The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for a society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.

—Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I

The Idea of Self-Management

The idea of the free association of producers is as old as socialism itself. Owen, Proudhon, Fourier, and others—those forerunners and contemporaries of Marx whom he contemptuously dubbed “utopian socialists”—all dreamed of a society in which production and exchange would take place in an atmosphere free of external compulsion, greed, and misery. Marx inherited this aspiration but warned that its realization was far from imminent and that it was predicated, as he asserted in the above-quoted passage from Capital, on material conditions that must themselves be the “spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.” As if to emphasize the point, in his writings he devoted nearly all his attention to that very process of development, giving little indication of what the new forms of association might look like when they finally appeared.

Only in one historical instance—the Paris Commune—did Marx recognize anything even remotely resembling what he called the “self-government of the producers.” The political and administrative structure of the Commune represented for Marx the thorough realization of the democracy of which he had written nearly thirty years earlier in his Critique of Hegel's ‘Philosophy of Right.' The popularization of the armed forces, the establishment of universal suffrage and rotation of delegates, the provisions for strict accountability and the merging of executive and legislative functions, and perhaps most importantly the provision that public servants receive no more compensation than an ordinary worker's wage—all were received by Marx with the highest praise. While the Commune did not provide directly for democracy in the sphere of production, Marx seemed to think that something on this order was immanent in the very nature of the Commune. “Its true secret,” he wrote in The Civil War in France, was that it “was essentially a working-class government, the produce [sic] of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.” Indeed without this last condition, he stressed, the entire formal political structure of the Commune

would have been an impossibility and a delusion. The political rule of the producer cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labour emancipated, every man becomes a working-man, and productive labour ceases to be a class attribute.¹

With the death of the Commune, the idea of the “self-government of the producers” was adopted by radical syndicalists who insisted that the organization of production should be carried out directly by the workers through their trade associations. It was more or less in this form that the idea surfaced in the Soviet Union in the early ig20S in the famous intra-Party debate over the “Workers' Opposition.” The Workers' Opposition, Kollontai asserted,

supports the thesis that the management of the economy is the affair of the trade unions, and in this its thinking is more “Marxist” than [that of] the theoretically schooled Party summits. . . . The leading economic organ in the workers' republic must, in the present transitional period, be an organ elected by the producers, the workers. All other soviet apparata which act in the area of production and the economy only carry out the economic policy of that main economic organ of the workers' republic.²

It is significant for subsequent Soviet history that these ideas about workers' councils developed out of the growing mistrust of Party activists of an increasingly ponderous central bureaucracy. To be sure, their suspicions were not unfounded. But Lenin, in his rejoinder to the Workers' Opposition, refused to confuse what he perceived as two distinct issues. The struggle against bureaucratism would proceed with ever greater vigor, he insisted at the Tenth Party Congress, while the trade unions would function as “schools of communism.” As for direct management of the economy by the workers, however, he dismissed the idea for the time being as a luxury which the Party, at a time when the country was in the grip of serious threats from abroad and continual crises from within, not to mention the still relatively uneducated state of the Russian working class itself, could ill afford.³ The issue was closed for the foreseeable future.

Thus when Tito boldly proclaimed the introduction of workers' self-management in Yugoslavia on June 26, 1950, this small country was embarking on a largely uncharted course. Conditions in Yugoslavia in the early 1950s were hardly more favorable than they had been in Russia three decades before. Yugoslavia was still a backward country with a rather small industrial base; it had recently suffered through a costly war in which it lost a greater proportion of its population than any other European country, including the USSR; it was under severe external pressure—both military and economic—from all sides; and it had just experienced the trauma of estrangement from the Soviet Union which itself was the cause of serious internal conflicts throughout the Yugoslav Party. With all this in mind, Tito's daring and imagination seem all the more remarkable in retrospect. The proclamation of workers' self-management was designed precisely to mobilize and unify the population in the face of these serious strains, internal and external. In addition, workers' self-management was intended to lay the groundwork for a far-reaching social transformation by cultivating the awareness of the broad working populace of its right to control the processes and products of its labor while simultaneously struggling against the evils of bureaucratism. And to root out bureaucratism meant no less than to strike at the very foundations of the Stalinist political order, many of whose features were closely replicated in Yugoslavia in the immediate postwar years. In his speech announcing the self-management reform, Tito clarified the purposes of the experiment:

The transfer of the factories and mines, etc., to management by workers' collectives will prevent the infectious disease known as bureaucracy [from] becoming endemic in our economy. . . . Bureaucracy is among the greatest enemies of Socialism for the reason that it is drawn in unnoticed at every pore of social activity, without people being aware of it at first. . . . It is imperative that we enlist the assistance of the broadest masses to fight against it and not allow this menace to Socialism to get under way.⁴

The introduction of workers' self-management in Yugoslavia can be described without exaggeration as a revolutionary departure. Still, this was a revolution from above. In prerevolutionary Russia, for example, the movement for factory control seems to have been at first the result of the spontaneous action of Petrograd workers, only later embraced by the Bolsheviks and then only temporarily, while in Poland and Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 demands for workers' councils came from below with dissident intellectuals acting as catalysts. In Yugoslavia, in contrast, workers' self-management appeared as the result of a political decision made at the highest levels and quickly became an integral part of the established system. As a plaque on a Yugoslav factory building reads, “the party-state leadership gave the factories to the management of workers' collectives.”⁵ These circumstances would have important implications for the subsequent development of the Yugoslav model of workers' self-management.

While it was originally applied only to factories and similar industrial enterprises, the principle of self-management was by the mid-1950s broadened to apply to other social sectors as well, eventually embracing social self-government (services and consumption), communal self-government (on the basis of territorial political units), and, on a much more restricted scale, rural self-management.⁶ The functions assigned to the units of self-management, as well as the degree of autonomy of those units from external control, varied over time but grew steadily throughout the subsequent decade. There is no question that by the mid 1960s the role of these self-managing collectives in the national economy as a whole was significant, but as Albert Meister suggests, their net social and economic impact was still rather difficult to assess:

Since their introduction, the effects of the workers' councils—and of their new liberty—have made themselves felt [in the following areas]: struggle against waste, increased productivity, reduction of manpower. These positive effects, however, have been counterbalanced—true, to a lesser degree—by negative tendencies: the economism of enterprises, a lack of morality in market behavior, excessive abuse of personnel . . . , and an excessive degree of individual profit-sharing to the detriment of productive investments and the social or collective utilization of profits.⁷

At the same time, and perhaps precisely because of these difficulties, the regime sought to confine the principle of self-management as much as possible to the lower levels of the political and economic system. Basic decisions about national investment policy have been handled not by organs of self-management in the productive sectors of the economy but either by central federal organs or, more recently, by banks and other commercial concerns. Indeed this and related problems, as we shall see below, is one of the major weak links which many Praxis Marxists have found in the practice of self-management in Yugoslavia. But for the time being, it is important to observe that insofar as self-management is a working part of the Yugoslav political system as a whole, it is subject to the same pressures toward idealization and rationalization as are all social ideas which lend their support to the formal political structure of a society and its perpetuation. In short, self-management, too, has had a sort of ideology constructed around it, and along with this there has developed an implicit but mandatory pecking order of criticism. Meister writes:

Before [criticism] is expressed by the Chief or major leaders, the institutions and their functioning are not presumed to be subject to criticism; one closes one's eyes to that which is not going well, one maintains silence about the evidence. Officially, the institutions are the best and most democratic that the people have had since the beginning of their history. . . . But later, criticism appears, the Chief speaks; and immediately everyone speaks, criticizes, and even demolishes.⁸

It does not seem overly exaggerated to say that Meister's observations have generally held true with but one significant exception—the Marxists of the journal Praxis. In this context, Stojanović provides a valuable supplement to Meister when he writes that “after an official acknowledgment of the existence of a deformation” previously criticized independently by intellectuals, “it is the critics of these phenomena who are expelled from the party rather than those who are really responsible.”⁹

Indeed, in their critique of workers' self-management in Yugoslavia the Praxis Marxists of ten f ailed to conform to this protocol of criticism. And perhaps this, above all, was their most serious offense.

