Gal Krin: Forgotten history of the commons in socialist Yugoslavia

A case of self-managed cultural infrastructure in the period of 1960s and 1970s

 

Yugoslav socialist self-management was born in the early 1950s and moved, both ideologically and politically, beyond the alternative between state and market,
and in many respects contributed to the invention of a specific form of ownership: social ownership. One could immediately object that workers’ self-management
was imposed “from above”, from communist leadership, however, even if this is formally true and not without irony, it is more adequate to trace its emergence from the split with Stalin and Informbiro in 1948. Also, being isolated from West and East, the policy of workers’ self-management was an attempt to sustain a strong popular support in the now “necessary” independent path to socialism.

Read full article here, p. 63-71.

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