Abstract
The socialist factory, as the ‘incubator’ of the new socialist (wo)man, is a productive entry point for the study of socialist modernization and its contradictions. By outlining some theoretical and methodological insights gathered through field-research in factories in former Yugoslavia, we seek to connect the state of labour history in the Balkans to recent breakthroughs made by labour historians of other socialist countries. The first part of this article sketches some of the specificities of the Yugoslav self-managed factory and its heterogeneous workforce. It presents the ambiguous relationship between workers and the factory and demonstrates the variety of life trajectories for workers in Yugoslav state-socialism (from model communists to alienated workers). The second part engages with the available sources for conducting research inside and outside the factory advocating an approach which combines factory and local archives, print media and oral history.
Highlights
The socialist factory, as the site of employment and production, and as an important institution of political activity, daily routines and leisure practices, is a fruitful entry point for the exploration of multifaceted aspects of socialist modernization, its contradictions and demise
This article has argued that the socialist era factory and its surrounding community of workers, former workers and their families remains an insightful location for research, in terms of labour history, but regarding the rise and fall of socialism in broader terms and in relation to working-class subjectivities
Despite advances in the exploration of labour in state socialism, the micro-level remains understudied, in the Balkans where the study of labour has paled in comparison to its more sophisticated treatment in central and eastern Europe
Summary
The socialist factory, as the site of employment and production, and as an important institution of political activity, daily routines and leisure practices, is a fruitful entry point for the exploration of multifaceted aspects of socialist modernization, its contradictions and demise. Many of the workplace periodicals emerging in this period referred explicitly to the 1976 Law on Associated Labour, Article 546 of which stated that basic organisations of associated labour (BOALs) were obliged to provide regular, timely, truthful content to workers in an accessible manner.[56] The restructuring and decentralization of the Yugoslav economic system with this law provided an ideological impetus to regularly publish a periodical as a means of communication between the various BOALs, League of Communists, trade union organizations and other institutions of self-management associated with an enterprise.[57]. Our experience in the field far suggests that a focus on one’s lived experience can temper some of the unrealistically positive portrayals of the recent Yugoslav past and result in more nuanced accounts of labour and everyday life
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