For this reason it is all the more important to emphasize that both within Yugoslavia and on the international scene, there have been no better or more persuasive spokesmen for the principle of workers' self-management than the Praxis Marxists— precisely, perhaps, because of their critical stance. To be sure, official opponents of the Praxis Marxists have been loath to concede this point. At international symposia,¹⁰ in lectures abroad, in translations of their works, and through the vehicle of the Korɩula Summer School and finally through Praxis itself, these intellectuals—of whose broad international reputation Tito himself has spoken publicly with much suspicion¹¹—have eloquently and forcefully spoken on behalf of workers' self-management as the sole form of social organization capable of resolving the contradictions inherent in both bourgeois and existing socialist societies and as most consonant with Marx's vision of a “free association of producers.”¹² Marković's enthusiasm for the principle of self-management is representative of that of his colleagues:

Eight decades after the Paris Commune and Marx's analysis of its experiences, the socialist movement rediscovered the forgotten principle of self-management. In so doing it returned to its soul, its profound human value, and its universal-historical character at a time when it had seemed that its hour had passed in the West. . . . For only democratic socialism—more specifically, a society of self-management—signifies a radical negation of modern capitalism and its ultimate radical humanization, and accordingly the necessary path for the further development of incipient transitional forms of post-capitalist society.¹³

Marković's colleague Ljubomir Tadić expresses a similar conviction:

I see the essence of self-management, as immediate democracy, as primarily the real possibility of submitting necessary public functions to the effective and public control and critique of the mass of workers, radically excluding professional functionaries and their privileges, since every parasitic form is alien to socialism.¹⁴

The Praxis Marxists have been careful, however, to distinguish between self-management as an immanent principle and self-management as an existing reality. They have consistently reaffirmed the appropriation and control by the producers of the means of production as the most worthy goal of a truly socialist society. But they have also shared a conviction that without a frank, critical, Marxist evaluation—whatever its conclusions—of the practice of self-management in Yugoslavia, this revolutionary principle of social organization would represent nothing more than an empty ideological justification for a new system of class oppression.

Self-Management Between Bureaucratism and Economism

As Yugoslav society underwent dramatic changes in the decade from 1965 to 1975, and especially since the effects of the economic and political reforms of the mid-1960s came to be felt, the emphasis of the Praxis critique of Yugoslav self-management tended to shift accordingly. In general, the Praxis Marxists have seen embryonic and fragile forms of self-management as threatened by the twin dangers of bureaucratism and market-induced atomization, by too much integration and—paradoxically—too little. But over time, the Praxis Marxists tended to exhibit increasing concern with problems of excessive decentralization and the rise of a new bourgeoisie, which in their view were simply superimposed over the more long-standing legacy of bureaucratic domination. Above all, it was the very dynamism of the Praxis critique, with its internal roots in a humanistic philosophy of man, that prevented it from fixating on any single dimension of self-management and that in fact contributed to the critique's ability to anticipate problems (such as the localization of economic conflict and the degeneration of the self-managing organization into a political subordinate of the technocratic infrastructure) that were only later grasped— and even then not in their entirety—by those in authority.

In the first major Praxis article devoted to a critical evaluation of self-management in Yugoslavia, Mihailo Marković stressed a basic discontinuity in the structure of the Yugoslav political system. While the principle of workers' self-management had been introduced a decade and a half before, in its actual implementation self-management had turned out to be an institution existing only alongside of the state rather than in place of it; an institution, furthermore, “which embraces only local organs of social power.” At higher levels of the political structure reigned the bureaucratic principle, effectively curbing democratic tendencies in the base while exerting real power where important social decisions were at issue. This situation led Marković to assert:

Self-management cannot be reduced to its initial historical forms which at present exist in our country. . . . It cannot be limited only to production relations at the level of the enterprise and to the local organs of social power. The complete and definitive surpassing of bureaucracy is possible only when self-management reaches the top: when the central organs of the state are converted into organs of self-management.¹⁵

At the same time, Marković suggested that this bipolar model of Yugoslav society was oversimplified to the extent that it overlooked the formation of bureaucratic cliques at the local enterprise level, composed of Party, technical management, trade union, governmental, and even workers' council leaders, who by virtue of their position in the hierarchy wield the balance of power in both the commune and the enterprise and who use that power to gain substantial personal benefits.¹⁶ The existence of such oligarchic cliques and their negative influence on the level of workers' formal participation in, and their information about, decisions at the enterprise level has been amply documented by sociological investigations. Studies from 1960 to 1969 by the Ljubljana sociologist Veljko Rus¹⁷ confirmed the relative lack of opportunity for worker participation in the decision-making process and the consequent alienation of the workers from the institutional structure of self-management. All of this seemed to indicate a basic lack of progress since at least 1964, when Rus reported to a session of the Korɩula Summer School:

Sociological analyses bear witness to the fact that the structure of power within workers' organizations, in spite of structural changes, have remained essentially the same. In spite of the significant degree of decentralization of competence, we find that the influence of the central organs of the enterprise is still predominant. In spite of the fact that the collegium is formally only an advisory organ of the director, we find that this organ has a dominant role in workers' organizations. These findings can be generalized with a great degree of certainty. But this means that all the previous structural changes have not sufficed to guarantee a fundamental democratization within workers' organizations.¹⁸

In order to appreciate the significance of these assertions it may be useful to sketch a broader picture of the relationship between participatory democracy and self-management as perceived in Praxis theory. In what was probably his most important essay on the problem of self-management Supek indicated that the goal of self-management is no less than the transcendence of the alienation of the producer by overcoming the harmful aspects of the division of labor which have been responsible for antagonistic class divisions in all previously existing societies save the most primitive.¹⁹ In this connection, both Supek and his Zagreb colleague Ivan Kuvaɩić have been convinced that the automation of production will contribute significantly toward a reintegration of the technical aspects of the productive process and an attenuation of the distinctions between labor and managerial functions, in addition to generating free time for the pursuit of cultural values.²⁰ To be sure, their technological optimism has been tempered with caution. They are aware that the integration of technical functions will not necessarily contribute to the de-alienation of labor from the standpoint of the individual producer nor will it automatically extend to spheres of social activity outside of the enterprise. Indeed beyond the goal of control by the producers over their immediate productive activity, Supek has described the primary function of self-management as the “integration of the productive community into the civil community”²¹—by giving the workers experience in the art of self-government during their labor time while extending the boundaries and competences of the self-managing collective beyond activities immediately associated with material production to include educational, social, and cultural activities as well. Thus the importance of worker participation in self-management lies in more than the immediate satisfaction that may be derived from such participation. Participation in the decisions of the enterprise should serve as a basis for the simultaneous mastery of the productive process, the integration of political and economic functions, and the complete development and humanization of the individual personality.

