okay thank you very much there are you know some some questions which which order the direction that you were just talking about and so I would like to ask them I mean you know in some
• 45:30 - 46:00 sense though the liberation deliver Flavia was unique as against the the other countries further to the north still there is one point that say point zero when the development of the people's democracies and Yugoslavia where more or less in the same place and you know you mentioned things like the
• 46:00 - 46:30 attempt the collectivization but this was attempted and of course brief periods of multi-party ISM elsewhere too were abolished in Yugoslavia and so in that sense there's a common starting point and no there's a lot of people have written on this and I'm sure you really know this very well the reasons for for the Stalin Tito split
• 46:30 - 47:00 not have anything to do with the internal issues that perhaps do have something to do with the internal party conflicts but not be their internal structural issues that must an important extent a foreign policy and international is true both connected to go to the overbearing influence that the
• 47:00 - 47:30 submit' Union played for its satellites which us laughs are in better position to resist also some policy differences I think there was a disagreement over Greece Greece yeah absolutely Yugoslavia would have liked to continue support the partisan movement Stalin was more realistic and and did not and so there were some conflicts of this time but still they did not have to do with internal structure they were your Sami
• 47:30 - 48:00 was falling in line even though it was of course in many respects are very different much more complex structure than the others and then following now I wouldn't be able to date it I'm sure you can date it let's say ten years after the death split which is caused by the external factor then there is this desire to to create another model or two
• 48:00 - 48:30 to do state socialism differently or to reorganize such a system on a structural lines so the first question I have to you is is the did this have to do with realization that the Soviet type systems had very severe drawbacks we will talk about on Thursday with sense you ready an economist considerably the economic
• 48:30 - 49:00 flaws of such a structure was there any of your consciousness of that and then sort of one question and the desire to do it differently was because because they didn't think the thing would work now you know I'm not sure if I can gonna get the dates right now but in 56 when you were stabbed you was put in a somewhat difficult position with respect to polish and Hungarian Uprising you know
• 49:00 - 49:30 it could have the self management system was not yet instituted right so did did those those uprisings indicated some way that the Soviet type staying in its Orthodox form was not a good idea that's the yeah Lucas consoles appears both in Hungary and Poland they were spontaneous they were not plans from above but maybe in
• 49:30 - 50:00 some sense that was a source of the idea that maybe that's a line that one could pursue in distinction to the other model so that's my first question and the second question is probably more difficult at one point I noticed you mentioned relative prosperity right and because for preparing for Senshi Reddy's presentation I read Cornell his chapter on self-management and I think that the
• 50:00 - 50:30 the general view of an economist like him and probably others he hungry : at least if not necessary go Slavia was that self-managing system was not structurally an improvement over state socialism that it would still be an economy for example under the soft budgetary constraint and the supported independence of the firm under worker
• 50:30 - 51:00 management was was not real and so in that sense the shortage phenomena characteristic of state socialism would not be solved it's also coordination with respect to market socialism by the way and that's a minor question to what extent self managing system was that was connected to the market what extent is this aversion of market socialism but the big question is did this thing work did this thing work on a purely economic
• 51:00 - 51:30 level because the way you introduced its eventual crisis is to the national factor right that's what he said well the thing because it was decentralized on a national level and because they were a publisher so different then he began to establish their own foreign relations of the foreign economic relation so you can indicate that is the national factor that made this thing eventually not work yeah did it work on
• 51:30 - 52:00 its own so the first question again to repeat was the introduction of the system to some extent the result of an understanding that the classical Stalinist command economy let's call it that was not really working it was not a good idea to the extent that you wanted to make this thing work and not break down like Poland and Hungary were on the verge of a breakdown Czechoslovakia - in the 60s was this an attempt to actually
• 52:00 - 52:30 do something else something better and of course there were some intellectual cultural political reasons for doing it that way and the second thing second question is did this thing ever really work as a alternative organization of a socialist economy so those are my two questions yeah so on the first one it certainly their first couple years in
• 52:30 - 53:00 a soviet-style command economy did not go well at all of course one could say following the war and the conditions and so forth then that that that would been a pretty hard in any case but it didn't go very well and immediately they realize that it went against a lot of the a lot of the traditional the traditional economic
• 53:00 - 53:30 development and and let's say opportunities and resources in the country so they were fairly adaptable and that flexibility and adaptability actually allowed for the reintroduction of some private property and more collection collective you know sort of a cooperative a cooperative organization
• 53:30 - 54:00 that was already in the early in the mid fifties that's already in the mid fifties and so rec and then of course because they had these early tradition of workers self-management and even going back to somebody like such as a markavitch and so on in the nineteenth century they ruined said you know this is our authentic workers councils and so on and it worked well with the structure
