Factories to the Workers?
A new online exhibition about self-management.
With Vladimir Unkovski Korica and Anja Ilić.
Listen: “Factories to the Workers?” (Episode #121)
Bonus Extras: “Factories to the Workers?” (Episode #121)
Ad-free version of “Factories to the Workers?” (Episode #121).
Transcript: “Factories to the Workers?” (Episode #121)
PETER KORCHNAK: This episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok, a member-supported global community and resource hub for all who remember Yugoslavia. Through membership contributions, Yugoblok members make this podcast (and a whole lot more) accessible and freely available to all. Members can also listen to the extended episode, as well as all past extended and bonus episodes.
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PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, a Yugoblok show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your manager, Peter Korchnak.
If you blinked and missed it, as I did this past summer, we’ve marked 75 years since the introduction of self-management in socialist Yugoslavia.
In June 1950, Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito introduced the Law on the Management of Workers Enterprises and Other Economic Entities by Workers Collectives. It was the workers who needed to be in charge of building socialism in Yugoslavia and self-management put them there. Workers were to take over the management of production, the economy would gradually be transferred from the state to workers’ collectives in self-managing organizations, and the state would become unnecessary and gradually wither away.
Self-management became a hallmark of Yugoslav socialism, evolving constantly throughout Yugoslavia’s existence.
“Self-management is a to be or not to be of our lives,” Tito said in 1966.
In 1969, in one of its reports the Central Intelligence Agency noted that, quote, “the idea of self-management [affected] virtually every component of Yugoslav society, and…contributed to the gradual liberalization of the country.” End quote.
Without self management, there was no Yugoslav independence, progress, socialism—without self-management, there was no Yugoslavia.
And yet. The 75th anniversary of self-management passed without much, if any, fanfare.
VLADIMIR UNKOVSKI KORICA: It struck me that there was an astonishing lack of any official commemoration or narrative around it in any of the former Yugoslav republics.
PETER KORCHNAK: Vladimir Unkovski Korica is a lecturer in Central and East European Studies at the School of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Glasgow. His longtime focus is Yugoslav self-management.
VLADIMIR UNKOVSKI KORICA: There’s a lot of discussion of the past, but the past is very much seen through a prism of simple failure, it’s a past, pre-1991, ‘92 and that was something that kind of strikes you, because when you look around the former Yugoslav republics, it’s not like what has happened since then has been a massive success, either, right?
PETER KORCHNAK: Unkovski Korica set out to correct that. The online exhibition, “Fabrike Radnicima?”, or “Factories to the Workers?”
presents a range of historical documents from the Archives of Yugoslavia about Yugoslav self-management. The sources include workers’ council minutes, government reports, media representations, newspapers and magazines, protest slogans, and on; and there’s a list of recommended reading on the subject.
The exhibition, which lives at fabrikeradnicima.com, is organized into eight sections. After the introduction, we learn about how self-management was introduced in Yugoslavia. Two sections showcase the workings of self-management, in the economy and in the society. Women and managers are each given a standalone section. Then there’s a section about the failings of self-management, the strikes and protests against it. And finally, there’s a section about self-management beyond Yugoslavia, mostly in the nonaligned world.
The goal of the exhibition is to quote “encourage a deeper and more critical understanding of historical narratives, both past and present. Rather than offering a definitive account, the exhibition invites reflection on the diverse and often contradictory realities of self-management. It asks how power operated in its name, how people understood their roles within it, and, implicitly, how its memory has been shaped – and reshaped – over time. In doing so, it also opens space for a reconsideration of how we write history, but also how we shape society.”
ANJA ILIĆ: One of our goals with this exhibition was actually to try to step out of the purely academic sphere and to try to reach out to some wider circles of society, to be something that can be used by, you know, like young researchers and scholars.
PETER KORCHNAK: Anja Ilić is the exhibition’s co-curator. She is a sociologist in Belgrade dealing with social democratic parties, and she’s a Marxist-left activist and organizer.
