"Punishment"? Re: Centralization

[Michael Pugliese]

   Two excellent libertarian communist polemics on the ex-Yugoslavia. 
   Both make the point that there were by the end of the Tito period, 
exacerbated by the Milosevic leadership, inadequate mechanisms for 
abjudicating  conflicting claims between enterprises and regions for 
dwindling resources.

http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-
9912/msg00200.html
<nettime> Ethnicizing and Natosevic - the war and the left
... nettime> Ethnicizing and Natosevic - the war and the left. To: 
nettime
<nettime-l at Desk.nl>; Subject: <nettime> Ethnicizing and Natosevic ...
http://www.amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-
9912/msg00200.html
   http://lists.village.virginia.edu/
~spoons/aut_html/Aufheben/yugo.html
Class Decomposition In The New World Order:

Yugoslavia Unravelled

(1) Introduction

Whilst there have been numerous wars around the globe over the last 
forty-eight years, Europe has seen only the mundane brutality of 
everyday capitalist social relations. But once again the spectre of 
war haunts the proletarians of the continent. The former republics of 
Yugoslavia have lurched into a bitter cycle of war, and the images of 
the suffering provide a terrifying reminder of the capacity of the 
working class to carve itself up along national lines. Are we heading 
for a major European war? Will the events of the past couple of years 
in Yugoslavia be repeated throughout Eastern Europe? An analysis of 
the conflict is clearly imperative.

Such an analysis is made more difficult however both by our separation 
from the events, leading to a lack of information from 'below', and by 
the endless stream of depressing details on the conflict in the media 
making any attempt to keep abreast of events into a desensitising test 
of endurance. So this article will be limited to an attempt to 
simplify the conflict by grasping the material roots of the 
nationalist tensions.

The first problem lies with deciding where to start. A possible 
starting point would be the formation of the first (monarchist) 
Yugoslavia after WW1, as the internal migration of Serbs under the 
Serb-dominated regime (to be followed by a similar migratory flow 
after WW2) helped produce the ethnic mish-mash with which we are now 
familiar. Another possibility is WW2 and the genocide perpetrated by 
the Ustashe which helps explain the fear of persecution so 
characteristic of current Serbian nationalist ideology.

Neither of these starting points seem to provide the best means of 
unravelling the conflict however, as the Socialist Republic of 
Yugoslavia did hold together for well over forty years despite its 
ethnic diversity and the experiences of WW2. Instead, the focus of the 
analysis has to be the 1974 Constitution, which appears to be a 
pivotal moment in the shaping of Socialist Yugoslavia; so, to begin 
with, we have to examine the factors which gave rise to it.

(2) Class Recomposition.

In 1948 the Yugoslav Communist Party (Y.C.P.) was expelled from the 
Cominform, in part due to the Y.C.P.'s desire for U.S. financial 
support. As if trying to disprove Stalin's accusation that the Y.C.P. 
was a 'Kulak' party incapable of making war on the peasantry the 
Y.C.P. set out on a programme of forced collectivisation beginning in 
1949. Prior to the war 75% of the regions population were dependent on 
peasant agriculture and immediately after the war the Y.C.P. rewarded 
the peasants, from whom the partisan army under Tito had drawn most of 
its support, with land reform; land previously owned by foreigners, 
collaborators, the church and large estates was broken up and 
distributed amongst the poor peasants as small plots. Such an 
organisation of agricultural labour was, however, a brake on the 
development of the productive forces so desired by the Y.C.P., a brake 
which collectivisation (socialist primitive accumulation) was designed 
to remove. This programme came up against significant peasant 
resistance however, with extensive riots in 1950 and widespread 
sabotage of agricultural production the following year. Given their 
need for the political backing of the peasants the Y.C.P. was forced 
to abandon this policy of rural expropriation. First the compulsory 
delivery of agricultural produce to the state was scrapped and in 1953 
collectivisation was abandoned. Peasants were allowed to leave the 
collectives, and most of them did.

