Tell me about Yugoslavia, lads. I keep hearing about how they had a unique socialist system

Yugo was shit. Tito was a megalomaniac. My (croat) grandfather's family were thrown out of their home and into a small apartment to make room for bosniaks who were way too many for the house anyway. His father, a socialist, disappeared after he had been vocal about discontent with the socialism Tito practiced and the worker's control of mop (they didn't control mop). Yugo was shit, in part because of Tito, in part because of external forces.

Alright. What are your biggest take-aways on why it failed?

As an ex-Yugoslav, I can tell you that the only real-world purpose of "Yugoslav self-management" was to make strikes illegal. After all, the workers manage themselves, it says it here in the law! This meant that a strike was never a strike but was in fact deemed an uprising, which were dealt as such. Yugoslavia was from top to bottom a true Stalinist state, and people were sent to Goli Otok not only for telling a joke about the party or Tito, but for laughing at such jokes as well. There was a similar workerist propaganda legend system similar to Stakhanovism called Udernici, too. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, was being ratted on to the state for anything by their neighbors. However, because of the ties to the Western countries, the dictatorship was comparatively a bit milder than in the Soviet Union. If you weren't a political dissident, if you never talked about politics anywhere, you could make a somewhat decent living. Employment was much higher than now and yet people, overall, were quite a bit happier according to relatives however. Ironically, raising your kids to be apolitical turned out to be bad. When the new states were created in the war, the old party members suddenly became democrats and/or nationalists and remained in the positions they were, because the generation that should have taken their place was taught to be apolitical.

Also, since I'm already ranting here, how about an anecdote? My grandfather was a local doctor in a small town, and one day a man with a metal plate in his skull came to him for a standard medical examination. They started talking a bit, and my grandfather asked him about the plate. The man knew he could trust my grandfather not to rat him out, so he told him how it happened. Turns out the man was part of a team sent to assassinate one of Tito's rivals in the early '50s. They did it, but a few days later they were all assassinated themselves. Turns out that what had happened was that they were sent on an "assignment" in an empty field and snipers took them down to leave them for dead. That one guy managed to survive because it wasn't a direct hit. Imagine that shit. Are you wondering why he could trust my grandfather? Because he was a Christian, and since, of course, all Christians (especially Slavic Baptists) are US spies (a well known fact to the government!), his life was made hard, so the man knew he wouldn't ever help the government.

I'm happy there are people like these guys >>1563646 who actually don't fall for the western leftist Yugo dicksucking (are you ex-Yugo themselves?), because it's always so easy to have Tito be your hero because he's the "safe" figure compared to Stalin or Mao who are well-known to be anti-worker scum to the whole world, including level-headed communists. It is frusturating how much of a pass Tito gets sometimes by certain people on the left, as if his shit didnt stink as much as the USSR's.

Oh, this is copypasta. What a shame. I didn't recognize the first part.

It's not a copypasta.

this is a serb Holla Forumstard that has wandered onto this board, I've seen his posts before.

Tito and his market "socialism" was the worst kind of socialism, and his debt shows this best. Fence-sitting is not a viable form of socialism, and the only reason why Yugoslavia survived so long and prospered was because it was in a condition where the capitalist bloc payed him to be in opposition to the eastern bloc, but at the same time he was in a position to jump back into the eastern bloc if he was threatened by the west, and he knew he'd have their support. His state was "prosperous" compared to other socialist states because he had trade with the eastern and western bloc, as well as taking loans from the IMF and various gifts from the NATO states, most prominently the USA and UK. He was a revisionist opportunist at best, but still a socialist. The reason why Yugoslavia crashed and burned so bad was because the moment the eastern bloc fell the west had no incentive to support a rogue socialist state that was their bloc in the balkans. They were an unofficial NATO member, for fucks sake.

But, despite this, the worst socialism is better than the best capitalism. Factories were organized and run by workers, and there were small petty-bourgeois businesses (usually owned by 1 or 2 people that worked there) and these factories competed on the market, I think the best name for this would be "workers corporations" because I don't know how else I'd name it, english isn't my native language. The workers running the factories elected 'managers' from among themselves who represented their factory politically and things were organized along these lines, with there still being a central party that kept things in line ideologically and politically. Tito also preserved the culture of the Yugosloven people, Serbian culture died with capitalist degeneration of society. Before you had huge social programs teaching you of the past of your people and you were taught to be proud of it, and yes you were taught to be proud of your Serbian heritage, but it was recognized that Serbian heritage is a part of a wider Yugoslavian heritage. So with all of Tito's opportunism and shit economics, he still built a people's state that protected the people's culture and heritage and celebrated it, and this should be recognized. What I hate the most about all you leftoids that have crawled out of your holes is that you like to screech not real socialism first, while ignoring the conditions in which these socialist states had to work with, and ignore the accomplishments they brought. Should Yugoslavia be criticized? Heavily, but to discard the advancements of the Yugoslavian socialists, or the socialists of the eastern bloc or china for that matter, is to look backwards, not forward.