ANJA ILIĆ: …something that can be used also as a digital archive, but at the same time, something that can offer like some introductory, at least, account of the self-management system and maybe what are some of the valuable lessons for today, what are some of the mistakes that try and not repeat if we encounter this big question of social change and reconstructing the societies we live in.
VLADIMIR UNKOVSKI KORICA: Maybe the word democratizing history is a good one to use here. In a way, trying to reach people and getting them to think that even if they’re not academics, they can access history, that they can critically think about it, that they can use it to learn lessons. This is all very important for us.
PETER KORCHNAK: The student protests in Serbia began while the Unkovski Korica and Ilić were preparing the exhibition.
ANJA ILIĆ: Many forms that were devised during these protests were essentially, left wing forms. The emphasis on self activity, self organization, direct democracy, horizontalism, etc.
VLADIMIR UNKOVSKI KORICA: The student movement in particular made us think quite a lot about how is self-management understood these days because there was a lot of discussion of horizontalism, mass assemblies that make decisions, so much so that the President of the Republic of Serbia, Alexander Vučić, in his response to the student movement derided the opposition and students as Bolsheviks who believe in horizontalism. Vučić talked about the students being in favor of the return of self-management and presented it as a ridiculous idea.
It was useful to think about what we are bringing to the table as a way of breaking through that memory regime, which stifles any notion that direct democracy can work.
And we were, in a sense, very conscious of the fact that self-management and the internal, domestic evolution of Yugoslavia from ‘45 to ‘91, ‘92 has been underplayed in in historical research, but also, in public memory regimes. If anything, it’s viewed as something that should never have been attempted and should go away. It was a failure. So if you’re able to bring history to ordinary people that can entice them to question not just the past, but also the present.
PETER KORCHNAK: While the exhibition aims to provide a corrective to the forgetting about self-management, it does not glorify the practice. Already the title of the exhibition is indicative of the approach. It’s not Factories to the Workers, period. It’s Factories to the Workers question mark.
Self-management—
VLADIMIR UNKOVSKI KORICA: —was a form of workers participation that was introduced from above, and it never really managed to kind of come out of the straight jacket allowed it by the Tito’s regime. So in a way, the lessons we’re hoping to impart is not that we should return uncritically to the past, but that by thinking critically about questions like “Should factories belong to workers?”, we’re bringing direct democracy into a conversation that has a longer history and can offer both positive and negative lessons for movements.
PETER KORCHNAK: The exhibition was funded by the University of Glasgow. And it is a collaboration with the Archive of Yugoslavia, the institution in Belgrade that is the archive of the federal socialist Yugoslavia. The curators had the freedom to select and interpret the materials as they saw fit.
ANJA ILIĆ: What the archives have shown is that, you know, there was, like, really, I would say, a very diverse, you know, palette of opinions about, you know, about the self-management system. Has it actually achieved these goals, or has it not? What can be done to improve it? What are the main sources of, you know, obstacles or dangers for the system and so on.
PETER KORCHNAK: Working with the Archive of Yugoslavia was, however, both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, the Archive owns a vast collection of official documents and media. On the other hand and as a result, the exhibition is presenting self-management predominantly from the top-down perspective present in the Archive’s holdings. Presentation of the functioning of the system on the ground, on factory floors or in offices, the voices of workers, corporate documents, are not as present in the exhibition as they could be, or as the curators would wish anyway.
The other challenge is that the exhibits are largely textual and, though the section descriptions are both in quote unquote Serbocroatian and in English, the archival materials are all in their original languages.
But, as the curators say, it’s all a work in progress. What an online exhibition also allows is to grow and expand.
ANJA ILIĆ: I think the important thing is that we will try to, you know, preserve the exhibition, and you know, to make it like not something that will last like only a few months, as you know, exhibitions in the physical space tend to do. We hope that we will make it something permanent, as a permanent digital archive and website on this topic. And the main core of the website will probably remain the same.
PETER KORCHNAK: The third member of the team is the web designer Marko Samardžić.
The reception of the exhibition has been overwhelmingly positive, according to the curators.
ANJA ILIĆ: People usually said that, you know, this is a topic which is basically under researched, underrepresented in the public sphere.
