THE PROMISE OF SELF-MANAGEMENT

...Milovan Djilas, people can leave, and do so without harassment, delay, body searches, or restrictions on the money they take out with them...

...Religion, too, is diverse—Roman Catholic...

...None was jailed, though it is public knowledge that they have been conducting a "flying university" at private apartments...

...Unemployment is up, and inflation has been hovering at the 30 to 40 percent level...

...What I found most impressive about self-management communism is that it involves the average citizen in economic and political decision-making to an extent unknown anywhere else—whether in capitalist, communist, or Third World countries...

...It's hell," a writer for Politika told me, "when they get the final figures for two months ago and you learn that you have to give back some of the money you already had...

...The law provides a floor below which earnings may not fall no matter how inept or inefficient the local workers' council, and in extreme cases the government steps in and liquidates or merges an unhealthy enterprise...

...Under the circumstances, the state had to introduce regulations and laws to stop such practices, and work out disputes between economic units quickly and effectively...

...From its inception, the publication vexed the regime—particularly during the 1968 student demonstrations against the "red bourgeoisie...

...Yugoslavia has hardly been the ideal place to prove the virtues of self-management communism, and certainly the Yugoslav system is still a long way from perfection...

...The government, which had kept itself aloof from the process more than it should have, according to economists, was forced to intervene...

...However, a writer for Borba who belongs to the party and serves on the workers' council told me that when a new editor was hired, "I put forth an editorial program entirely opposed to his...

...There was a drop in national purchasing power and a consequent further drop in production—a slump...

...The government cut back imports, devalued the dinar by 30 per cent to stimulate exports, placed a virtual freeze on wages (not directly, but through the party and the unions), and took other measures to cut the trade deficit to $2 billion and reduce it further this year...

...Workers receive a monthly bonus that depends on profits...

...But they evidently believed they had to respect the compact with the people for .ve//Lmanagement, and decided to let that process go as far as possible before intervening...

...There are, to be sure, stringent limitations on freedom of speech and of the press, but I saw none of the fear that is pervasive in so many other countries...

...Per capita income, computed at an average of $2,300 a year by the Yugoslav government and at about $3,000 by U.S...

...But we accept it as a good thing...

...we had to reintroduce a certain amount of autarchy...

...In 1976," the government boasts, "36 per cent of all families owned a private car, compared to only 8 per cent in 1968...

...My friend Juliana, who is wholly indifferent to politics, now shares a modern three-room apartment with her retired mother...

...Tito held this motley combination together through strong personal leadership, delicate diplomacy, the promise of a better life...

...by 1978, a $2 billion shortfall, and in 1979, a whopping $3.6 billion negative balance...

...We have done it while greatly improving the living standards of our people...

...The Yugoslavs speak of "social," not "national," ownership...

...Instead, she remains in Belgrade, complains—as almost everyone does—about constantly rising prices, but admits she has never had it so good...

...says a Yugoslav economist, "may have a similar rate of growth, but they have reached it by an intense exploitation of their labor force...

...if there is a loss, they must pay back some of their earnings...

...She could work in Frankfurt and earn higher wages, particularly since she is fluent in German, but the thought has never occurred to her...

...Similarly, they recognize that they must keep a good distance between the party and the economy, or workers and managers will exercise little initiative...

...Nonetheless, you could not hold a meeting to demand national independence for Croatia or any of the other national republics...

...A "recession" is now under way: Real wages fell last year by about 8 per cent and probably will drop further this year...

...Yugoslavs were spending more than they were earning, and they were living better than they should have been...

...I was voted down, but there were no reprisals...

...The food was awful, and so were the dowdy dress uniforms of the three flight attendants...

...they used to share a flat with another family...

...If a single word can describe Yugoslavia's "self-management communism," it is relaxed...

...Croats and Serbs speak a common language (though it is written in two alphabets, Cyrillic and Latin...

...It called, instead, for "democratic socialism," a truly free press, free speech and assembly, trade unions free of party control, and other changes...

...South Korea and Taiwan...

...Self-management extends to every aspect of life—farming, education, housing, culture...

...The share of food expenditures in total personal consumption declined from 54 per cent in 1952 to 39 per cent in 1973, per capita consumption of foods having been doubled in the meantime...

...But it is a long, long way from rigid Stalinism—a small beacon pointing toward the future...

...Tito personally demanded that the professors be ousted from the university and expelled from their party branch, but both institutions resisted.' Finally, after a change in the Serbian administration, the professors were denied the right to teach...