Sta si ti uvopste ako nisi neki Holla Forumsjak, jesi ti neki iz Marks21 pa volis da se levicaris ili sta? anarho-trotskista?

I'm no historian, most of what I know is from what I've been told by relatives or friends. So from this perspective I'd say that one of the problems was, that the party was officially Communist, but the members weren't really, playing along with the game, just because everyone else was too. This eventually allowed the debts to increase and nationalism to return.

Incidentally, the return of nationalism actually truly allowed me to become a internationalist, since my parents moved away before the war began, and then to another country when I was a kid, effectively making it impossible for me to form any national identity, since I wasn't from the countries I lived in, nor from the new ex-yugo states, but that has nothing to do with the topic.

For more details, I'd recommended there articles, I found them very insightful:

How come? I can say anything for , but I know I wrote my post.

also, I could go into more detail of what the economy in Yugoslavia looked like and how it was organized. Workers had a lot of freedom in the workplace, which provided both good and bad results as various things could come from this. I could give a few examples if interested. And I know the leftcoms will screech at me for the markets in the Yugo economy, but that is only because they have no practical knowledge of socialism, but only theoretical. Your theory means nothing if you can't put it to practice, this goes for any communist or socialist.

Yeah, it's called capitalism.

Nope I'm a Croat, not Serb. And I'm not from Holla Forums either, I am a communist.

And this is so inaccurate it hurts:
Simply check those links posted above. They have all sources and show that there was in reality none of this, just an aesthetic/ideological thing.

Like what? There is simply nothing Yugoslavia did better than post-Yugoslav nations. And this is mostly because Yugoslavia was simply a capitalist dictatorship, and post-Yugoslav at least had some democracy and could properly liberalize without fear of sacrificing the grip of the dictatorship which gave it some economic prosperities. A real achievement would be a really free society, with real working class influences. But there was none.

Sranje!

Crkni, supak.

Ironically, this is a pretty good argument for anti-revisionism. If you are real, it also make a pretty good argument for full communism now, rather than socialism.

I would be interested in those examples.

I'm not sure if I'd say that this is a good example for "anti-revisionism", if only because this term usually implies strong adherence to a ideological authority. And in this case, it wad the authority and it's ideology that failed to actually produce socialists and lay the material conditions for them to flourish. Also I believe that it was exactly the case that they should have developed their ideas, adapt them to the circumstances and fix their problems, and not just idealistically suppress dissent and complaints, fearing monarchist or nationalist opinions.

I do not deny what is posted in those links, and I even agree with them. However it needs to be recognized that the progressive elements of SFRY provided better life conditions than the contemporary neoliberal/neocon economic forms rooted in ex-yugoslavian economies, furthermore today Yugoslavia is split into economic sectors that are occupied by foreign agencies, solely used as economic colonies. No matter how removed from socialism was Yugoslavia, this couldn't have happened under the system in place there.
As for the worker's self-management, I can attest that in fact it was in place, but I question it's efficiency. It shown both positive and negative effects on the economy, compared to other economic forms, and as stated I can provide both examples of why it was bad and good, and it also allowed for bourgeois deviations within the "socialist" system in place, because you had people that before SFRY lived in conditions of a monarchy and even late stage feudalism with some parts of the economy being capitalistic, and which grew up in the culture inherent in this system, and you then handed over to this people the economy and the country to manage. If you see where I am going with this, you see why this is a horrible idea.

They built most of the industry and cities in the ex-Yugoslavian nations, or if these cities already existed they brought them up with cement roads and modern structures, from their 19th century begging. Why this is unique compared to liberal economic societies is because they accomplished this on their own economic structure, without taking loans (or taking minimum loans, with the post-1949 period) which inherently shows it's efficiency compared to free market society. The same could be said for most of the eastern bloc. All of the successes of post-Yugoslavian states can be attributed to the infrastructure built during Yugoslavian socialism.
That's not saying the infrastructure of SFRY was effective, however…
I can go into detail if you are interested in conversation.