• 54:00 - 54:30 of the sort of existing structures that they had and with the idea that decentralization and democratization went together they never resisted the word democracy and democratization they defined it their way but they use it quite often so that it was a really good way to sort of strengthen this idea that we're gonna start bottom-up and everybody then you know sort of repeated this in various different ways the question was what about the party
• 54:30 - 55:00 wasn't gonna be bottom-up or top-down and so that's where there were a lot of differences on that but the early on saw that they were not going to do well and then in order to get buy-in so we would say today that the self management system was a way to do it and then of course they adapted a lot of their political rhetoric to that and the party adapted in some ways not all people adapted to that and of course
• 55:00 - 55:30 that's where some of the differences were and so no definitely they will argue even people who are later critics of you know something it was long Yugoslavia argued that this did come out of their sort of own traditions and so on I think you're probably right they all knew one another they were influenced probably about their Hungarian polish counterparts and but
• 55:30 - 56:00 also they were very resistant to that hard heavy-handed hit heavy handedness of the Soviets I mean the Yugoslavs were not you know they were not they were they made some subs made some bad calculations on who these people were and because they had had their that they were able to resist they were able to carry that off I mean if they had not
• 56:00 - 56:30 had the support of obviously the large population behind them they had a huge popular majority in the first couple years after the war you know even in this multi-party system they just you know one of the things is that they were never confident enough they would let something go and then they got nervous but they were losing control on the big clamp down and you can see this there's a lot of different periods of that so the second question did it work uh there were some very
• 56:30 - 57:00 successful firms well mostly because I would I mean there were two things one because they were following the market in many ways and they did have a combined you will of the market in certain things so some of the some of the the factories actually these firms were very successful now was it because of the
• 57:00 - 57:30 management from the local basic organizations associated labor and all of the sort of mechanisms that or on top of it they got a certain amount of buy-in and a certain amount of leeway from strikes that they might have had not have had as early and particularly in the better managed and the wealthier firms and so this bought some let's say some sort of labor participation and so
• 57:30 - 58:00 they weren't actually some of them were quite successful and the ones that they were successful unfortunately were pillaged by the new tycoons that the breakdown with Yugoslavia who they lasted all the way to then and actually became now unfortunately profitable companies in the hands of these tycoons you know so so sort of interesting but there were some just about there you know some notably successful ones and
• 58:00 - 58:30 and great success stories it's a very interesting sort of discussions around which ones have better let's say workers councils stronger ones where actually the workers were involved in creating better conditions of labour didn't they really get involved in decisions about how to reuse the profits because the whole idea wasn't that the profits from the self managing firms you know they've started with the basic organisations and
• 58:30 - 59:00 then they became he's come compositors complex organizations associated labor that were made up of various different basic organizations and they had these complex agreements and so on and so forth became very elaborate so what's that really what made them successful or were they fulfilling a need in the market which was essential so for instance Gore Enya was one of the best
• 59:00 - 59:30 factories incredible is still very strong in Slovenia today and just on everybody I'm in oh my spinning your friends had refrigerators and ranges you know refrigerators from boring they were very successful and as a result of their six you know it's sort of hard to say depending upon what your position was whether it was because the workers were really involved in decision making at the local level that the decisions were good and therefore the company was stronger or was it just that they had a
• 59:30 - 60:00 market it was a fertile market for the you know for him for modernization and all the homes and so forth apartment buildings across the country that they needed these refrigerators and they had good managers you know so you could say one way or another on that it was the case that where the self management was stronger the conditions of labor so there was a lot of discussion around the women's participation in the factory outbursts of labor could control the shifts how many things off you had what
• 60:00 - 60:30 kind of cultural arrangements do or did you get what kind of vacations did you get did the work where the worker is able to establish like hotels on the beach that they could use and so forth and if the the GDP went definitely so even those who are critics of the system and the ways in which the banks and the local tech you know technology can across and so forth and party elites really creating these little triangles of power and so forth upper level the
• 60:30 - 61:00 standard of living basically we went and and people did have resources so the shortages actually didn't start until let's say the eighties where there were demands that needed to be met in terms of some of the loans that they had taken out and then the fact is that they began to fight over the distribution of resources which is a you know typical sort of federal issue from that came in
• 61:00 - 61:30 let's say from the wealthier Republic's that would then go to some of the poorer ones but in some places let's say some of these factories say cargo boxes the motor works very successful tows a school notebooks pencils pens all those kinds of things unfortunately I'm translating right now because I actually never talked about these aspects of self-management in
• 61:30 - 62:00 English get remember what towles was called company in Bosnia leather works and Bazzi there's some of them were actually the focus of some nationalist revenge during the break down because they want to attack these successful self-managing you first but as I said was it because they captured the market at a good time was it because they of the socialist market or was it because
