Quasi‐proletarians and a patriarchal bureaucracy: Aspects of Yugoslavia's re‐peripheralisation

Abstract

THE CRISIS AND COLLAPSE of 'real socialism' in Europe should be seen in the overall perspective of increasingly unequal conditions in confrontation with a global capitalist economy undergoing profound restructuring since the beginning of the 1970s. The social and economic systems of'real socialism' showed themselves incapable of commanding or developing forms of organisation consistent with the demands of the 'third industrial revolution' (the microelectronic) on increased 'just in time' flexibility, human creativity and decentralised institutional autonomy harnessed to intensified accumulation of capital in the postmodern era. This could be seen as one of the important factors undercutting their economies, leaving them hopelessly stagnating and outdated, and forcing them into rapidly increasing dependence on Western capital, knowhow and technology. This new dependence made them slide into the quagmire of the 1970s petrodollar foreign debt trap. At the same historical juncture, the vastly expanded integration of formerly 'Third World' regions into the economic orbit of transnational capital meant that the stagnating and increasingly world-market-dependent economies of 'real socialism' were rather abruptly exposed to ferocious competition from a mushrooming of new, vastly more modern plants within the classical base industries now resituated in low-wage, low-cost Asiatic and Latin American NICs (newly industrialising countries). Yugoslavia was the 'real-socialist' country in Europe longest and most intensively confronted with a number of dilemmas relating to socialist states' (re-)integration into a global capitalist economy. During the 1960s, according to a number of social and economic criteria, Yugoslavia could be described as a country aspiring to entry into the category of'core' industrial countries. There was the problem of rather extreme regional development imbalances. All parts of Yugoslavia, however, had experienced fast industrial development during the post-war period. Living standards had continuously improved, and the country had succeeded in controlling its de-agrarianisation process to a larger degree than most other NICs. A decentralising economy in combination with the social and economic incentives represented by incipient forms of industrial and local-level democracy, as embodied in 'self-management', appeared promising as a determined attempt to transform the structure of the national accumulation scheme, and to build up a strong and internationally competitive export sector. Growing