Abstract
Getting rid of Rankovi was the easy part of the reformers’ task. The real problem was how to create a stable system of inter-republic bargaining without undermining the power of the central Party machine. They still had no experience to guide them. The rhetoric of the Seventh Congress about distancing the Party from power had absolutely no basis in reality. The rulers of Yugoslavia would have fitted comfortably into two buses,1 and the role of the League of Communists as the ‘ideational vanguard’ of self-governing socialism was notoriously a farce — among the public at large, Communists had a well deserved reputation for careerism and corruption.2
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Notes
Stipe Suvar, who was in a position to judge (he later held the highest offices in the Party, and became President of Yugoslavia), wrote in his ‘Young Turk’ phase that ‘all important federal and republican functions in this country are discharged by about a hundred people at the most. All possible functions are earmarked for them’. Nae Teme (5), 1968, p. 759.
Branko Horvat recalls a local Party meeting where the subject of corruption came up. One participant wanted to know what all the fuss was about, remarking that everybody gave bribes to get things done. Horvat comments: ‘What impressed me was not that a degenerate bureaucrat had lost all feeling for basic moral distinctions, but that of the fifty or so Communists present not one reacted to his statement, and that the man was later elected to the secretariat of the organization.’ See Ogled o Jugoslavenskom Drustvu, p. 242, available in English as An Essay on Yugoslav Society. An in-house study of Party members in the early 1960s, carried out by Miroslav Pecujlic, revealed that two-thirds of them had joined for ‘career’ rather than ‘ideological’ reasons; see his Politicka Sociologija (Beograd, 1965), p. 107.
Leslie Benson, ‘Market Socialism and Class Structure’, in Frank Parkin (ed.), The Social Analysis of Class Structure (London, 1974), passim.
B. Jaksic, ‘Jugoslovensko drustvo izmedju revolucije i stabilizacije’, Praxis (3–4), 1971, p. 423.
Dugan Bilandiic, ‘Problemi samoupravljanja danas’, Nase Teme (5), 1968, p. 717.
Edvard Kardelj, Socialist Planning (Beograd, 1982).
See Ljubo Sirc, The Yugoslav Economy, on the basic failures in agricultural policy (pp. 203ff.), and the idea of ‘mass planning’ (pp. 210ff.). On the ‘Green Plan’, see Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, pp. 137–9.
M. Schrenk et al., Yugoslavia: Self-management, Socialism and the Challenge of Development (Baltimore, MD, 1979).
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© 2001 Leslie Benson
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Benson, L. (2001). Reform — and Reaction. In: Yugoslavia: A Concise History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403913838_7
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