File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1996/96-11-09.204, message 9


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



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