• 62:00 - 62:30 they had strong self managing base that is a sort of a chicken in the egg and of course various people will take different sides hey thanks so let's open up the floor to direct to the class I can go first Kahn yeah well I thank you for the talk it was really interesting and I'm I don't know much about the Yugoslavian experience and I found your short reading very insightful and very
• 62:30 - 63:00 informative and I was gonna ask you about the last part where you talk about the lack of the accountability system so I'm thinking like I mean I I think I understand the point here but I think my question is more related to like what makes it different than the Stalinist socialist government was there any accountability there or I'm also thinking like I'm from Turkey I'm also
• 63:00 - 63:30 thinking like many populist countries like Turkey India where economy is not you know doing great and the government barely takes any responsibility for it right there's always like the enemies of the state who are kind of conspiring against the state and that's why the economy is bad so I well first of all you know if you
• 63:30 - 64:00 remember the description of the concept of the system you know they define the use of self-management socialist democracy is a system of political and social relations in which individuals determine the conditions of their lives and work on the basis of their labor with socially owned means of production and mutual agreement and on equal standing with one another okay that was the description
• 64:00 - 64:30 that's verbatim well my translation okay so the difference is in many ways which is important difference is that they were very clear that everybody is participating in these decisions and so people should know where the issues are people should eat where the problems are they should take responsibility for the problems and various different levels and people should be held accountable
• 64:30 - 65:00 for those decisions and so if you know may not be any different because in the end it was the fact that sometimes you know it was you know sort of the inflexibility of these people's interests against the other the local interests against the larger interests or you know the workers not seen in the larger picture or maybe because the banks were giving the money because the Republic the other republics were you
• 65:00 - 65:30 know starts not collaborating or competitive so you could always find an outside right but the problem was that given the system in the Declaration and the processes for decision making there was an expectation of accountability and what happened is is that people were very frustrated and angry so you know they were they also used these you know
• 65:30 - 66:00 sort of surveys and and particularly in the 80s when there were this economic crisis and people were demanding to know what what the problems were in addition to you know some so they weren't happy with the decision like the answer that it was the West that was unreasonably calling in its debts or that they had too much you know that they credit the interest was too high or they didn't recognize the difficulties at the time so in other words there was and the people were
• 66:00 - 66:30 saying well that's frustrating because why did we make these decisions to take on so much credit I don't remember this coming up oh yes you know you weren't paying attention its own so the fact is is that but what was the worst thing and people with nuts over this answer was to say that you know given that we made these decisions collectively through this process of harmonization of our interests that we're all responsible you
• 66:30 - 67:00 know and and so the people could know that's not true these decisions were made you know I didn't in our basic level we didn't hear about you to make that decision and so once you set yourself up just you know sort of as to declare that there's this decision-making in there at various local steps there was this decision-making then people become even angrier that they're not being represent you know that there that that when they're told that they're in fact
• 67:00 - 67:30 responsible because it was a collective decision so that's one of the issues the other part about was because of the delegate system the delegate system was developed probably one of the strangest it wasn't workers up you know the workers councils not particular to you was Lobby I mean their development if it was in the system of having it in the local units and every different part of the society maybe it was distinct the
• 67:30 - 68:00 delegate system was an attempt to get away from party politics so in other words not to have representatives based on political parties than having platforms and then people would vote for the parties or that or for having what they call professional politicians etc of course many of them were professional politicians it's just circulated and different roles because there were there were limits on terms so that he
• 68:00 - 68:30 would not have professional politicians and so the delegate system wasn't you know you would have delegates at below everybody was somehow are there a delegate from some walk of life to a higher level and then those people would send a delegation to the higher level and the delegation said so of course that line of who is my delegate what they're doing and what their decisions are got blurred and so this was the worst card not so much the self management in the firm's where it was
• 68:30 - 69:00 easier to see what decisions were being made and what the outcomes were but these delegate systems which are the political parallel to the to what happened inside the firm that people were so angry about because it had a promise of being a democratic system that would resist the idea of inter-party conflict and but it but at the same time was supposed to and people
• 69:00 - 69:30 did not feel that the system in fact there was almost no one since I translated all of these documents I had its idea of this you know sort of delicate system but I think that they were like you know no one when they would do these interviews and they were pretty funny you know you hear people in the local radio and so on and they say do you understand the delegate system absolutely and then they go to a lot of people nobody let me just ask you the