Considering the central importance attributed to the concept of participatory democracy in Praxis theory, Veljko Rus's 1970 Praxis essay entitled “Self-Management Egalitarianism and Social Differentiation” seemed to indicate a clear intellectual rupture between Rus and the Praxis group. Here, he explored the implications of recent sociological findings suggesting that the goal of participation in self-management institutions had become less salient to Yugoslav workers after 1967:

While from 1962 to 1967 it was found that employees wanted the distribution of power which is closer to normative than to actual structures of power, in the past two years we have found that employees' aspirations approach closer and closer to actual structures and move further and further from normative ones.²²

According to Rus, the explanation for this deradicalization of workers' norms was to be found in the distribution of power within the enterprise brought about by increased differentiation in the technical-functional division of labor. What should be sought under such circumstances is, he contended, a “pluralist centralism” consisting of a distribution of “active” and “passive” power (corresponding to positions in the functional hierarchy) and a mode of conflict resolution characterized by both bargaining and participation.²³ This argument seemed to presuppose a Saint-Simonian vision of a natural hierarchy of social functions which, although distinctly antiegalitarian in its thrust (and perhaps because of this very factor), enjoyed increasing support in Yugoslavia in the wake of the liberal economic reforms of the mid-1960s.²⁴ It was precisely, however, this antiegalitarian impulse, at least in terms of the distribution of power, that was most sharply at variance with the social vision held by the “mainstream” Praxis theorists. Indeed Rus concluded his 1970 essay by remarking that the chief failing of Praxis criticism lay in its romantic fixation on democratic norms whose time was long past:

This radical criticism of everything that exists was [sic—css] dogmatic in the sense that it had never attempted a “revision” of fundamental values in the name of practice but rather merely emphasized the fact that social practice is far removed from proclaimed ideals . . . It was not creative to the extent that it did not point out the necessity of certain reinterpretations or redefinitions of the fundamental values which were the starting point of this criticism.²⁵

Rus's disenchantment with Praxis, then, derived intellectually from an observed shift in workers' attitudes and the broader implications for the political structure of self-management which they seemed to suggest. For Rus, Praxis's commitment to participatory democracy through workers' self-management— indeed, the entire traditional Yugoslav theory of self-management, which had served for nearly two decades as the cornerstone of the official ideology—had been outmoded by industrial progress and technical specialization. Self-management in its classic, participatory form, Rus suggested, is basically a preindustrial utopia whose feasibility retreats with the advance of modern, industrial society.

It should be noted, however, that Rus's skepticism, at least in a methodological sense, is valid only to the extent that the articulated political norms of industrial workers (or for that matter, of any members of any political unit), expressed in responses to inquiries of a sociological investigator, can be universally accepted as “realistic” in a given historical context. In fact this is a dangerous assumption to make, for it at least potentially neglects the ideologically stultifying effects that existing structures can have on political attitudes. Even as early as 1965, Supek had maintained that attitudes expressed at the level of immediate production are not necessarily accurate measures of “public opinion,” since for Supek, the very concept of public opinion is one which has programmatic as well as descriptive aspects:

Opinions on the role of workers' self-management have even been advanced recently that are more Fourierist than Marxist, for example when it is maintained that in our country “public opinion is formed at the level of the structure of society and workers' self-management,” concluding that we have no need of institutes for the sounding of public opinion. This would mean that society is transformed into a system of atoms or molecules in which each thinks and decides according to his own criteria. But we know that Marx was a fierce adversary of localism and of enclosing man within socially determined limits. For him, development necessarily proceeds in the sense of the universal consciousness of man, the identification of the individual with all of humanity.²⁶

While for Rus, then, the accommodation of participatory norms to structures in economic enterprises represented an important step on the road to democracy without illusions, most Praxis Marxists would have argued that this accommodation was a sign of something much more serious—the illusion of democracy— whose roots lay deep in the still incomplete nature of the self-management system.

Supek's comments on “localism” bring to light another dimension of the Praxis critique of Yugoslav self-management. For the Praxis critique of bureaucratism does not preclude an aversion to the opposite extreme of undiscriminating decentralization. Mere decentralization from below may represent, as Markovic warns, a type of “polycentrism without decrease in the total amount of the alienated political power”; while Zagorka Pešić reminds us in this connection that “bureaucracy as a constituent element of political power can be transcended only through the transcendence of politics as a distinct and professionalized sphere of social decision-making; that is, through the ‘socialization of politics.’”²⁷ With respect to self-management, the decentralization of economic decision-making power to the enterprise level may not, as we have seen, necessarily imply any greater access to these decisions for those affected by them. Numerous studies of Yugoslav self-management have shown that workers are often presented with decisions by the technocratic infrastructure of the enterprise as virtual faits accomplis ready for ratification and that workers are generally very poorly informed about the issues in each case, having no independent basis to evaluate alternative courses of action.²⁸

A potentially more serious consequence of this type of decentralization, however, is the potential gap between the interests of the enterprise and those of the community at large. This disparity has been reflected in the increasingly exclusive nature of the interests of each enterprise vis-à-vis other enterprises, as well as in renewed interest in the territorial-political commune as an alternative instrument for the political integration of conflicting interests.²⁹ To be sure, the “localism” of the self-managing enterprise is not necessarily inconsistent with bureaucratic statism. So long as “social” interests are authoritatively dictated by the state, it may be expected that individual social components will naturally tend to pursue selfish interests so long as it is in their power to do so (“The liberty of a subject, lieth therefore only in those things, which in regulating their actions, the sovereign hath praetermitted”—Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 21). And as Stojanović suggests, the reverse relationship holds as well:

Self-government based exclusively on groups will reinforce the power of the state rather than negating it. . . . So long as integration, coordination, regulation, and planning are not inherent in self-government, these functions will have to be performed by an alienated part of society—the state. When there is no real community, a surrogate for it becomes indispensable. The Yugoslav experience shows that the state can easily manipulate atomized self-government.³⁰

The behavior of individual enterprises does, in fact, seem to be guided by selfish motives of a purely economic nature, with feverish competition, rather than cooperation and coordination, characterizing inter-enterprise relations. The attitude of the enterprise toward the productive resources within its own domain is, as Stojanović points out, more aptly described by the term “group ownership” than anything approaching “social ownership,”³¹ while an entire ideology—which Stojanović has called “ ‘socialist' anarcho-liberalism”—has grown up around this subsystem of relations. This ideology, as Stojanović explicates it, is one which has several features in common with the ideology of liberal capitalism: a belief in the spontaneous integration of private interests through the independent economic mechanisms of the market; fear of all coordination, regulation, and planning; a bourgeois doctrine of freedom which defines freedom as “the right to do everything which does not harm others”; and finally a commutative concept of justice in which “each person ought to receive as much in social distribution as he has earned on the market,” to the exclusion of more egalitarian notions of distributive justice.³²

The resemblance of these assumptions to the doctrines of Proudhon has been pointed out by more than one Praxis Marxist.³³ Yet the experience of Yugoslav self-management would seem to demonstrate the ultimate futility of Proudhon's stateless system of associations bound together only by contracts and a spirit of “mutuality.” “Especially in our ‘Balkan conditions,'” writes Supek, economic development left solely to the market “will need continual compromises and a single arbiter in the resolution of continual disputes.” In Yugoslavia, this function of integration is performed by that institution which still maintains hegemony over the “vertical organization of social power”— the Communist Party.³⁴ As Supek's vision of a system of self-management based on collectives whose social functions extend beyond the purely economic sphere reminds us, confinement of the enterprise's interests to economic interests alone may play a large role in the inability of self-managing collectives to establish an adequate framework for integration on a cooperative basis. Be that as it may, the existing system is torn between statism from above and the market from below, these two elements being present in proportions which have varied over time but which have characteristically shifted in favor of the former in periods of acute national crisis. It is in this connection that Stojanović speaks of a “vivid dualism in practice” between “self-managing groups in the base and a rather strong statist structure above them”³⁵—neither of which seems to hold much hope for the future of a democratic socialism.

The Economic Reforms and the Emergence of a Market Society

The economic reforms of 1965 played an important role in the decentralization of functions discussed above. The reforms were primarily aimed at reducing the power of the state and its central bureaucratic apparatus in the coordination of economic affairs. Advocates of the reforms claimed that they would stimulate a general shift in the balance of power from the state to the individual enterprise, thereby bringing social power closer to the immediate producers. And indeed, as a result of the reforms, individual enterprises obtained broad, if still limited, control over profits and investment. They were even allowed, under certain conditions, to sell bonds to the public and plan their own growth and future needs, as well as to sign contracts directly with foreign corporations for joint economic ventures. Thus while the doctrine of the “withering away of the state” certainly has yet to be accomplished in Yugoslavia, the withering away of the state's functions in the field of direct economic planning and control seems to have been brought significantly closer to realization by the reforms.