alright, as I stated before you had locally managed factories which were managed by workers and administrated by managers elected by them who usually represented them politically, but due to the 'chaotic' nature of Yugo-socialism this wasn't always the case, you had amalgamations of the entire working staff answering for their workplace politically etc. Most of the time the workplace was administrated by all of the people working there, despite the manager existing. This provided bad and good results, bad being that sometimes workers would slack off, calling in "sick" while going to drink coffee or hang out with friends, while their fellow workers accounted for them as sick, and they received value from their work despite not doing it. In other cases, you had greater organization and production than in most factories because the workers were very knowledgeable with the production process, where they would complete their production quota in 2 hours when it was predicted it'd take 6 hours, and they would either spend the rest of the time hanging out at the factory eating and smoking, or go home. Another example I can think of is a factory where the engineers organized so that they received pays when they weren't working, and stopped receiving them when they had work to do, so they always rushed to finish fixing the machines as fast and best as possible so they don't break later on, so they don't stop getting payed. Without state managed production, organization was quite different from workplace to workplace. Petty-bourgeois businesses existed and flourished in Yugoslavia, and it was common that a small workplace like a hair parlor where 1 or 2 people worked functioned as basically a petty-bourgeois businesses, where the two people technically "owned" their workplace.
From this worker self-management often came nepotism, however, because when the people working in the factory looked to hire someone they'd hire their sons and daughters if they were educated for that line of work, and this caused quite a problem as it kept happening from it's inception up to the 1980's.
Another problem with the Yugo economy is that it was built not only for efficiency, but to foster comradery between the Yugoslavian republics. iron was imported all the way from bosnia into a steel mill in serbia to be refined, which is a big waste of resources when you look at transportation costs, but it was done to foster friendship between the Bosnian SR and the Serbian SR. The more efficient thing would be to build the steel mill in Bosnia. There are many examples such as this. They also allowed foreign industry in their country in the 70's-80's, much like the soviet union, and this fucked them badly as anti-socialist elements purposely built useless industries, like factories that were built in the middle of nowhere with poor access to resources, and due to the state's flawed nature they subsided the factories anyway, sinking millions of resources into nothing. Or the time they accepted Reagan building pointless railways in Serbia, which couldn't even fit our trains.
The party structure also fell apart almost immediately because they opened up the party in the 60's, and anyone could join, despite most of the population having grown up in conditions of a monarchist, semi-feudal state, and inheriting the values of such a society. People like that can't run a socialist country.
those are a few examples off the top of my head.

keeping thread bumped for interest.

market 'socialism' is about as socialist as social democracy

do serbs still want to exterminate the bosniaks and think they're trying to turn serbia into an islamic state?

no, but I don't think they ever did, other than a select few terrorist organizations who went to Croatia and Bosnia to rape and loot under the guise of some political movement.

If you lived there you'd be singing a different tune, since we went from market socialism to a social democracy. Maybe if you took the time to research Yugoslavia itself and it's praxis rather than just books you'd understand this.
Every socialist should know and understand history.

This happens under capitalism. So does easy high school, except that college is entirely dependent upon how rich your dad is.
Trust me. This was for a reason. The idea that people from Croatia put people from Serbia in a death camp is beyond comprehension.

so what was the 1990s war about and why were fugitive war criminals like karadzic and mladic sheltered by the population for so long?

because their only media outlet was controlled by people like Karadzic and Mladic, and the only side of the story they heard was theirs. I know a lot of people that fled here from Bosnia though, that saw Bosnian nationalists perpetrating crimes against local Serbs as well. All the nationalists in Yugoslavia were criminals funded by NATO and the EU, even Karadzic, but he bailed when he realized he'd be used as a scapegoat.

absolutely, it's built into the system itself! But these things should be treated with scrutiny in a socialist society.

I agree with you that these things were necessary. Every marxist will tell you that culture and society has an economic basis, and by fostering economic collaboration they fostered friendship between the Yugoslavian ethnicities. This does not make it economically efficient however, which was my argument in this situation.

Zizek was a dissident for a reason

you need to be more subtle in the future dude
now I know that you're bullshitting

lmao. At worst they were sent to a local police station and jailed for 3-4 days, and this was in '49 when they split from the eastern bloc and he was purging dissidents. What a liar.

but belgrade wasn't under siege. sarajevo was. what did the bosniaks do to the average serb to make them support people like mladic?

the bosnian nationalists causing chaos there (not the bosnian civilians, they were as removed from this as most serbian civilians) killed Serbian people living in Bosnia, they threw them out of their houses and before it escalated to that point they were heavily scrutinized against.

but did the serbs ever suffer anything comparable to the sarajevo siege? something that would explain their contempt? some people being thrown out of houses in a village is not exactly the same as terrorising an entire city

Oh. okay. Sorry I doubted you. FWIW, I'm sorry for what my country perpetrated against yours.