• 69:30 - 70:00 delegate system how how different is it and the classical council pyramidical model of having local councils that the local councils elected representatives delegates to a higher level and then eventually the national government suppose of this form or the national legislature is formed on the basis of delegates of delegates right is this right yeah this was basically but it it
• 70:00 - 70:30 was a parallel to the self management yes yeah and um and they base and then they would vote as a group like a they were like blocks and then they would vote at the national not the federal well yeah first first it would reach the national the the national legislature the National donor and then together then they will yield the federal
• 70:30 - 71:00 government also in the same the assemblies but the assemblies were created a little differently but they came out of the delegations the delegations would send there's no direct election know of anybody for a one of the chambers that was the problem and there was a very interesting where a lot of discussion around that and let's say in the later day in ravit you know attempt to revise the system in the
• 71:00 - 71:30 eighties when people be talking about really changing and getting rid of it and so on that idea was there very popular and then they were said do you remember what happened are in assemblies you know and so on and then if we had parties how else we do it like people and and so and so there was a lot of discussion around that in the 80s before the break down about you tie or 86 which is the only
• 71:30 - 72:00 time I was in Belgrade we were going to a restaurant and I had no idea what the name of it was but mihaela markavitch um I think you you yes was the guy who was a witness escort me do the dinner well we can actually talk about the proxy's group a little bit later on in this discussion but me I though was the star of the proxy's group one of the original editors had to be a serve and a Croat
• 72:00 - 72:30 the chloride so what he did if a guy like Petrovich but in any case and we high/low was the one that I do better and I was taking me to the restaurant and before we entered I sort of asked him how is any and is supposed to work without multi-party ISM either the accounts the conciliar system or for that matter even the factory councils
• 72:30 - 73:00 hardly supposed to work with a with a monolithic single party that has ultimate authority and everything and so he kept me outside for about 33 minutes not letting me into the restaurant trying to convince me that multi-party ism of any kind would be the wrong answer for Yugoslavia whether it would even come I'm not sure if you rejected competitive election it is not exactly
• 73:00 - 73:30 the same because you could grassroots could nominate alternative candidates you could have alternatives three four candidates running for each seat I'm not sure I don't want to be too unfair to his memory he passed away I know he would do unfair to his memory I didn't like the guy but in any case a man be too unfair to his memory I don't know he rejected the competitive elections yeah yeah competitive
• 73:30 - 74:00 elections were there was a lot of discussion around that and some elections were competitive if the local have already had some competitive election yeah I don't know yeah yeah they did but one of the famous articles I think it was written in maybe 76 what's by said to story on a who you knew very well yeah that's set up to stay on image wrote yeah multi-party there's there's something really good
• 74:00 - 74:30 about that because there was a book that was written by said Kosta trabocchi and voice to Nisa about the history of the party system you know and to the end of the intro the multi-party system in Yugoslavia and so fit the style image were very interesting articles saying yeah it's a it's not a bad thing you know and we need to figure out how to do a better job of representation yeah a different view I think yeah
• 74:30 - 75:00 right but as what he said very clearly and this is one of the most important points that's why they had articles stuck in my mind and a lot of people's mind was he said unfortunately and Yugoslavia because we have a multi-party system it will break down according to national and you know and so there were some attempts fantasticks aunty markavitch tried to create the reform party at the breakdown of he was you know when you wasabi was starting to
• 75:00 - 75:30 break down he tried to create the reform party there was you IDI where many of our friends or dissidents who were part of you know they tried to create all UGA's love you know Social Democratic Left parties which were not nationalist parties and all of the mad nam nationalist parties lost everywhere so and there's a really interesting um really interesting article by avoiding material each on using sort of game theory and you know sort of the worst
• 75:30 - 76:00 off possible consequences how do you avoid them you avoid them by voting for the by international party because if you you know you may like the social dams better but you start to worry about it you think I don't want those other crow you know that I say the Croatians to win so I'm gonna have to vote my second choice which is the Serbian National Party and affecting it's a really interesting sort of work on that so yeah unfortunately very dogmatic you
• 76:00 - 76:30 have elections right yeah and assuming the old type system you know basically it is a single political organization which by the way doesn't call itself a party in this one country cause it's a League of comedy a league of come right right party which have controls the choice of candidate
• 76:30 - 77:00 it's so even though they may not serve directly nominating they control who runs by the way the question comes up for the firm too because if as I understand it the firm elects at least some of the top managers right yeah managers but there too the question comes up where those genuinely competitive elections John mentions accountability accountability would be that you could remove the bad manager and some how do you remove him or her
• 77:00 - 77:30 unless somebody else runs against him or her but if they cannot if if that is forbidden or if all the alternative canon that is a big by the League of Communists in some way you see so in that sense competition is one step and then the ability to organize compensation others I see Arya sitting there Arya you know in your country which is Iran you do have competitive elections