Nevertheless, the overall impact of the reforms has been mixed at best. The luster of increased consumer production and the new attraction that Yugoslavia holds for foreign investors have been dulled by strong inflationary tendencies, an unusually high rate of chronic unemployment and a large foreign labor force, together with new patterns of social stratification and regional rivalries which have fed the flames of nationalist sentiment. Indeed one is tempted to turn back the clock to the reaction of former Polish Party chief Wlàdyslaw Gomulka to demands by Polish and Hungarian workers for factory self-management in 1956, when he warned that “if every factory became a kind of cooperative enterprise of the workers, all the laws governing capitalist enterprise would inevitably come into effect and produce all the usual results.”³⁶ And for Yugoslavia's leaders, the problem of how to reap the fruits of liberal economics while avoiding its pitfalls has represented a major concern over the past decade.

The foregoing is not to suggest, of course, that the position of the Praxis Marxists on self-management should in any way be compared to that of Gomulka, although their detractors often tried to blur the popular mind by identifying the Praxis thinkers with “bureaucratic centralist forces”³⁷ on the basis of the openly expressed Praxis opposition to “market socialism.” The extent of the Praxis Marxists' opposition to the market system is in fact matched only by their mistrust of the state-controlled economy on the Soviet model insofar as both, in their view, tend to deprive the producers of control over the products of their labor and especially over surplus value. What the Praxis Marxists would seem to advocate, instead, is a mixed system of market and plan on the basis of workers' self-management³⁸—a system, however, in which neither market nor plan would have the alienating consequences that they have in existing societies. This view of a socialist economics, they are convinced, is the most thoroughly Marxian approach inasmuch as it fetishizes no specific set of economic relations and is most consonant with Marx's own critique of the alienation of labor.

Very little has been written by the Praxis Marxists concerning the problem of planning from a strictly economic standpoint. To be sure, their critique of the political and human aspects of Stalinism has strong implications which carry over into the economic area as well. In general, however, “planning” in the sense of coordination or redistribution of investment resources (Praxis Marxists from Zagreb are perhaps less enthusiastic with respect to the latter) has been supported by several Praxis Marxists as a mechanism that would help to counteract the centrifugal forces of regional economic differentiation.³⁹ Marković, however, has stressed that in whatever measure planning is present in the economy, it must be a type of planning that is democratic in nature. Thus he has proposed a system of central planning organs constituted through local, territorial, and regional self-managing councils, which would exist independently of the state apparatus. Through this mechanism, he contends, it would be possible to determine democratically the general economic and social goals that should be pursued by enterprise and the economy as a whole. “Analytical groups and centers,” responsible only to these planning organs, would be responsible for offering alternative methods for achieving these goals. In this way, the monopoly of the technocratic infrastructure—which tends to define both goals and methods, presenting society with a single plan to which there can be no alternative at all—would be decisively broken and control of the economy would be returned to the producers and their organs of self-management.⁴⁰

Indeed, even in a society without formal planning, it is Marković's fear that the alienation of the producers may be just as great as in a totally planned economy as a consequence of the monopoly over economic decision-making exercised by technocratic forces, which act according to their own very restricted notions of rationality and efficiency. Neither in the planned economy or in the market economy, therefore, do the producers have a real opportunity to evaluate alternative courses of action in accordance with their human needs. Thus when Marković, along with other Praxis Marxists, speaks of the need for rational direction and coordination in the economy, it suffices to say that he has in mind a humanistic notion of rationality which may differ substantially from what a federal planning official or a local managerial specialist may see as being “rational” from a purely economic standpoint.

The Praxis Marxists are more commonly associated in Yugoslavia, however, with their critique of the market economy and the consequences of the economic reforms of the mid-1960s. Yet in spite of their theoretical predispositions, they are not totally intransigent toward the market as an economic mechanism nor toward commodity production as a temporary, if distasteful, necessity. Stojanović, for instance, has conceded that insofar as the market tends to reveal imbalances and concealed inertia in the statist economic system and stimulates a healthy competition, it performs a vital social function. Furthermore, he maintains that for the foreseeable future, the production of “use values” mediated through “exchange values” is the sole hope of progress toward material abundance. At the same time, however, he warns:

So long as it exists, the market will try to impose itself over society as the supreme regulator and criterion of human relations. . . . The market reacts mainly to the existing level of demand and . . . creates artificial and even harmful demands. It thus comes into conflict with the mission of socialist community, which seeks to humanize existing need and develop new, human needs. . . . Without rational control of economic tendencies by the associated producers, socialism in Marx's sense is out of the question.

Elsewhere, Stojanović observes that the

market can lead to the discovery and rejection of statist and other kinds of privilege. However, it also facilitates the development of another kind of privilege, based upon monopolistic position, speculation, the accidental influence of circumstances, and so on. The anarcho-liberals oppose all corrective measures and plead for the totally free operation of the market. . . . Even capitalism began attempting long ago to prevent the accumulation of super-profits based on monopoly.⁴¹

Thus it is not the market itself—properly kept within bounds—that the Praxis Marxists fear so much as the unrestricted action of the market and the hegemony of the market principle when extended indiscriminately to all areas of social life. It is in this connection that Marković warns against the ideological system of “economism,” which, he contends, was given new vigor by the economic reforms. He describes “economism” (a close relation to Stojanović's “ ‘socialist' anarcho-liberalism”) as a set of assumptions about social life which depict man as an economic being motivated entirely by selfish and consumption-oriented interests. This economism, Marković contends, visualizes the maximization of income as the highest goal of socialist society and asserts (in Marković's words) that “the most important thing for socialism at this moments [sic] is complete liberation of economic laws and the undisturbed development of commodity-money relations.”⁴² The fetishization of the market principle is also evident in the officially accepted notion of “socialist commodity production,”⁴³ which is rejected by the Praxis Marxists as a contradiction in terms that cannot provide a suitable basis for a socialist economy, however unavoidable commodity production may appear in the short run. Nor are they persuaded by those who invoke the necessity of developing a strong material base as the absolute precondition of socialism, thereby justifying the free action of economic laws and even the development of social inequalities. Such arguments, in their view, differ little in substance from the demagogic appeals of Stalinism to the citizenry to forgo immediate material satisfaction in the interest of the future communist society: both ideologically justify alienation in this world with the promise of salvation in the next.

Similarly, the much-vaunted “socialist” principle of “distribution according to work”⁴⁴ has come under Praxis criticism for its insensitivity to the human values of solidarity, equality, and justice. Stojanović and Životić, for instance, have devoted much effort and passion to arguing for a moral principle of equality which would counteract the inherent inequalities built into the principle that a producer should be paid fairly for commodities produced, i.e., without the extraction of surplus value by others who convert this material surplus into social privilege.⁴⁵ Apart from the purely moral dimension, the principle of equal pay for equal work is, as Životić notes, at best a bourgeois principle of equity of which Marx wrote: “This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. . . . It is therefore a right of inequality in its content, like every right.”⁴⁶ The equality inhering in this principle is one determined by the impersonal laws of the market and presumes by its very nature the alienation of labor that Marx so roundly condemned. In this connection Deborah Milenkovitch observes:

The traditional socialist [sic—css] principle of distribution—“to each according to his work”—has been revised by the Yugoslavs, becoming “to each according to the factors of production supplied by the human agent or to which the human agent has access, as valued on the (imperfect) market.” This principle is scarcely distinguishable from that of private enterprise.⁴⁷

What the Praxis Marxists find particularly objectionable in this respect is the reification of the market principle and its enshrinement at the level of permanent moral truth. For the eminent Belgrade sociologist Radomir Lukić, for instance, the principle of distribution according to work is “intimately linked to the very principle of socialism,” and to violate it out of egalitarian motives “would signify no less than a desire for exploitation—for the appropriation of the surplus of the better producers.” It is this confusion between socialist ends and essentially bourgeois means that Stojanović rejects when he refers to

people who in the guise of reform are intensifying their efforts to liquidate communism in general along with its more immature manifestations. Reform and modernization are the slogans not only of those people who are oriented toward socialism; they are employed by “socialist” anarcho-liberalism and technocratism as well.⁴⁸