Osim sto nije bilo genocida, right?

I dont know what village you come from, but i remember that my grandmother was openly dissident (she would hang croatian flag, one time she slapped higher rankinging officer). My father and mother where not in communist party and where involved in student movements that where labeled subversive.

How old are you anyway? Yugoslavia was not flowing with milk and honey, but today perception of yugoslavia is overblown by left and right.

Dude there was terror perpetrated against the serbs living in Sarajevo, the Serbian civilians living there suffered the same fate the bosnians suffered under the Serbians, and it was even the excuse the JNA used to siege Sarajevo. As for something equal to the siege in Sarajevo perpetrated against Serbia, NATO basically destroyed our industry and sold the rest of it post-mortem trough their hirelings here.

Yugoslavia was a result of its time, but like many socialist nations, theres much to learn from it..

Titoism did a good job of addressing the economic calculation problem at its time, by mixing centralized and market economies (until full economic liberilization nearing and afte Tito's death), and addressed a lot of issues the soviet union faced with shortages due to beucracy and failed planning a lot more effeciently than the soviets did

It was the only true successful "socialism in one country" and it worked well for the time it existed, and works as a good model for market based socialism. but like what many here have said before, the issue with Yugoslavia was its dependence on the cold war and the existance of the eastern and western blocs. Once the soviets fell, and the cold war ended, their role as a buffer ended too and they fell soon afterwards.

still love that yugo aesthetic tho

so why is serbia so desperate to join the e.u. if the west was so bad to them?

because all the ex-Yugoslavian states are occupied by the clique put in place by NATO and EU occupiers, and the politicians are only rotating between parties but are the same people that have been dominating the political scene since the fall of Yugoslavia. We have no party that is anti-EU that has any real power that isn't a banana party, the only two anti-EU parties with relevancy are the Radicals (right wing nationalists, whitewashed nowadays) and Dveri (christian traditionalist party, women should stay at home etc, absurd)
And all the political parties are thieves as well, every party so far has stolen government cash for their own purposes and lined their pockets so far. Currently in Serbia there are huge demonstrations because people are both sick of the clique that has been installed after 5th october, the neoliberal piss, as well as the new center-right thieves in government.

and the political/democratic system is built in such a way that you cannot even become a candidate without considerable money, and you do not have the funds for elections if your clique doesn't own some sort of corporation in the country or receive funds from outside forces such as NATO, the EU or the Arabians.

you forgot about depleted uranium
I suspect modern serb retardation is because of depleted uranium poisoning

so what's the deal with all the stuff about genocide and srebrenica and war crimes and so forth? is this all a western/nato show, and serbia is the real victim?

you can't be serious

Our cancer rates rose 200% country wide since the depleted uranium bombing and by 500% locally. Look up Iraq, they got it way worse it's fucking horrible, so many birth deformities.

I think that the JNA did perpetrate the crimes but I also think that Bosnia has bloated the war crimes for their own political purposes, Izetbegovic especially. But those who inflate the war crimes of Serbia tend to hide their own war crimes behind it, which both the bosniaks and croats commited.

Ultimately the crimes perpetrated against the people of Yugoslavia were orchestrated by the CIA, and there is a defector that published books about his work there and gave interviews.

I need to do some digging to find it though, you can try googling it yourself.

the soviet union started failing in the first place because they started privatization in the 60's, the efficiency of Yugoslavia was due to it's capability to trade with the rest of the world and due to IMF loans and gifts from NATO states. I find it disgusting how freely they worked and accepted aid from the soviet union while shitting on them in their media, truly disgusting.

lol

capitalism with nice healthcare and free education.

lmao there was a lot of anti-serb sentiment among Bosniak nationalists but come on lol. In Bijeljina and Zvornik every muslim was forced to leave. When did that ever happen in Sarajevo?

It did happen in Sarajevo but the Serbian population was a lot smaller than the Bosnian population so it was put under the rug.

michaelparenti.org/yugoslavia.html
archive.fo/K4Yth

everyone blaming any side for the soul destruction of Yugoslavia needs to read this. It was destroyed both from without and within, and the Serbs weren't any more guilty than the other sides in the brother destroying war.

ti ocigledno nikad nisi cuo za komunisticku levicu, je'li?

cuo sam o decijim bolestima, stvarno je zalosno kako su psiholoske institucije u drzavama bivse Jugoslavije propale, racunajuci da smo imali medju najbolje u evropi.

tricky question
by introducing Khozraschyot in the 1965 Soviet economic reform they did indeed emulated some crippled form of market in the capital goods sector and in the consumer goods there was always a market
but to call it privatization is a stretch
they were essentially fence-sitting between plan and market

also relevant en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khozraschyot

Boze pomozi, anti-intelektualisticki staljinisti su uzasni.
Kakvi je to socijalizam u kojem zakon vrijednosti dalje vlada?
The only thing that ever happened in Yugoslavia is capitalist modernization.

