SQUEEZE: ON YUGOSLAV WORKERS
After six weeks of ‘discussion in the National Assembly, the Yugoslav government, on July 21 finally published the decrees directing a turn in economic ‘policy that was decided on some months ago. A number of things are involved, beginning with devaluation of the
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dinar from 750 to 1,250 dinars to $1 U.S. Price increases on all commodities and services range from 25% to 300%, with the biggest jumps in the prices of raw materials and services like gas, electricity and rent. Import of goods is to be widened on a big scale (consumer goods, including Shipments from capitalist countries, are to be imported to cut prices for similar goods on the domestic market). Subsidies for plants are to be sharply lowered (including. those producing for export), Centrally guided investments are to be considerably reduced (plants will now dispose of 71% instead of 50% of their net income). Great pressure is to be brought on plants in favor. of "profitability." During a transition period, plants showing a loss will be granted subsidies (however, with a sharp reduction in the average income of workers employed in these plants). After the transition, they will be forced to close down if they can't make ends meet. This means a rise in unemployment,
Wages and salaries will be adjusted after the price increases, but the figure most generally quoted is a 25% boost. Talk is open about lowering the standard of living, since the main goal of. the new economic policy ig.to heighten "austerity." Investments (only profitable ones!) are to be increased at the expense of consumption.
The social consequences of the policy will certainly be to _ put a heavier load on the least privileged layers of the population, the least skilled industrial workers and the working population of the more backward regions. Inequalities between the workers and the bureaucracy and between workers of the more advanced and the more backward regions will tend to increase. To return to a more and more "liberal market economy" makes this inevitable whether the enterprises in competition on such a market are owned by private individuals (as is the case under capitalism), or whether they are under collective ownership but managed by bureaucrats and workers to the exclusive interest of the plant's personnel (without taking into consideration the over-all interests of society; i.e., of the toiling masses of the entire country).
The drastic economic measures which the Tito regime feels forced to take in order to combat run-away inflation, which has been spreading for some time, indicate that workers self-management at the plant level, while certainly a step in the right direction, does not in and of itself constitute an ideal "model" for managing the economy of a workers state in transition from capitalism to social-~ ism,
Only the combination of workers self-management at the plant level, with central planning under a regime of workers political democracy on the national level, can make it possible to gradually break the stranglehold of the bureaucracy. over the economy, while at the same time avoiding the twin evils of overcentralization and overdecentralization (excessive use of market mechanisms and excessive leeway for particularist, regional and corporatist tendencies at plant and local levels) to which the Yugoslav economy has been submitted successively, the first before 1948 and the latter after 1953,
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