The question of the market principle in the sphere of culture, as an area of activity which is naturally of great concern to the Praxis Marxists, is a case in point. One of the consequences of the broad sweep of the economic reform was to put all cultural enterprises, as well as industrial ones, at the mercy of the market, evidently with the intention of eliminating statist domination in this area. The eminent Zagreb sociologist. Josip Županov, replying in 1968 to the critics of commercialism in culture, supplied part of the rationale behind these measures, albeit with an important caveat:

When commercialism is frontally attacked, the only thing that is demonstrated is a misunderstanding of the market mechanism. The market is precisely a daily plebiscite of a great number of people about the values and uses of various products and services. If as a result of such a plebiscite intellectual products come out badly, then the evil lies not in the fact of the plebiscite but in the inadequate position of those who make the products.⁴⁹

The exponential growth of the dime-novel and pornographic market since the mid-1960s in comparison with other areas of Yugoslav publishing activity bears adequate testimony to the fact that “intellectual products” have indeed “come out badly” in recent years: Stojanović complains that “individual groups (self-governing, now) can use the market to encourage the most uncultured of needs and make quite a bit of money in the process.” And while recognizing the undesirability of eliminating all market elements from the spheres of cultural production and distribution, Marković at the same time observes that

it would be wrong to think that the market in socialism ought to be the sole and exclusive regulator of relations in the area of culture. For after all, such is not the case even in capitalism: benefactors, powerful private foundations, churches, and the stale have never ceased to intervene energetically in the area of science, art, and cultural creativity in general. Without such important correctives of commodity-money relations, it is problematic whether bourgeois society would have created even a small part of what it was able to create.⁵⁰

Rudi Supek, who of all the Praxis Marxists has generally displayed the greatest concern in questions of cultural creativity and awareness, takes the argument one step further by contending that there is a basic inconsistency between culture and the market principle—the former stressing universal human values, and the latter involving what are essentially private and selfish interests. The problem is not only, writes Supek, that the ideas of particular groups or persons tend to be presented in the world of commercialized culture as the only “true ideas,” but also that

every general idea evokes suspicion, mistrust, and questions as to whether all that is at issue is some sort of mystification or dissemblance. Thus people are ashamed of such ideas, and the universal and the international increasingly retreat before the particular, the ethnocentric, the nationalistic, and localistic; clannish thinking takes the place of class thinking; and the “end of ideology” in this case represents no more than the end of common ideals and the need to sacrifice something for them.⁵¹

In contrast to Županov, then, Supek suggests that the market principle is itself profoundly at variance with the ends of cultural activity. To be sure, Supek would not find it difficult to agree with Županov's proposition that the real problem may lie in the “inadequate position of those who make the [cultural] products.”⁵² But what Supek wishes to warn against here is principally the fetishization of the market principle of socialism. The “humanist” critique of the economic reform, he asserts, is directed mainly toward the “transformation of certain economic measures into a social ideology.” Insofar as the reform's measures were designed to achieve greater economic efficiency and to crush “centralistic parasitism,” they were laudable; but once they became cast as ends in themselves, the results obtained were counterproductive and harmful for the prospects for socialism, to wit:

profit proceeding not from greater devotion to one's work and better organization, but rather from a greater ability to manipulate the market, speculation, pseudocompetition which in Yugoslavia customarily reduces itself to the rule: “Fleece the consumer!”⁵³

Just such negative consequences of the economic reform became evident shortly after its introduction in 1965. The social basis of the new mentality, according to some Praxis Marxists, was to be found in a new and burgeoning economic class with all the markings of “petty-bourgeois capitalism”—without, however, the aspirations toward universal cultural values which ordinarily endow bourgeois ideology with much of its persuasive force.⁵⁴ In a controversial 1971 article, Milan Kangrga presented this new “middle class” as having its historical roots not in the relatively weak interwar Yugoslav bourgeoisie but in the development of Yugoslav society after 1945—in a class hostile to Marxian and all leftist thought and to the aspirations of the working class, a class which in fact viewed true Marxists as “class enemies.” This new class, wrote Kangrga, aspired “to constitute itself economically, to become socially established, politically situated and ideologically and intellectually shaped and reinforced on the level of—the liberal bourgeoisie.” Kangrga described this class's rise to power in the following terms:

For a good many years we can follow this quickened process, from day to day, of the birth, growth, entrenchment, stabilization, penetration, and consolidation of the middle class, which dizzyingly (in the course of our specific and prolonged “primary accumulation of capital”) strengthens itself economically, augments its wealth, takes the conduct of the affairs of the entire society into its own hands, attracting in its wake other social elements and strata, corrupting them, spreading the ideological influence, and drawing itself into all the pores of society—political, economic, social, cultural, theoretical, and philosophical—and even further becoming an ever more dominant intellectual and ideological force in our society. . . . It is even attempting to transform the League of Communists into its own mass party (which from year to year is statistically, in terms of numerical composition and social character of its membership . . . , becoming ever easier to demonstrate).⁵⁵

Underlying the growth of this new “middle class” was the growth of new institutional centers of economic power independent of both the state and the workers engaged in production. The dramatic increase in the power of large commercial firms and banks, the latter coming to play a major role in investment allocations concurrently with the atrophy of central and local planning mechanisms, was indeed perhaps the most important large-scale structural legacy of the economic reforms.⁵⁶ The much-debated constitutional amendments of 1971 represented a consolidation of the position of those enterprises, granting them the status of “self-managing organizations” with the right to increase their income and to dispose of “profits” in accordance with their own wishes.⁵⁷ Supek noted in this connection that the

economic reform has led many production organizations into a difficult situation and has facilitated the rapid rise of the financial organizations to their monopolistic position. While the banks and commerce previously served the development of industrial production, now industrial production serves the strengthening of the economic power of the financial centers, [which is] of course as contrary to the interest of the working class as it is harmful to the policy of economic development.

This juridical identification of productive and intermediary associations was also decried by Vranicki on the grounds that the latter do not produce surplus value and hence merely dispose of the capital produced by others. This confusion, he added, did “serious harm to several essential principles of socialist relations and solidarity.”⁵⁸

Nowhere was the harmful impact of the reforms of the mid-1960s on “socialist relations and solidarity” more evident than in the reappearance of severe national conflict within the Yugoslav federation. For after nearly two decades of relative tranquility and national amity so uncharacteristic of the troubled Balkans, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw a rekindling of national animosities of sufficient intensity to put into question the viability of the Yugoslav multinational idea. For the Praxis Marxists, the resurgence of the explosive “nationalities question” represented the culmination and crisis of the economic-political reforms. This is not to say, however, that the Praxis Marxists saw the solution of this issue in a new set of economic or political measures, since they recognized that the problem of nationalities conflict had become so entangled with moral and ideological overtones that a purely economic or political approach (such as introduction of a greater degree of central planning and resource allocation, coupled with political recentralization) would serve only further to confound the issue. Indeed, with their uncompromising critique of political and economic alienation in mind, it would seem clear that in the Praxis view any solution that relies principally on “merely” political or economic measures would serve in the end only to perpetuate and compound an alienated condition that is sharply at odds with the fundamental goals of socialism.

