Abstract

Few of the many dozens of articles and books in English and French published during the last years on the “Yugoslav road to socialism” have been concerned with aspects of Yugoslav life other than the structures of self-management and their relations to the market socialism that Tito and a bevy of agile economists have devoted themselves to developing in place of the “Plan”—the “rigid statist-bureaucratic system” as Yugoslavs call it—to which the Soviets are wedded. As a result, the wealth of information now available to western readers focuses almost exclusively on “objective” events in post-war Yugoslavia: the break with the Soviets; industrialization; the forging of self-management as a mobilizing ideology to replace (or maybe sustain and expand) that of the partisan period; its evolution into structures resembling a modified western development model—market socialism; the emergence of new forms of social differentiation in the guise of technocrats and bureaucrats; and finally, the consequences of all of these for the economic health of a country firmly enmeshed in the vicissitudes of an increasingly shaky international monetary system.