• 77:30 - 78:00 formally but candidacies are controlled by the one power for particular organization eliminating candidates all the time I don't think it was like this newest Lamia because probably there were no faith no no one would have even dared to become a candidate under those circumstances but you know in that sense for I didn't the council model or the factory workers control model it's a real drawback if there is one monolithic
• 78:00 - 78:30 political organization that is able to determine you know because the accountability depends on ability also punish and remove those who don't serve don't represent well or don't those who mess up the firm you know I'm sure they were also aside from your Google firms very bad firms for example let me ask you specifically you mentioned strikes there were some strikes I don't know which we're the
• 78:30 - 79:00 first ones 80s probably even probably earlier they were earlier earlier so what you know if your workers council controls the firm who are you striking against this is exactly what then the sort of leader said you know like we can't you know we have to stop these strikes because you're fun you're you're fighting against yourselves you're the owners um you know you don't have state-owned proper we have publicly
• 79:00 - 79:30 owned you know and every factory they own their own the workers own their own property and so on it's lighted up in the system you know revenues and incomes and and so yeah so you're just striking against yourself so it's a very interesting there were a few people who were really good who wrote on this you know and so on and this is sort of a contradiction in the notion of strike and trade unions when in fact the people that you would be striking against with yourself so it
• 79:30 - 80:00 would be a mechanism to bring to the attention of your collective that the interests that we establish you know are not being Sur and and yeah very very very complicated and so this was you know depending upon where you were the system and so on how those strikes were treated and you know how it's sometimes they were ignored sometimes they were stopped actually brutally and so on and
• 80:00 - 80:30 so it was a very complicated the issue your system is based on you know the working people so and their property yeah in the days when things there were still experimentation when the issue came up the trade unions answered by saying well the worker really has two dimensions two capacities one is part of the managerial staff and the other one is worker this is almost like you have
• 80:30 - 81:00 visit marks the distinction situaion and bourgeois very same person but you have two facets one is participating in governance and the other one being an executor of the decisions of the collective right and you have interests on both levels so you need unions to protect one the burkas council does the other I'm sure the relationship of Union to worker was a complicated one too because
• 81:00 - 81:30 after all the union's themselves have appointed of officials who appoints them system all this becomes much more precarious or a single monolithic political system irrespective of the form of decentralization mister below under that nationalism national decentralization have become so important because that's the real form
• 81:30 - 82:00 of decentralization and it's the model is to some extent so that's that's the kind of dis the kind of thing that comes up but when you mentioned strikes I think it was an obvious an obvious issue that if it were true workers democracy strikes would be somehow unnecessary they were perfect we could always check this what they always say well imperfect obviously we have our you know we're still developing there's a lot of
• 82:00 - 82:30 contradictions we're trying you know so this was always the answer for something like this you know we're trying to improve and so the idea of the party was very important they did not want I got into trouble once because somebody was interviewing once and it was when I was already back in the States not clipping any oh right at the time and they interviewed me on one of these talk shows and said what do you think about this you know the statement we keep hearing about the Yugoslavia is a
• 82:30 - 83:00 non-party system because the party is the league as you say and just one of the subjective forces in society guiding and so on that is super cheap nice nog and that's what they were anyway so they asked me this and you know I was so bad I was so flipped and they caught me in a bad moment and I start laughing and I said well you know really what does that mean a non-party system there is either parties or multi parties but the non party system I you know I'm sorry but then just theoretically
• 83:00 - 83:30 I have a hard time with that and then the next caller called in and said lucky professor ma stop to laugh but she doesn't live here and I remembered that a little humility and it's pretty important and for the truth the matter was question Julie I'm still in accountability could the market make the firm accountable in other words yeah of
• 83:30 - 84:00 course sailing where their bankruptcies yeah there were bankruptcies and Phegley you know you could lose your job could a firm lose its existence there was a lot of especially if it were important in terms of the community and so forth and you know who knows where let's say in a capitalist system but I think even a you know a fairer and more just market system the capitalist one but still if you don't have consumers if
• 84:00 - 84:30 you can't get credit because the bank thinks that you're not worth given any giving any credit to a firm would fail and and the one of the ideas the soft budgetary constraint we talked about it on Thursday in this in this class if you cannot fail so you will still get the credit you will still get the subsidy you'll still get the raw materials
• 84:30 - 85:00 irrespective of and so of course no one would buy your product but in any case you can't fail because of so in Yugoslavia as far as far as you know there were actual bankruptcies firms are dissolved or something we're taking her they were merged or they were you know new leadership and so on because especially is it was a question of you know unemployment which would be difficult that's the problem he said oh
• 85:00 - 85:30 you know however the firm fails people lose jobs so they would have to do something to get to China in this class is how in the midst of a great transition they had the avoided massive unemployment you questions so you mentioned that they were that the different republics in the north and in the South different historical legacies and economic differences I think and I was wondering