Nationalism and the Nationalist Mystification

“La patrie des philosophes, c'est la patrie de la liberté”

—Title of Danko Grlic's contribution to Praxis (IE), no. 3-4, 1968

The concept of nationalism as the ideology of an ascendant middle class has always been an integral part of Marxian theory. It was in The German Ideology that Marx observed, in connection with his discussion of the modern nation-state, that “the bourgeoisie is forced to organize itself no longer locally, but nationally, and to give a general form to its mean average interest.”⁵⁹ The Praxis Marxists have maintained that this concept of Marxian social analysis remains every bit as powerful for the analysis of socialist as of capitalist societies, and they have not hesitated, regardless of the serious risks to which it has exposed them, to bring such analysis to bear upon Yugoslavia's present difficulties. For it has been their contention that the new Yugoslav middle class—the beneficiary of postwar Yugoslavia's economic progress, consisting, according to Ivan Kuvaɩić, of “employees of enterprises, offices, commercial and several other social service organizations”⁶⁰—a class in search of an ideology, has found its ideology in nationalism. This nationalism, like its classic predecessors of the nineteenth century, links the interests of the class with those of the state, which in turn is presented as embracing the interests of society at large. It is this deliberate ideological misrepresentation of narrow economic interest as general social interest which is the key, for the Praxis Marxists as for Marx himself, to understanding and exposing nationalism for the collective fiction—the modern “opiate of the masses”— which it is.

To be sure, modern Yugoslav nationalism thrives on other elements than economic conflict alone. What we today call Yugoslavia is the result of decades of dedicated effort, struggle, and bloodshed toward the goal of transforming age-old rivalries and hatreds into the basis of a peaceful and prosperous multinational community. An invisible line crudely dividing the country between north and south testifies to deep historical conflicts that are reckoned by the centuries—between Catholic and Orthodox, Christian and Turk, European and Slav, “West” and “East.” For a while after the end of the Second World War, it had seemed as if these tensions had been all but submerged by the urgent need for national unity in the face of economic isolation and military threats from abroad. But with the gradual abatement of these dangers, the idea of a “Yugoslav nation” as the ideological cornerstone of national harmony began to decline in popular acceptance. To this cultural vacuum there were eventually added sources of economic conflict which reinforced and aggravated traditional cultural animosities, yielding a sure formula for renewed political tension which, if unattended, would inevitably break out into the open.

Interregional economic rivalry, it is true, is nothing new to Yugoslavia. Her northern regions, once provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, historically enjoyed a higher level of economic development and prosperity than her southern territories, which had been among the most backward dependencies of the Ottoman Empire. The pattern of Yugoslav economic development after 1919 and into the post-World War II era only tended to aggravate these disparities, although especially in the latter period efforts were made to reinvest excess “northern” returns into the southern regions. But the decentralizing reforms of the mid-1960s, while perhaps a step forward from the standpoint of economic efficiency at the local level, sowed the seeds of serious interrepublican conflict. One of their effects was to encourage the growth of antagonistic national centers of economic power by transferring the responsibility for much hitherto federally-controlled capital to the republican level. Control over much of the country's productive industrial resources reverted to Croatian and Slovenian interests, while the traditional center of commerce and banking, Belgrade, firmed its grasp on these valuable resources, but now at the level of the republic. Economic decentralization was simultaneously reinforced by a decentralization of political decision-making power, with the growth of substantial republican bureaucracies to cope with the new responsibilities bestowed on them. Finally, in order to articulate the competing interests bred by this new state of affairs, there emerged reinvigorated nationalist ideologies and their spokesmen in republican political structures. Thus modern Yugoslav nationalism may be understood as the result of a peculiar conjunction of two important factors, to a critique of which the Praxis Marxists have devoted much of their writing on political and social issues—the negative side-effects of the growth of a market economy, along with the still incomplete debureaucratization of Yugoslav political life. And it should not be surprising, then, to find that the Praxis Marxists have reserved some of their most passionate rhetoric for discussions of the controversial “nationalities question” and for acerbic and provocative critiques of the obfuscations of nationalist ideology.

The nationalist spirit has found expression in the economic sphere in the militancy with which spokesmen from the economically more developed republics, principally Croatia and Slovenia, have decried the funneling of excess profits from their economies to the underdeveloped republics where investment resources are desperately needed. Such profits would be better and more efficiently utilized, they maintain, in reinvestment in their own republics, while they portray the less economically developed republics as a burden on the development of the national economy as a whole.⁶¹ The Praxis Marxist Miladin Životić alludes to this attitude when he deplores

various particularisms, localisms, duplication of economic facilities, and other forms of anarchy, profiteering appetites, investment in economically unjustified projects, and the tendency to forget the Yugoslav community as a whole. . .⁶²

although it is not so clear whether the “moral principle” of equality which he advocates would do much to alleviate the situation. And Rudi Supek, more directly addressing the dangers of the kind of regional autarky advocated by the most extreme nationalist spokesmen, warns that attempts to establish economic independence from forces within the community on a weak economic basis openly invites a state of semi-dependence on foreign capital similar to the situation which prevailed in Yugoslavia prior to the Second World War.⁶³

This is not to say, however, that the Praxis Marxists have adhered to an absolutely unified position with respect to intra-Yugoslav regional economic rivalries. Indeed, a close reading between the lines might reveal that some Zagreb Praxis theorists (Supek, for instance) have occasionally made certain concessions to the claims of their regional compatriots by deploring the growth in power of the Belgrade banks, whereas their Serbian colleagues (e.g., Marković, Stojanović, and Životić) may often have tended to give greater emphasis to the egoistic behavior of wealthy industrial enterprises and to the need for greater regional equality in economic development, perhaps even at the cost of falling short of optimum efficiency. Despite these minor differences in emphasis, however, the most important contribution of the Praxis Marxists to this picture has been their common insistence that what is at issue in regional economic clashes is not the allocation of resources to entire national communities which are internally homogeneous, but rather the competition for these resources among different segments of essentially the same economic class—a class which crosscuts republican boundaries—at the expense of other segments of the same class and of the working class as a whole.

The statist element in Yugoslav interrepublican nationalism has been closely tied to the autarkic tendencies noted above. The incomplete decentralization of real political power, stopping at the level of the republican bureaucracies, paralleled and reinforced the regionalization of economic interests, to the extent that the Croatian League of Communists itself was an important locus of nationalist sentiments, especially from 1969 to 1971.⁶⁴ The Croatian Party leader Mika Tripalo, deposed in 1972, formulated Croatian political aspirations under the slogan of “republican statehood,” which involved, in George Schöpflin's words, “very far-reaching powers over political and economic matters . . . the proclamation of a barely veiled nationalist ideology that in practice regarded the national interest as higher than that of class.” (Indeed at the height of nationalist sentiment in Croatia in 1971, the increasingly influential group around the journal Hrvatski tjednik and the Matica Hrvatska publishing house began to agitate for Croatian independence even in the areas of foreign affairs and defense.)⁶⁵ Tripalo's idea of national “statehood” gained a great deal of popularity because of the common heritage it claimed with both the Croatian national struggle of the nineteenth century and the Yugoslav anti-Stalinist struggle of the twentieth. In his effort to strengthen the power of the Croatian republican bureaucracy, Tripalo even drew at times on the rhetoric of self-management by expanding it to embrace the nation as a whole, irrespective of class divisions within particular national communities.

The Praxis Marxists reacted vigorously against such transparent attempts to depart from Marx's teachings about nationalism in the cloak of Marxist phraseology. Milan Kangrga's comments about nationalism in contemporary Yugoslavia could easily have been written by Marx himself a century before:

The nation is precisely par excellence the political creation of the bourgeois class. . . . It is nothing other than the politically constituted people in the state. It is thus at the same time necessarily a class creation, which assumes and implies the power of the bourgeoisie over the working class and all other classes . . . and strata of society. There is no nation without its own state . . . that is abundantly clear. But it is just as clear that the modern state . . . is only the state as the political instrument for safeguarding the ruling interest . . . of the bourgeois class and the bureaucracy and simultaneously for the oppression and exploitation of the working class of the very same nation.⁶⁶

It has been precisely this effort to conceal class division by appealing to the concept of the nation in which the Praxis Marxists have seen the most unmistakable sign of the ideological nature of the new nationalism.⁶⁷ “The national state,” writes Ljubomir Tadic, “may be a free state while man may not be a free man.”⁶⁸ A younger Praxis Marxist from Zagreb, Žarko Puhovski, recalls the past extremes to which the fetishization of the nation has been taken in the statement made by the fascist leader of the puppet “independent” Croatian state during the Second World War, Ante Pavelić:

