Date: Wed, 6 Nov 1996 21:20:59 -0500 (EST) From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena) Subject: M-I: Re: Socialist Unemployment in Yugoslavia Roxanne writes (tentatively): >...But the political consequences of unemployment must be refigured in light of the autonomist impulses that >re-surfaced after 1985 in Yugoslavia....This, of course replicates >in some sense the centrifugal forces at work in >other (former) countries of "Actually Existing Socialism"... But in Yugoslavia the problem was more intractable. Yugoslavia was not a fully socialist state in the Soviet sense. Furthermore, its economic difficulties were, in no small measure, the result of Yugoslavia's road to socialism. The system of workers' councils and self-management, which had engaged the attention of reformers throughout eastern Europe from the 1950s to the early 1980s, was a disaster. It even managed to bring about the small miracle of a simultaneous decline in productivity and an increase in unemployment. Left to themselves, workers with jobs tended to use profits to increase wages; they did not invest in the means to increase productivity, nor were they keen to cut the wages cake into smaller slices by employing more workers. Investment had to come from banks; and banks were increasingly free to borrow money abroad. Eventually, the lenders in the West demanded reform of the system, and by the early 1980s they had to be heeded. As Susan Woodward argues in her seminal *Socialist Unemployment: the political economy of Yugoslavia, 1945-1900* (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), unemployment became politically "invisible", owing to its redefinition in terms of guranteed subsistence and political exclusion, with the result that it corrupted and ultimately dissolved the authority of all political institutions. Forced to balance domestic policies aimed at sustaining minimum standars of living and achieving productivity growth against the conflicting demands of the world economy and national security, the Yugoslavian leadership inadvertently recreated the social relations of agrarian communities within a postindustrial society. Louis Godena --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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