...Four out of ten families now own automobiles, and every morning owners of Zastavas fight for parking spaces at Marx-Engels Place...

...Though Praxis endorsed the self-management system, it considered the present form, undemocratic and self-defeating...

...The government and the party could have stepped in years ago to force the enterprises, banks, communes, and republics to invest more in raw materials and infrastructure development...

...Though she complains constantly that she is strapped for funds, Juliana travels out of the country several times a year—usually to Austria, but also to London and Paris...

...Last year was the year of reckoning...

...But my impression changed as soon as 1 stepped off the plane in Belgrade...

...The new airport is clean and modern...

...We're not unhappy...

...Prices are roughly comparable to those charged in the United States...

...Even my non-political friend, Juliana, would vote for it...

...A typical reply was, "No, not enthusiastic in the sense that we glow every day...

...The nine-person presidency that has succeeded Tito will find it more difficult to manage—and an economic slump like the present one is bound to fan the flames of separatism...

...After the reform of 1965...

...But Juliana's rent is only $18 a month, medical care is free, and she can retire at age fifty-five and draw 85 per cent of her present earnings for the rest of her life—plus a cost-of-living adjustment that guarantees the pension's purchasing power...

...The result was a growing balance-of-trade deficit...

...In each plant, the workers elect a workers' council from their own ranks, and the council in turn hires the plant director, sets his pay, and decides what to produce, from which bank to borrow, whether to merge with another enterprise, how to set prices, what to import, how much to reserve for capital expansion, and all other policy issues...

...The present slump originated when the state allowed the free market to go too far...

...The greatest problem facing Yugoslavia is its multitude of nationalities, religions, and languages—and the lack of cement to hold them together...

...But these are uniquely Yugoslav problems, and they do not reflect on the system of self-management, which has worked remarkably well even under the stress of ethnic conflict...

...In the last decade, the various republics and their hundreds of constituent communes placed too much emphasis, according to top Yugoslav economists, on processing industries—from textiles to electronics...

...in 1977, a tiny deficit...

...She has a color television set made in Japan, which she bought on the installment plan...

...Self-management extends to every aspect of life-farms, schools, housing, culture "We did not invent this system," a communist leader told me, "but we have put it into practice...

...Since the late 1940s, Yugoslavia's economic growth rate has been among the highest in the world—6.2 per cent a year...

...says Alexandre Lebel of the magazine Economics and Politics, "we switched from a moderate degree of autarchy to a much more open economy...

...Food markets, too, seem well supplied...

...Proportionately too much money was put into durable manufactures, where it could rapidly be recouped, and too little into raw materials, where the investment would have to lie fallow for a much longer period before yielding a decent profit...

...I suspect the system does not work nearly as well in practice as it does in theory...

...The state kept itself at a distance, even when relations between enterprises or regions obviously demanded regulation...

...It will probably last a year or two, but it is the sort of thing that has happened before...

...We found, for instance, that some enterprises were not paying their debts to others, using the funds instead to buy raw materials from abroad—but there was nothing the creditor could do...

...There are six republics—Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro—and two autonomous provinces, Voivodina and Kosovo, all with divergent cultures and histories...

...In fact, the government helps citizens—even physicians, engineers, and skilled workers—find better-paying work elsewhere, whether on a temporary or permanent basis...

...Iencountered critics of the regime, some of them bitter, but I had the feeling after dozens of private conversations with ordinary people that the Yugoslav regime could easily win an honest election...

...They come back because, like Juliana and her mother, most Yugoslavs have never had it so good...

...Each delegate must report back to the constituency and is bound by law to vote as directed by the constituency...

...You can buy Western newspapers and magazines— even a copy of Playboy...

...Croatia and Slovenia are "European," and enjoy European living standards...

...the only lines I saw anywhere were for soft ice cream...

...My judgment is that some version of the Yugoslav system will have to be adopted wherever communism is to have a chance of succeed-ingv The Yugoslav communists recognize that they must keep a good distance between the party and the state...

...Yugoslavia is not dogmatic about private ownership—there are, in addition to millions of small landowners, 117,000 private entrepreneurs in such endeavors as beauty parlors, repair shops, restaurants, grocery stores, and even a few industrial supply workshops—enterprises where the state believes private endeavor is more efficient than social ownership...

...It might seem, at first glance, that the system is falling apart, but actually it is catching up with itself—correcting an ephemeral imbalance...

...The party—the League of Communists—seems to be playing a greater role than it once did...

...M Sidney Lens, a contributing editor of The Progressive, was in Yugoslavia this summer...

