In his paper, Jože Pirjevec demonstrated ideological complexity and the political consequences of the debate that has developed after the split between Tito and Stalin not only at a bilateral level between Belgrade and Moscow but also at a multilateral level and in the frame of international workers’ movement. Beside Tito the main actor of this process was Edvard Kardelj, who became one of the main heralds of the new Yugoslav political direction which was trying to find another route into socialism, different from the one enacted by Stalin in the Soviet Union and “people’s democracies” of his bloc. Even after the “normalization” of relations between Moscow and Belgrade in the mid-1950s, Kardelj continued to upgrade his idea of self-management socialism, perceived by the Soviets, especially M. Suslov, as despicable “revisionism”.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 2473427The aim of the conference was first to reconstruct, from a time distance that allows us to access hitherto unavailable archival sources, the course of the Yugoslav–Western European debate on the perspectives of self-management socialism, and, secondly, to determine its significance for the development of a political theory and practice both in Tito’s Yugoslavia as well as in capitalist countries. Drawing on this context, the conference aimed to ascertain which forms succeeded in penetrating Yugoslav society, and vice versa, the impact of the self-management experiment on industrial democracy in Western European and democratic transitions in Mediterranean countries from the early 1950s to the late 1980s. To some degree, we addressed the question regarding how the Soviet Union and its satellite countries reacted to the Yugoslav alternative to the state-socialist model and how “Open Marxism” and Eurocommunism challenged its aspiration to present itself as a ‘third way’ alternative to liberal capitalism and state socialism. At the conference, 22 scholars from France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Finland, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia presented the results of their research.
B.01 Organiser of a scientific meeting
COBISS.SI-ID: 294784256In this paper Jure Ramšak presented Yugoslav understanding of the concept called “collective self-reliance”, a Third World strategy aimed at changing the rapport of relative economic power and mutual dependence of subjects on the international economic level. Scrutinizing documents from the party meetings, diplomatic memos of the state visits of leaders of non-aligned countries and dispatches from Western diplomats in Yugoslavia, presentation contributed to the understanding of economic component of Yugoslav ties with the Third World. The latter is still one of major unresearched aspects of this particular relationship even though insights into those problems also pose an opportunity to examine vigorous attempts by the UN and some progressive supra-state actors in the 1970s and 1980s in order to bridge the structural gap between Global South and Global North and shape World economy on different basis.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 1539909316The paper aims to outline the idea of Yugoslav self-management socialism as shaped in the mind of Edvard Kardelj. First expressing his conviction that there exist various possible paths to socialism in 1943, he began to elaborate the idea more systematically after Tito’s rift with Stalin in 1948. In the beginning of the 1950s, Kardelj tried to forge contacts with western European social democrats and socialists, finding like-minded counterparts open to dialogue, particularly among the Scandinavians, Germans, British, French, Belgians, and, later, among ‘Eurocommunists.’ The divide between Kardelj and his interlocutors arose in regard to perceptions of democracy. While the latter were betting on or discovering democracy as an expression of political pluralism, Kardelj was building an ideal of self-management direct democracy to be applied top-down by the Communist Party. In the search of such social order, he designed a singular normative system, which, however, proved unrealistic and collapsed together with Yugoslavia.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 1540367812Reviewing the book “Politics of Rupture: From Partisan Politics to Socialist Transition” (Gal Kirn, 2014), Jure Ramšak presented the most common misunderstandings, which are part of public discussion on Yugoslav self-management during the transition period. He put an effort to contextualize Kirn’s interpretation of revolutionary rupture during and after the World War II on the one hand and traced political and social developments, which led Yugoslav political economy away from its revolutionary origins on the other. In this sense, he made special emphasis on the Edvard Kardelj’s claim on individual happiness as a symptom of the late socialism or in other words, transition towards “post-socialism”, which took place since the 1960s.
B.06 Other
COBISS.SI-ID: 1538074052