Our friends, the historians, were saying that they find it very helpful to have, like all these documents now scanned and presented in a form of a digital archive.
But one of the most important things for me, at least, was that you know some people who were not that familiar with the system, who are not scholars who take some interest in Yugoslavia, or socialist organizing today, or any sort of like left taught in practice, they have usually Found this, this exhibition, something which is, you know, quite accessible.
We also got some very constructive critiques, mostly pertaining to, you know, the things we could add to this exhibition.
But the idea of this exhibition wasn’t to cover every possible topic. The idea was to make some sort of a general overview, and then maybe inspire some other people to study the topic as well.
VLADIMIR UNKOVSKI KORICA: One of the other things that has emerged was not just interest internally in the former Yugoslavia, but perhaps unsurprisingly from abroad. Yugoslav self-management was a system that, during the Cold War, positioned itself much like the Yugoslavia nonalignment project as between the First and Second worlds of the Cold War, an alternative to both, you know, the market, private property capitalism in the West and then the statism in the East, right?
And it did travel the during the Cold War. I mean, one of the sections that we put up was about its international impact. People from Asia and Africa were interested in how it functioned. Some tried to emulate it. It held specific and special significance in Eastern Europe, and even in Western Europe strands of the left who were looking for a third way often viewed it as an institutionalized form of a third way. That comes out through the documents, but also comes out through international interest that we got from Latin American, North American, West European, East European colleagues. It would be great to get more traction, also in Africa and Asia.
PETER KORCHNAK: Though the exhibition is a culmination of a lot of work and it marks a particular anniversary, even as it will stay up for the foreseeable future, with or without any additions or expansion, it’s also a kind of a starting point.
VLADIMIR UNKOVSKI KORICA: I do think that it’s probably worth talking about self-management in general, beyond the exhibition itself for us. For us one of the obvious questions that is no longer being posed in a direct way, but was worth revisiting, was precisely this idea of industrial democracy, as it was called in the English language literature, a lot. This idea that you know, the of labor should go to those who create it. And revisiting this as an idea that shouldn’t be simply dismissed was critical for us.
It’s important to understand how the system functioned. It was also important to show that when the system broke at various points, it broke in ways which aren’t just the classic route to private property again, in the 1990s. There were seeds of other possibilities during during the during the period of Yugoslavia history, and many of these were came from workers themselves, they came from people who participated in Yugoslav self management, but often wanted it broadened out.
And it’s important to bring that back, because I think one of the central lessons for me of the Yugoslavia experience was that the straight jacket of a single party state, in a single nation state, in a world capitalist dominated world, cannot succeed, right? Socialism needs to be something in the future that comes from the mass self activity of workers across the world. That might not be easy to to depict in a single in a single online exhibition with a federal archive being your only source, but it was something that hopefully by pointing out ordinary people and their reactions to the system we could at least kind of nod to as an inspiration. And it is something that’s an important question, I think, around the world these days, where the question of who can save us from from a situation in which we don’t control our lives? Well, the fundamental lesson has to be, it’s we ourselves as a collective working class across the world.
ANJA ILIĆ: One important takeaway of this exhibition that I would like to see in other people is that, you know, they really like, Don’t to try not to limit themselves, and you know, even like their visions of this, you know, so to say, like positive utopia or whatever. Because if we only look out for alternatives to the present social order and system in the past, without actually analyzing what led up to the collapse of these systems, I’m afraid we are bound to repeat the same mistakes again.
One valuable thing that you can get, even like from the documents from the federal state archives is that you can see that even like the creators of that very system were, in a way, conscious of the fact that, you know, it had its shortcomings.
So I think thinking critically about the past societies can only do us good.
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PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening.
All guests’ opinions expressed are solely their own; unless otherwise noted they do not express, reflect, or represent the views or opinions of any third party, including myself.
Find additional information, sources, embeds, links, photos, and the transcript of this episode at Yugoblok.com/RememberingYugoslavia. Also at Yugoblok, the ad-free version of this and every other episode, plus extended and bonus episodes. Become a member today.
Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić.
I am Peter Korchňak.
Cao!