...Other regions are "Balkan," with far lower standards...

...My mother," she adds, "told me the same thing last week—that in all her years she has never lived so well...

...We couldn't maintain the degree of openness we had...

...It is managed by an assembly of councils...

...A 1974 reform, intended as a safeguard for the self-management system, is the practice of electing "delegates" for the party, the unions, and almost all other organs from the bottom up—from the workplace to the commune, the commune to the region, the region to the republic...

...No one expects the depression to be so deep as to cause either a social explosion or repression by the regime...

...The door to the overhead rack kept flying open, and the tray table in front of my seat had a similar case of the jitters...

...In Belgrade you can buy a book by Leon Trotsky as well as one by Henry Kissinger— both published in Serbian rather than English, which only the elite can read...

...Since no worker can be elected to the council for more than two successive two-year terms, a significant number are ultimately involved in managerial decisions...

...the government admits there are 350 political prisoners, mostly separatists of one nationality or another...

...This produced large quantities of consumer goods that were swiftly gobbled up, and that provided the enterprises with quick profits and turnover of capital...

...At a ball-bearing plant I visited, the party secretary told me that more than half the candidates for the workers' council were party members, and while he insisted that party members feel free to engage in open disagreement with each other, I got the impression that the party provided more "guidance" than it would admit...

...Recently, articles in the press suggested that the government ought to invite the seven in for political discussions...

...About 700,000 avail themselves of the right to travel, and almost all come back home...

...Serbian Orthodox, Islamic, Macedonian Orthodox...

...analysts, varies widely around the country...

...The workers' council wants to earn as great a profit as possible for the enterprise, because wages are based not only on production levels but on plant profits...

...One point worth underscoring is that except for a few prominent dissidents such as Josip Broz Tito's former associate...

...Macedonians and Slovenians each have their own language...

...Living standards, though much higher than in the past, are still extremely low in Kosovo, which has an Albanian majority, but seven times higher in Slovenia, which compares to Western Europe...

...She earns $290 a month, which together with her mother's $100 monthly pension provides them with a modest income...

...The national product has doubled every eleven years...

...The system, introduced after Tito's break with Stalin in 1948 and often modified since then, begins with the assumption that workers, not the state, own the means of production...

...The PKB state farm outside Belgrade, which covers 100,000 hectares and serves as marketing agent and adviser to farmers who own another 200,000, employs 25,000 workers in its many enterprises and has more than 200 workers' councils...

...The Promise of Self-Management Yugoslavia may have found the way to make socialism work BY SIDNEY LENS My return to Yugoslavia, after an absence of more than ten years, did not have an auspicious beginning...

...The JAT airplane from Madrid to Belgrade had that hand-me-down look of an old DC-3, though it was, in fact, a reasonably late model...

...But they were kept on the payroll at 60 per cent of their former pay for more than six years, and six of the seven were allowed to travel, teach, and publish abroad...

...In 1964, seven professors in the philosophy department of the University of Belgrade started a publication called Praxis...

...Enterprises were going into debt to buy raw materials to produce more goods for workers who were voting themselves more money to buy them...

...I asked students whether they were enthusiastic about socialism...

...Even Yugoslavia's mistakes sometimes reveal a core of concern for the individual, an indispensable component of self-management communism...

...What is remarkable is not just the rate of growth—no small achievement for a nation that lost 1.7 million people (11 per cent of its population) and a sixth of its wealth in World War II and then had to contend with years of economic blockade by its former Soviet and East European trading partners—but the way it was attained...

...and every second one owned a television set, as against the 1973 ratio of one in four...

...Where the two coincide, as in the Soviet Union, pluralism is discouraged and sometimes brutally suppressed...

...No one else has...

...raw materials that were not being produced at home had to be imported in ever larger amounts...

...In 1976, Yugoslavia had a surplus balance of payments...

...The stores are packed with well-displayed merchandise, including such durable goods as refrigerators, wash machines, and kitchen ranges...

...Now they have accepted research jobs at the university with full pay, and they are publishing their magazine in England, from where it is mailed back to Yugoslavia...

...The city itself looks remarkably more prosperous than it did on my last visit...

...With some raw materials less available than previously, certain plants had to reduce production until domestic raw material sources could be developed...

...There are also councils at the universities, with student participation, to decide on staff, curricula, tenure problems, and student grievances...

...Meanwhile, outlay on cultural needs, health and hygiene, recreation and entertainment increased from 3 to 8 per cent, on furniture and durable household appliances from 5 to 10 per cent, on transport and communications from 2 to 9 per cent...