“Our internal political structure will be such that the nation, without so-called democracy, without the speculation of politicians, will itself make sovereign decisions in its own essential and vital interests.”⁶⁹

All this is to say that the new Yugoslav nationalism embodies the same ideological fiction as its classic predecessors in representing the territorial consolidation of state power as the liberation of the nation. Tripalo's concession that the concept of republican statehood does contain elements of “republican étatism” (although, to be sure, an essentially progressive form of statism)⁷⁰ only serves to lay bare the “concealed statism” which Mihailo Marković believes is “much more resistant and dangerous” than statism in its classical, centralist, Stalinist form. The former, he holds, is an “invisible and uncontrolled statism which often conceals itself behind the slogan of decentralization and the struggle against statism.”⁷¹

For the Praxis Marxists, this nationalist ideology also has important philosophical implications which are most evident in the way the nationalist consciousness approaches the human individual. Supek distinguishes between progressive and reactionary nationalism on the basis of two criteria: the relationship which each posits between man and time (history) and between the individual and the larger community (politics). Any progressive nationalism (such as the rationalist ideology of the ascendant bourgeoisie at the time of the French Revolution or the ideology of a national liberation struggle) must view man as primarily future-oriented and creative, rather than bound by past loyalties and identifications. With respect to its political world-view, Supek argues that conservative nationalism (he offers the examples of De Maistre's traditionalism, the “School of Historical Law” as represented by Burke, Von Savigny, and Stahl, in addition to Montesquieu's geographic determinism and Social Darwinism) is basically irrationalist in outlook, postulating a total subordination of the individual to general metaphysical forces not subject to human control. That nationalism may at times play a progressive historical role, however, Supek does not rule out; indeed, he observes that the “national sentiment was born as an expression of the extension of the humanity of man.”⁷² Supek's thoughts may be summarized in the following way: when nationalism broadens human perspectives and provides an increasing number of individuals with an awareness of their common social interests, it is “progressive” and to be valued. When, however, nationalism is restrictive and exclusive, artificially aggravating conflict in order to aggrandize the position of privileged social groups, it is reactionary and opposed by its very nature to the development of a more humane society.

Similarly, Supek's colleague Danko Grlić does not deny that in its struggle against reified “supranational structures,” nationalism has its positive aspects. Once this goal is achieved, however, nationalism loses its historical justification as a progressive ideology and serves only to blur the lines of class conflict and to submerge the individual personality in the national myth.⁷³ Turning to contemporary Yugoslavia, Grlić observes that even the political recruitment of leaders in the alienated nation-state becomes subject to nationalist mystification. The selection of cadres takes place less on the basis of universalistic criteria of merit than on the basis of purely ascriptive criteria, generating political leaders and functionaries “who are no more than members of a nation,” which Grlić condemns in no uncertain terms as the “valorization” of “moral and intellectual zeroes.”⁷⁴ It is above all the false and uncritical universalism of nationalism—the presentation of the “national community” as the only basis for true community—which the Praxis Marxists have found most deplorable in the nationalist phenomenon. And by the vehemence and consistency of their attacks on nationalism in general, they have left little doubt as to where they stand with respect to nationalism and its spokesmen within the Yugoslav community of nations.⁷⁵

By the same token, certain pronouncements of the Praxis Marxists give one the impression that in their view, their preeminently philosophical vocation somehow uniquely qualifies them to speak out critically on the problem of nationalism. Their vision of true philosophy as both rationalist and universalist distinguishes their position radically, they maintain, from the “ ‘pure philosophy' propagated by various nationalist dandies” in Croatia who call for the “definitive liquidation of ‘clearly anational philosophy.’”⁷⁶ It is a cosmopolitan vision summarized by Tadic when he writes that

The nature of the thing is that philosophers speak the language of international entente, the language of universal human interest, and not of particular interest.

The radical, critical posture of true philosophy is sharply contrasted by Grlić, in his characteristically graphic style, to the spirit of nationalist fetishism:

You do not reason or theorize about the nation; for the nation you only struggle and die; you love the nation as the flesh of your flesh, as the essence of your being, drinking it with your mother's milk; it is body and blood, the heritage of our ancestors, the holy of holies, a call to militancy; it cannot be the subject of conceptual conclusions or of peaceful and dispassionate analysis.

With this in view, it is certainly no wonder that Supek, in the course of an analysis of the structural origins of nationalism, should have written in 1971 that

historical experience shows that nationalists are incapable of solving the question of equal relations between nations. And now it is clear why they are not.⁷⁷

It is not nearly so clear, however, that philosophy itself— even a truly critical philosophy—is capable of “solving” this important question either. Surely the issue of nationalism cannot be resolved entirely by “peaceful and dispassionate analyses,” nor does the general Praxis position on philosophy, discussed in Chapter II, suggest that this is the case. There is no question among the Praxis Marxists that only practice can deal effectively with the national question—specifically, revolutionary praxis, informed by critical theory, that would destroy entrenched centers of bureaucratic and economic power by realizing the principle of self-management in all areas, and at all levels, of social life.

Perhaps it was the very farsightedness of this vision, however, that was responsible for repeated accusations against the Praxis Marxists of “centralism” and “unitarism” on the part of suspicious critics (especially in Croatia)—whose number even included one of the former editors-in-chief of Praxis⁷⁸—whose commitment to various nationalist ideologies blinded them to the main thrust of Yugoslav Marxist humanism. To be sure, the Praxis Marxists gave their detractors ample ammunition in various editorial statements and articles on the national question, to which one entire issue of Praxis in 1968 and large parts of other issues (especially no. 3-4 of 1971) were devoted.⁷⁹ On the other hand, Praxis's intensely antinationalist stance was one of its most well-known attributes within Yugoslavia and perhaps its chief immediate asset in surviving as long as it did in the face of strong official antagonism. Indeed it is one of the great paradoxes of Praxis's tragic history that it was the very success of the official campaign against nationalism which presaged the end of official tolerance for Praxis as well. For if it is true that the radical critique of nationalism was Praxis's saving grace for so many years in the eyes of the authorities, then the official victory over nationalism may well have divested the journal of its utility to the professional manipulators of power, leaving it to stand, instead, as nothing more than a source of constant discomfort to the regime.

Toward a Closed Society?

Socialism is propagated, popularly explained, and its faithful gather in the newspaper columns, but no one thinks about it, since it has long ago been proclaimed as being beyond doubt.

—Milan Mirić, “Feuilleton on the Current Moment of Socialism,” Praxis, no. 3-4, 1971

To follow the flow of articles in Praxis from its appearance in 1964 throughout the subsequent decade is to observe an unmistakable, rising pessimism about the future of socialism in Yugoslavia among the Praxis contributors. The fate of the 1968 student uprisings, the appearance of a strong pseudo-liberal ideology in response to the economic reforms, the disappointing outcome of the debates on the constitutional amendments in 1970-71, the resurgence of a divisive nationalism and the reassertion of a repressive apparatus in the cultural sphere—all these factors combined in the early 1970s to dampen the hopes of the Praxis Marxists for the future of the Yugoslav experiment in self-management—which in 1972 Stojanović even went so far as to label, in a Marcuseian twist, “repressive self-management.”⁸⁰ For Supek, the indomitable crusader for self-management both at home and abroad, it must have been especially painful to write the following lines in the editorial introduction to the 1971 issue of Praxis dedicated to “The Moment of Yugoslav Socialism”:

We should immediately add that the failures of Yugoslav economic policy and instances of the crisis of the working-class movement [in Yugoslavia—css] have not been able to damage this evolution in creative Marxism and self-managing socialism [which, as Supek presents it here, originally grew from the Yugoslav experience and spread to the larger European community— css]. . . . Although it is our sincere wish that our country will truly contribute to the growth of socialism as a system, it is just as encouraging for us to know that the victory of workers' self-management no longer depends upon our internal success or failure, regardless of the serious harm that this failure may do to the worldwide working-class movement (especially after the shock it experienced in 1968 in Czechoslovakia).⁸¹

Similar notes of discouragement were sounded by other Praxis Marxists. A year earlier, Marković, whose reputation for political moderation among his Praxis colleagues was otherwise noteworthy, had publicly shifted his main hopes for revolutionary changes from the socialist East to the more developed West, asserting that

fundamental internal changes in the socialist countries cannot be expected in the foreseeable future: they will continue to industrialize, produce an ever greater abundance of commodities, services, and the most diverse kinds of institutions. But because of their bureaucratization, they have ceased to be a model of a more human and more rational society and can no longer exert a direct influence on world history merely by virtue of their very presence and competition with the opposing capitalist camp. They may liberalize themselves to a certain degree, but the real conditions for more decisive debureaucratization will be created only by means of possible revolutionary processes in the leading powers of the West.