• 85:30 - 86:00 if that was reflected in the functioning of the workers councils in to that it some republics advocated for workers councils more or were very more successful or and some Republic's demand more centralization and governments yeah
• 86:00 - 86:30 that's a great question I mean let's say Bosnia was known particularly for some of the best really strong holds the Tuzla Aswan and some of them really known as strong holders strongholds of the workers very strong workers movements and strong workers
• 86:30 - 87:00 self-management trade unions and so long the unions and you know that's interesting that probably came from their legacy you know you don't have to study the history of those movements maybe they were they had that earlier on and then they were able to keep that developed that there are certain areas of Serbia that were peasants you know among Macedonia didn't have you know as much because of just the economy said they had four hand had some sort of you
• 87:00 - 87:30 know farmers as our communities and so on and so on but but there were places that were were known to be strongholds there were economies that were wealthier just and they had more industrialization earlier so let's say Slovenia they and they had also select you know involved in certain
• 87:30 - 88:00 industry that found itself markets that were let's say more lucrative and kept them you know in the were in good shape there were some like the shipbuilding on the coast that were also very strong there were some that were international you know that architectural and construction firms that were all over the Middle East it was law firms that were very strong and so it sometimes depend upon where their centers work and
• 88:00 - 88:30 some of them were because of their histories but also because of the wealth that they were able to reinvest had had pretty strong self managing organs and then others that were so involved in international trade electro energy I guess is a the energy company you know they were they were really like a multi
• 88:30 - 89:00 you know they were sort of involved in international marketplace and I really have no idea of those really interesting to look at how successful those basic organizations were within those firms that really were over facing don't know but that's certainly you know they're those histories had something unsure to do with the histories of these firms and and the strength of the workers within them honey ask you you mentioned early
• 89:00 - 89:30 collectivization which was a disaster you say or very poorly yeah when that comes to an end is agriculture re privatized is it really for most of the history from the 50s on ninety operatives they were more like cooperative so they were aren't you know sort of cooperative avoiding is the best example you know sort of where the Hungarian minority is a majority it's a really very fertile land great
• 89:30 - 90:00 agricultural they had them sort of very developed industry there and that was sort of done in big firms but they've worked off and on a cooperative basis so people had small little farms and they gave their milk products to the cooperative and then people have worked in the co-operative and so on and then you know they were so those and those are pretty famous that was very successful I don't
• 90:00 - 90:30 know I haven't studied I never studied those but they were sort of they I think that they took a lot of examples from the Italians sort of somewhere in between there but they were more on the co-operative model rather than cooperative model rather than a collectivist the model of the of the Soviet time yeah yeah far as you can tell as far as even I could tell I've been there four times in the eighties certainly there is no was no dramatic
• 90:30 - 91:00 food shortage that its food is available now food shortages but there were shortages of detergent and coffee those are the big ones that came and they have local industry of both of them right right but the agricultural problem which beset many of the cases right yes Napoleon where agriculture remains private these cooperatives and they came directly out
• 91:00 - 91:30 of the collectivization movement or they were they just resisted they never worked totally clear they tried to collective eyes they never move right so you must like I mean effect was a mixed economy of having different types of production within it that's right that's right but no state sector proper in other words the state directly was not not directly the well of course me the workers control sector the problem what
• 91:30 - 92:00 is the property exactly who is the owner the workers in their self managing it's the institution's basis organizations are the owners of the property but not the individual workers well each person is a member of the collective and then that property is there buddy leaves or she needs the job let's say or retires they
• 92:00 - 92:30 pensions were very good I thought we broad people with their votes yeah people have pensions based upon their contributions to their you know which came out of their own income they would get the IRR like we get you know when you look at and see how much of your income is you know you made and then how much was taken out for your insurance and all these other things but that came out of your own income but yes you know
• 92:30 - 93:00 so it was sort of you know this sort of cooperative idea of what they would call public property I mean nothing was owned by the state except for the military I would say in the militarization of society and I don't know enough about it but the military was the most Yugoslavia institutions and the last one to fall apart yeah let after the party the party went right hurry was already break broken into the railroads or hospitals or
• 93:00 - 93:30 telecommunications yes all of them were self that's the point right they're all socially owned I guess it would say socially on the same structure though yeah yeah everything even hospitals universities cultural institutions and then of course private property and private property you could have private property up to a certain amount of people that work for you
