International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Extract

The proclamation of workers' self-management in June 1950 shaped Yugoslavia's “own way,” independent of the Soviet Union, to socialism . In a basic law, the Yugoslav communists transferred the management of a series of state economic enterprises in key sectors like mining, transport, agriculture, and trade into the hands of working collectives. Through a system of workers' councils, workers would manage the factories. According to the program of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) from 1958, workers' self-management would create “new social relationships” without “class contradictions” and “exploitation of man by man.” The new system should elevate not only the “degree of material wealth” but also the “degree of true freedom of the individual.” Interpersonal and social relationships should develop a “new humanistic quality” in a “socialist democracy.” The program of building workers' selfmanagement was a reaction to the split with the USSR and Stalinism in 1948 that had shattered the Yugoslav communists, who had liberated the country in World War II mainly through the mobilization of their own resources and rejected submission to Moscow. With workers' self-management the Yugoslav Communist Party intended finding a new ideological groundwork, considering the experiment of socialism in the USSR as “deformed.” In contrast, the LCY claimed their model of workers' self-management ... log in or subscribe to read full text