Finally, Kuvaɩić's lament should suffice to demonstrate the despair of the Praxis Marxists as a group about the “Yugoslav path” to socialism:

That our present social system does not represent a real basis for a qualitative change in the manner of life . . . and that one must not be given over to hoping that anything will issue from the present state of affairs, is today more than obvious.⁸²

What is presented in all these passages is a picture of an increasingly closed society—a society, that is, closed to prospects for further revolutionary praxis, whose institutions have entrenched themselves to such a degree that such transformation is, at least for the time being, out of the question. It is a “one-dimensional” society where even radicalism becomes firmly integrated into the status quo and dissolves into powerless rhetoric and aimless gestures of despair.

All this stands in marked contrast to the outlook of the Praxis Marxists in 1968. The 1968 Korɩula Summer School was a truly remarkable event, calling together radical Marxists from all parts of Europe to examine what seemed at the time to be the beginning of a new revolutionary upsurge, encompassing both Western and Eastern Europe as well as the United States. Bloch and Marcuse addressed the meeting, the latter appearing to modify his theses on the revolutionary potential of the working class, perhaps not a little surprised by the broad support shown by French workers for the students in Paris and the initiative which the workers took in demanding workers' self-management in the factories.⁸³ A flush of revolutionary enthusiasm was in the air, and it was given expression by the Praxis Marxists in their presentations. Supek declared triumphandy at the opening of the session that the

workers' movement in Europe in fact shows, in the capitalist countries as well as in the socialist countries, that the socialist revolution is returning more and more to the line and framework of Marx's original anticipations.⁸⁴

But this elation was only short-lived. Even while these declarations were being made, Soviet tanks rolling through the streets of Prague cast a dark shadow on the hopes of the Marxists assembled in Korɩula to celebrate the promising events of the preceding months. Czechoslovakia, where before the occupation, in Supek's words, “Yugoslav philosophers and sociologists felt more at home than anywhere else, even including their own country,” had been turned into an armed camp, and in this development Supek saw somber omens of what he feared was a “new stage of socialism.”⁸⁵ The participants of the Korɩula Summer School addressed appeals to world opinion deploring these events and sent a personal telegram to Tito urging him to bring his great influence to bear.⁸⁶ And in an ominous indication of things to come, the Hungarian delegation to Korɩula, headed by Lukàcs's brilliant student Agnes Heller, sent a separate telegram of protest to Janos Kadar and returned home only to find severe reprimands in store for each of them. Less than six years later, when the campaign in Yugoslavia to remove all Praxis influence from Belgrade University was just beginning to gain real momentum, these courageous Hungarian philosophers had already found themselves expelled from their university positions and unable to disseminate their views in public.

Within Yugoslavia, the somewhat delayed repression of the June 1968 student movement served only further to demonstrate to the Praxis Marxists that the existing institutions of socialist society were incapable of serving as vehicles of meaningful social change by subjecting themselves to revolutionary modification from below. This theme began to appear with increased regularity in Praxis essays, such as the young Nebojša Popov's discussions of the relationship of the working class to official institutions of self-management.⁸⁷ Popov interpreted the steadily increasing incidence of strikes in Yugoslavia since 1958 as a sign of a widening gap between workers and their representative institutions, noting in this connection the recent emergence of several wildcat strikes accompanied by the “self-organization” of the workers independent of formally established institutions. He decisively rejected the sophistic line of reasoning that such strikes cannot be of a class character since they take place within a society in which the working class (allegedly) maintains dominance, and that therefore the very idea of a strike is absurd in such a society since the working class cannot strike against itself.⁸⁸ Still, it is to be noted that the strikes analyzed by Popov—including the student strikes—were no more than poorly organized, isolated outbursts whose effectiveness was further impaired by the atomization of broad working-class consciousness so deplored by other Praxis thinkers such as Supek and Kangrga. Indeed Kangrga has pointed out only somewhat facetiously that at present there are six working classes in Yugoslavia rather than one. In a more serious vein, he has lamented that the most that has been accomplished by the existing institutions has been to generate a fragile “self-management consciousness”—without, however, substantive evidence of even the promise of approximating self-management in practice.⁸⁹ And it was in the decline of the Yugoslav working class's ability to control its own destiny in the face of hostile economic and bureaucratic forces that the Praxis Marxists found the ultimate tragedy in the present state of affairs. Marković lamented that

at this moment it is impossible to perceive the identity of those social forces who will diminish existing class inequalities, eliminate the monopoly of power, ensure the power of the workers' councils from the level of the enterprise to that of the federation, and create anew the spirit of brotherhood and solidarity which was destroyed just when it had seemed that its moment of historical triumph was at hand.⁹⁰

Perhaps this picture—drawn, it is true, in the early 1970s, when tensions were beginning to surface which would only a few years later culminate in the expulsion of Marković and his colleagues from Belgrade University and the closing of Praxis itself—is unwarrantedly discouraging. One of the central features of Marx's critical method, it will be recalled, was its ability to penetrate the surface appearances of existing civil society and to find in that same society signs of tendencies presaging new and more human modes of social interaction. It is perhaps with this in mind that Kangrga has spoken of the development of a “self-management consciousness”—not in the negative sense of the failure of reality to mesh with ideals, but in the positive sense that these ideals may become truly meaningful and urgent to the Yugoslav working class, rather than being proclaimed loudly from above and falling only on deaf ears. That these aspirations have been formed by the interaction of the workers with institutions of workers' self-management—and by their reaction to the inadequacies of those institutions—may itself be seen as an indication of a hidden positive potential which may yet one day rise to the surface. In the same sense, Popov's observations about the alienation of the Yugoslav working class from its institutions, and its response in the form of strikes, may well have been a secret source of encouragement for him. Indeed he wrote elsewhere:

A gloomy picture of human life in contemporary society can be a peculiar kind of ideology in so far as one fails to examine the concrete, historically determined nature of the given state of affairs . . . and the open possibilities of changing it.

Kangrga concurred, adding:

Only public and argued, resolute and militant Marxist criticism can liberate minds from the nightmare which daily oppresses people and sends them into apathy and resignation, or privatization, or confusion and disorientation, which then operates to the advantage of politicians and manipulators of all calibers, [who seek to] impose themselves upon this society and all areas of social life.⁹¹

For all this, however, one cannot help thinking that while a methodological optimism may be appropriate to Marxian social analysis, the Praxis Marxists might have been somewhat better prepared for the travails that lay ahead had they embraced a healthy pessimism to guide them in their dealings with the world of political realities. By the time Praxis entered into its final, although prolonged, confrontation with the authorities, it had been in existence for over six years. During that time it had managed to establish itself as a uniquely respectable public forum for the sort of Marxist criticism which Kangrga described in the above-quoted passage, a dissident forum which seemed to have a remarkable capacity for withstanding hostile confrontations with the authorities in the face of formidable odds. But as the writings of the Praxis Marxists, assuming ever more provocative tones, probed ever more deeply into the workings of an increasingly disturbed Yugoslav society, they would find to their frustration that their forum had not been built upon the most stable of foundations.