• 93:30 - 94:00 depending upon how many people work for you and all you could have a small firm yeah right in DiCarlo could have taken you to a private restaurant well I don't remember what it was it was kind of it's a writer's club I noticed in more was more consciousness in Cuba where you could really see the big restaurant then it's state-owned and Apollodorus which is private you generally can have about five to six employees right I'm sure this was some
• 94:00 - 94:30 extent take a Julia you mentioned we were not and I saw my question about autonomous I'm not sure if I use the proper word autonomous Republic or just an almost autonomous yeah how they were the autonomous provinces okay so this is the best of my limited knowledge of Yugoslavia only Serbia because wow this was a big big issue for the Serbs yeah and my question is so was there a
• 94:30 - 95:00 difference in those terms of kind of those three principles of the reading so on federal level between the kind of full Republic's and Republic's within Serbia yeah you hit a really sore point for the Serbs from the very beginning so boy Wadena had been part of the Avenue Serbia but what would be now has a majority Hungarian population and then a
• 95:00 - 95:30 lot of other really very multi-ethnic so you went to voivode inna and in the you know height of hubris loss period any plaque on a public building or so forth or school or museum even would have like six languages because in addition to you know Hungarian and Croatian and Serbian then you had to have you know there was all kinds of lock locks and there were a
• 95:30 - 96:00 lot of different groups that live there you know and so they really cherish this sort of multi-ethnic position however they were very strong on their position that they were a province and they had this autonomous it was in order to give recognition to the various different nationalities and ethnicities within boy Edina they had a separate assembly which was the provincial assembly which had
• 96:00 - 96:30 its own areas of responsibility and authority and so and also the delegate system and so on and that became a of contention because of course sometimes they voted and they also have them re-- representatives in the federal government and the federal party was they had their own party they had their own you know leadership government leadership and so then they would get to be part of that revolving government and
• 96:30 - 97:00 so on and the students were very angry about that because then they also whoever didn't notice one thing where there was a lot of wealth which they would have liked more control over but then there was the poorest part of it which was Kosovo and Kosovo you know was also had the status of an autonomous province and the Kosovars particularly the young ones and some of the you know sort of more militant wanted it had this their slogan was a
• 97:00 - 97:30 cause of a Republican and they wanted to be a republic because they were separate people and they wanted to have their own Republic and not be an autonomous province within Serbia and so of course the main reason why the Serbs and even other parts of you miss la mia we're not happy about that the slogan of Kosovo pública because if they were a republic they would have a right to secession all of the Republic's in the Federation had
• 97:30 - 98:00 a right to secession they did not because they were provinces and so because of course they said well that's the only reason why they want that so that they can then join Greater Albania the neighbor so this was a big issue now the Serbs argued they were really angry at this because they said the Kosovars have their assembly the Florentines have their assembly and then we have an assembly for all of Serbia and we don't have our own separate assembly they went
• 98:00 - 98:30 nuts Serbia proper did not have its own assembly and so from the beginning of that Constitution ISM before the Serbian nationalists were very unhappy about that and you know they continued to say that until breakdown of Yugoslavia were finally in the one of the last moves of Milosh of age before the complete breakdown of Yugoslavia was to grab those provinces and deny them their special status just follow-up so what was the criterion
• 98:30 - 99:00 between full Republic autonomous province so this notion of the constituent people so the Constituent people had their own republics but Kosovars couldn't have their own Republic because they were not the Constituent people they were a constituent nationality not a constituent Nara why because they had their mother people in another state I eat Albania the Hungarians had their
• 99:00 - 99:30 mother people you know in another state hungary therefore they didn't need the Republic because they were nationalities in the story but the Serbs weren't anywhere else but certain you was Croatians weren't anywhere but you was la vía so these were Slovenes not anywhere and so that was a different that was the argument for the different status of course underneath it was this idea that the Republic's were able to secede and nobody wanted to lose by Modena because it was the wealthiest and
• 99:30 - 100:00 of course Kosovo was the idea that they would go together with Albania and then you'd have greater Albania as your neighborhood and neither the Macedonians nor the Croatians the Montenegrins or the Serbs want that that's good yeah that's interesting yes a really interesting oh my god that difference between the gnarled and gnarled nasty and then ethnic so that's what the national the net the people and the nationality and then they were
• 100:00 - 100:30 ethnic minorities like Italians it's interesting because of course is my other questions historical sociology doing nationalism we're studying nationalism this week's everything always converges it you're in my world things always converge it wasn't intended but I was just reading a discussion and one of the volumes I'm not sure now if it's brilli or Gallner or anderson who cites it but someone cites kashrut who was our nationalist
• 100:30 - 101:00 leader in hungary having a discussion with a serve and collude is a liberal and suggests this is an eighteen forties right eighteen forties that of course you're going to give you every possible civil right Serbs and to the other so it's civil rights of course every individual could have exactly the same rights but we're not going to give you nationality
• 101:00 - 101:30 rights because you're not a historical people now by now of course that was for 1840s certain had their own stage right that's just it would not have said that Croat because Aykroyd would have been historical people who had their own as State Assembly but in his mind a Serb would not have been a historical people and in that sense that idea but you explain it differently for for this distinction between provinces and
