I recollect that some weeks ago Michael Hoover referred to the internal inequalities that had built up in the Yugoslavian economy, and this post confirms them.
I think his statement
>unskilled working class and poor regions bore brunt of joblessness
is not necessarily in contradiction with the claim made by someone else that the centralised state gave more to Kosovo than to other regions.
>policymakers stressed traditional textile manufacture, agriculture,
>and handicrafts
That is not necessarily wrong provided the local economy has other ways of accumulating surplus. For example in northern Scotland traditional clothing is fostered for export.
No, the description of
>extended families of 20-40 people
>continued to live within walled compounds, blood vengeance, arranged
>marriages, and polygamy remained common, Kosovar Albanian women
>continued to live secluded in the home, subordinate to male authority,
>and with little or no access to education
is not socialism. It is social labour. Marx refers in chapter 2 of Capital to "primitive society based on property in common" and gives among the examples of this, the "patriarchal family".
It is possible therefore that this social formation had communistic features but was not socialism, oddly enough.
Marx treated pre-capitalist formations with respect. In Capital chapter 1 section 4 he criticises the way "forms of social production that preceded the bourgeois form, are treated by the bourgeoisie in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treated pr-Christian religions."
My questions about the Yugoslavian economy were not from a supporter of "'socialist' decentralization and marketization". More the debate is about how the Yugoslavs developed the market. Some of Michael's comments suggest that marketization was not wrong in Kosovo, but they chose the wrong products of labour to marketize: they should have concentrated on developing the means of production.
The reference to chronic inflation suggests that the authorities did not control the issue of currency.
My main contention however was the failure to run a social market in land. Essentially land appears to have been owned communistically. They then distributed grants to different regions with inadequate mechanisms to ensure they would generate surplus.
Not in a decentralized way, but in a centralized way they could have strengthened planning of land use, and marketed the leasehold use of land. This would have automatically raised higher central revenues from the more rapidly developing regions, while lowering the relative cost of land use in the less developed regions, making it easier to start enterprises there.
Yugoslavia seems to have embraced the market without a central mechanism to reduce the centrifugal effects of uneven development. This was the result of an odd combination of premature communist policies with laissez faire capitalist policies.
Chris Burford
London