Thereafter agricultural labour consisted of two sectors; a small 
collectivised 'socialist' sector comprising about 5% of the 
agricultural workforce and 15% of agricultural land, and a much larger 
private sector in which peasant families were able to sell their 
surplus produce on the open market with the states role reduced to 
setting the levels of taxes and some prices. Yugoslavia had clearly 
begun to move away from the Stalinist model of a centrally-planned 
economy. The Y.C.P. had decided that the accumulation of alienated 
labour would have to proceed using the discipline of market forces 
with the coercive power of the state decentralised. In 1950 the 'Basic 
Law on Workers Self Management' was introduced in the industrial 
sector to allow workers to participate on a democratic basis in their 
own exploitation. Workers Councils were henceforth able to elect 
Management Boards which by 1953 were able to engage in foreign trade, 
set prices in most cases, and decide for themselves questions 
concerning product range, investment, output, supplies and customers. 
Thus there evolved the partial separation of the 'political' and 
'economic' aspects of the capital relation; the involvement of the 
Federal Government in the everyday running of the economy gradually 
declined as the social division of labour came to be increasingly 
regulated by the market.

Liberalising economic and political reforms occurred in 1960-61, 1963, 
and 1965 despite concerted opposition from the more centralising 
elements within the Y.C.P. The net results of these reforms were 
twofold although both represented a decline in the power of the 
Federal Government in Belgrade. On the one hand remaining price 
controls, including that setting a minimum price for labour-power, 
were abolished, and control over credit, and thus control over the 
real accumulation of capital, was devolved to the banking system. The 
rule of money over the conditions of life thereby increased. Alongside 
this shift was a political one devolving a certain amount of political 
clout to regional authorities although fiscal policy and control over 
the repressive functions of the state remained the prerogative of the 
Federal bureaucracy in Belgrade.

Within the Y.C.P. there had occurred a certain division between the 
conservative autocrats of the bureaucracy and the liberal technocrats 
of the productive enterprises and banks, with the relative empowerment 
of the latter. And such a reorganisation proved to be very successful. 
Investment rates during the 50s and 60s were exceptionally high by 
international standards. Rapid accumulation allowed for rising real 
wages paid for through rising productivity. A relatively generous 
social wage was affordable; healthcare and other services developed to 
rival those in many West European countries. Thus the Yugoslav model 
became the ideal for many left-liberals in Britain and elsewhere who 
had a particular fetishism for democracy but no critique of 
alienation. But this rapid accumulation had a number of consequences 
which would serve to undermine this particular form of market-based 
self-management.

i) Accumulation of Grave-Diggers:
<snip>

   Danny Postel, now of the Chronicle of Higher Ed. has a forthcoming 
anthology on the Serbian q	uestion and the US left debate. I expect 
another demogogic fulmination by Ed Herman in Z when it appears.
   http://www.wildcat-www.de/krieg/nato99.htm
Materialiensammlung
zum Krieg im Kosovo / Ex-Jugoslawien

Beiträge zum Krieg aus dem Wildcat-Zirkular 50/51, Mai/ Juni 1990
   http://web.greens.org/s-r/20/20-15.html
>...(One anti-Marxist publication from the UK, Wildcat No. 18, Summer 
1996, had some good analysis.) 
   Heh, well, of coarse, this M-L'ist calls Wildcat, a libertarian 
communist/anarcho-communist journal, anti-Marxist! Be more accurite to 
say it uses marxist analysis to critique Leninist loons to draw 
lessons for working class struggles against bureaucratic collectivist 
regimes.
   http://burn.ucsd.edu/~acf/nowar.html
No War But The Class War

CONTENTS

Anarchist Federation Yugoslavia Articles
London Group (e-mail from Escape Publications)
E-mail message from Scotland
E-mail message from Left Disorder
Worker Solidarity Movement (Ireland) statement
News from Germany- Activity against the war in yugoslavia
   
Michael Pugliese