• 101:30 - 102:00 Republic's is not a kind of historical argument about did you have a state going back to who knows when but rather do you already have another state which of course would mean that if there were enough Jews in Yugoslavia they would not have gotten from even a province so the juice if they were distinguished themselves separately where an ethnic minority just like Italians and this is sort of a weird you know Slovenia right
• 102:00 - 102:30 there's some Italians in Slovenia yeah oh yeah yes yeah that was a whole issue but but Bosnians is different so they had to figure out how to give this representation so the only religious group that got a its own Republic was Bosnia and Bosnia Herzegovina was known as the Republic of Muslim Serbs and
• 102:30 - 103:00 Croats so in other words the three groups in general core the Constituent peoples and this was really unusual so these boss a Bosnian Muslim Bosniaks God had particular status because this was their sort of you know a key to participating in this system and preventing the Serbs and the Croatians from splitting up which
• 103:00 - 103:30 basically they tried to do but with the breakdown of Yugoslavia Bosnia so was interesting because they're the only ones we have that status you know because this class handles these cases or a very long period of time you're going to be doing that with Cuba where we'll have to do a second session one might as well kind of bring this topic into the present in one sense but also not in terms of all the political
• 103:30 - 104:00 problems now the reason but but directly on this self-management question and let me ask you this way does anything of the self management system survive you already mentioned that some of the managers are the most successful companies did what manage this day in Russia some extent in in Hungary through indirect methods in Czech Republic and
• 104:00 - 104:30 so on so manager managerial privatization obviously is one thing that did happen but did any of the worker Council's able to protect their solicit property did they survive as as quasi owners or owners or or is that completely obliterated than gone now in the in the extra public's I understand and this is something I don't know for sure I
• 104:30 - 105:00 understand that in some of the companies that are old companies that exist there still is pretty feistiness you know among workers in voivode in here there are some some companies that were going under with the breakdown of Yugoslavia and and in the privatization that happened with you know after in each Republic and the the workers actually
• 105:00 - 105:30 bought with help of various friends and so on took the companies so there are some worker run companies in various places it sort of you know depends on the Republic the place and so on there actually is a lot of sort of let's say autonomous self governance in the octina and in the what's called the mess and design needs
• 105:30 - 106:00 that the local community like even let's say apartment complexes and small communities smaller than the municipalities so there's a lot of that that sort of remains because people found it so useful and they were used to going to the people who are active in these self-governing sort of living community and looking to them to help solve local problems so that some of those have remained and it's some places
• 106:00 - 106:30 it's a really interesting there are big fights against you know sort of the demolition of certain communities and so on that people came together so but unfortunately those people are all let's say our age and so younger generation so don't have the experience although some of the younger generation they're interested in this and have you know have been following it up and figuring out how they can you know sort of recover some of that history I should say also in the non-governmental organizations that were very active in
• 106:30 - 107:00 the breakdown of the for me was Flavia all over from you know Bosnia Serbia Croatia yeah all of those that sort of worked in peace movements and to protect basic rights of individuals and so on and that almost all of those were based upon earlier participation in sort of the critique of the Serb Urich realization of self-management Ori so
• 107:00 - 107:30 that's a kind of interesting story and the very strong women's movement which exists today and that's something you know we had talked a lot about nationalism you know I that was one of the books that I wrote off written a lot of articles on that it was very involved in the women's activities in the country and so but in nationalism actually focused on undermining the role of women in both the communist movement and the
• 107:30 - 108:00 anti-fascist struggle and in self-management it's so on and sort of saying you know women in the church and the family their rule as you know protected and reproducing the nation has been destroyed now we're going to recover that doesn't go over too well we have a student I'm a medicine I don't know if you know her yeah works on an NGO who was writing a dissertation on NGOs yeah they're
• 108:00 - 108:30 fantastic yeah it's kind of quite interesting she should be done let me just finally asked the farmer coops what happened some of the same names when you go to the grocery store now you see them and I don't know who you know where it what the story is with them I just know one thing the raspberry pickers were on strike when I lived
• 108:30 - 109:00 there in the 70s and they remain on strike every time I go you know because I go into usually in the summer to visit him coops that worked relatively well in the 1980s and 1990s I'm sorry 1972 1980s were privatized I'm a very private guy so people who owned the land before 1948 were able to
• 109:00 - 109:30 recover it I know that wasn't like hungry and check I don't read privatization or crying yeah yeah there's a lot of private ownership is this yeah that's a great question I don't know it yeah sure hotels on the Dalmatian coast have become entirely private horrible horrible yeah and urban planning no 90-some just disaster russians bought
• 109:30 - 110:00 up a lot of the beachfront dead you know even in hungary there's a lot of property bought by russians yeah that's what's happening in the region well thank you very much that was welcome extremely informative and it's great to be able to have you for this yeah thanks I'm happy to do yeah breaking with you