Auh, ne brini se druze, ovdje u dijaspori smo u dobrim rukama, ma da ja licno mislim da je vama "anti-revizijonistima" pomoc vise potrebna.

...

that's how i feel when marxists talk

you are correct, I was wrong in what I said, it wasn't privatization per se, despite there being individual cases of the growth of petty-bourgeois businesses, but the introduction of markets into the economy was the gateway to privatization and caused major problems for the economy itself, as it created shortages of goods. Refer to the breadlines under Hruchev for example. You could also chalk it up to Hruschev's devastating agricultural policies.

Ko kaze da sam anti-intelektualac? prosto tvrdim da se treba teorija primeniti. Daj mi prakticnu primenu tvoje socio-ekonomske ideologije i bez zajebancije, naj ozbiljnije te pitam. Koji je tvoj politicki plan i program, itd?

It's a leftcom that is calling me an anti-intellectual because I said theory isn't useful if it isn't put to practice. He is also calling me a stalinist and appears pretty angry

Well obviously it happened but there's no evidence suggesting that the Bosniak leadership ever intended to conduct a similar program of ethnic cleansing as the Serbs did. Not that they wouldn't have done it, Alija obviously had no moral qualms when he invited Islamists to join the Bosniak cause, there was just no need for it as a multi-ethnic Bosnia with a dominating Muslim bourgeoisie was the goal of Bosniak nationalists.

Stvarno mi nije do te diskusije, posto smo tu istu vodili jedno 100 puta (ukoliko se dobro sjecam). The leftcom position concerning actually existing socialism has been discussed at least a million times on this board.

Threads like this make me feel like a brainlet.
it's cause I am one

and

There is also no evidence that the Serbian government under Milosevic (Karadzic is a different story but read the links I posted) wanted to conduct ethnic cleansing, and it is implied that his generals committed it on their own hand, but that is worth nothing to the Bosnian victims. I'd say the same could be said about the removal of the serbs.

I could agree with this however.

gross oversimplification. They mostly funded the organizations that did it in the first place, you can control a movement with funds quite easily however, look at what modern corporations are doing on the political scene globally.

Nisam ucestvovao u diskusijama na zalost zato sto nisam bio redovan na boardu poslednju godinu-dve, ali lurkovacu pa cu upasti na sledecu diskusiju.

yea, Novocherkassk incident was a massive fail

Khrushchev's agricultural policies had nothing to do with Khozraschyot
he sold MTS to kolkhozs because they were on the balance of the soviet state, i.e. they were a burden to the budget
that's what happens when you only look at the numbers and think with your ass
he essentially ditched all responsibility for the planned development of agriculture

and his corn adventure was Mao's backyard blast furnaces tier

Maybe no direct evidence, but the cooperation between the YNA and eg. Arkan's Tigers in Bijeljina and Zvornik really is proof enough tbh. An ethnically clean Drina valley and Posavina was in the interest of both Karadzic and Milosevic.

that gave me a chuckle. Truly localized steel production is one of the worst policies I ever heard of.

What were even the conditions that lead to it? Lack of roads or resources for them to bring workers to factories?

Didn't he cause some of the fuck ups during collectivization that initially lead to starvation too? Since he was the administrator of collectivization in Ukraine. It's terrible how people attribute him as a continuation of Stalin's administration when in fact there was a coup d'etat at the 20th party congress.

I have to read up on this, but it doesn't sound far fetched. As far as I know Arkan's Tigers acted on their own accord and the YNA turned a blind eye but never collaborated. I also heard that some soldiers got some of the loot too for turning a blind eye.
that's what happens when not 15 years post revolution you let people with monarchist/feudal values into the party. Holy shit why would Tito open the party to the public.

Yeah, the whole war and the incidents leading up to it are a mess in general. I don't think we'll ever get the whole truth anyway, definitely not while the same bastards who are complicit in the atrocities committed still have political power.

I think that even if a socialist state came to power the secrets of the war would still stay buried as not to re-ignite ethnic tensions or become unpopular with people feeling that they are not to blame for the war crimes of the past government.

large furnaces required large scale investment
local everything is an easy way out

dunno
All I know is that he was asking politburo's permission to exceed execution quotas in the Great Purge

if a new socialist state comes to power it won't be a reunited yugoslavia

That feel when you can understand B/C/S. Let the shitstorm continue, comrades