The solution to this is worker's self-management, an economic model that was pioneered by Yugoslavia, but has mostly disappeared with its dismantlement.
Any company with more than five employees had to be run as a worker-run coop. The board and execs were elected by the workers. Companies still competed on the market.
This would solve for the problem of alienation while still having an environment of competition.
Yugoslavia also had severe political repression, with peace between the provinces only maintained by a (near) dictator with a cult of personality. Their economy and standard of living was mediocre at best, and only even possible within a limited geopolitical context where they sat between competing superpowers. It wouldn't be possible to create something like Yugoslavia today. Stupid to even try.
I'd argue the repression of reactionaries was part of the secret sauce that made it work so well. We saw what happened when they were loosened in the 90s.
I'd posit that the rise of the Nazis (which caused the rise of the SFR Yugoslavia as a resistance movement) taught us differently.
Karl Popper, himself an Austrian that saw the rise of the Nazis and had to live in exile as a result famously formulated it as the paradox of tolerance.
In Yugoslavia you couldn't even get bananas or coffee or jeans. People had to go to Italy or Austria to buy it. You had to wait more than a year to get a car. Of course then there was no gas for it. Inflation ate your paycheck before you could spend it.
Because it was destroyed by right-wing extremists in the 90s, funded by Western capitalists that were scared it would show the world a viable alternative on how to run an economy
I really like what you wrote, because it demonstrates what kids in Yugoslavia were thought from a young age. There was this idea of a foreign enemy that it there to get them and any economic and political fault in the country was because of the sabotage of this invisible foreign enemy.
Yes. Or would you prefer working dawn to dusk picking bugs off of your crops, with the constant spectre of crop failure and famine?
Do you prefer living in a mud hut to a house with air conditioning, central heat, hot and cold running water, electric lighting and flush toilets? All courtesy of economic powerhouses.
Maybe you'd prefer spending your free time spinning thread with your spinning wheel, making cloth, and sewing all your clothes? (The first industrial target was textiles.)
This is a false dichotomy: Either your country is an "economic powerhouse", or you're living in a mud hut, with nothing in between. A country can be a good, decent place to live, where people's basic needs are taken care of, with opportunities for modest life improvements for those who want them, without being an economic powerhouse (and all of the bad that comes with that).
> Despite facing numerous challenges, including political instability and external pressures, the Yugoslav economy achieved significant growth and modernization during its existence, with a particularly strong emphasis on education, health care, and social welfare
You need bricks to make a house. Where are you going to get the bricks from? You need lumber to build a stick frame house. How are you going to saw the lumber? Where are you getting the steel for the saws? Where are you getting the nails from?
Those all come from economic powerhouses.
The steps from mud huts to modern buildings came from economic powerhouses.
Only some parts were industrialized. Most of the the best companies were existing before Yugoslavia. They were nationalized after the revolution, the owners killed or they escaped to the west. Very little new industry was developed by the regime itself.
Do you think that was the lifestyle in Yugoslavia? And their heyday was half a century ago at this point. You're presenting a false dichotomy. Nobody's gonna live in a mud hut using a spinning wheel just because workers run companies.
>Nobody's gonna live in a mud hut using a spinning wheel just because workers run companies.
That exactly what will happen. In the best case, if you lacky enough, you will be live in a mud hut. The rest will envy those who can afford to live in a mud hut.
Workers can start running companies at any time, no one restricts them from running their companies. The only reason they don't do this is that this will be worse for workers.
So you are being hypocritical. You don't want workers to run companies (they can do that now), you want workers to have no alternative.
What are you even talking about? Nobody lived in mud huts in Yugoslavia, that is verifiable fact.
And no, workers can't start running companies because they lack the capital and thus the means of production. That's the problem with a capitalist system, the power is with the entrenched capitalists.
When a "problem" has no solution then it's not actually a problem, just a fact to be accepted. Like gravity. There's nothing wrong with worker owned cooperatives, but for anything that requires significant capital you have to run things the way that capital owners want. And large-scale economic central planning where governments allocate capital has been an abject failure everywhere it has been tried, so don't insult our intelligence by suggesting that we give it another shot.
This is absolutely not true. In absolute numbers, the cost of starting a business is quite low, and workers have a lot of money, much more than their employers. And if workers collectively stop spending their salaries on unnecessary things, and instead organize a fund - on average, in 2 years they will have enough money to buy out the entire company they work for, or organize a comparable one.
There are no problems with capitalism, capitalism just allows you not to do all of this, not to suffer 2 years of poverty for the sake of living in a mud hut (if you're lucky enough).
You’re roughly describing the whole point of Yugoslavia’s workers’ self-management. This is in contrast to what the Eastern Bloc had with the government establishing and running the factories directly. Also in contrast to the capitalist system where someone with enough capital establishes and runs the factory themselves while employing the workers.
And no, you didn’t have to live in a mud hut for it. In fact, it was more affordable for the regular worker to build a house than it is now. Those houses were/are comparable to what you see in Germany today. Go check out the real estate market in Slovenia if you don’t believe me, look for houses built 1950-1990.
Ah yes, taking the last 4 years post pandemic, in the midst of massive climate change, and in a near world war and then comparing it to 60+ years ago in the height of the Cold War and US global dominance.
Usually the sign of the fairest and most humane systems of government and economy is when people get shot in the back by border guards if they try to escape.
Generally yes. Unlike Soviet occupied Eastern Europe, most regular people in Yugoslavia were able to obtain passports and travel internationally. There were some people barred from leaving or held as political prisoners.
You responded to a rhetorical question with the wrong answer (you can obviously live well on only modest means as arguably the majority of people do, even in the US), and then proceeded to lay out maybe the most egregious false dichotomy I've ever seen right after. I'll try to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you hold a definition of "economic powerhouse" that aligns more with "a first world country" rather than "a shareholder-maximized corporatocracy".
There seems to be a false narrative here that increased economic production will always lead to higher quality of life. I would venture to guess you only have to look into your own life to disprove that narrative.
I doubt you work 20+ hours a day. You probably realize there are diminishing or outright negative returns on quality of life for trying to maximize productive output. I would say we should apply the same logic to the economy as a whole; focus production on the things that actually improve society instead of operating on the assumption that “more production is always better.”
Being an economic powerhouse or not isn't required for the idea to be a reasonable and workable one.
But given the high levels of dysfunction/conflict that led to the breakup of the country, I doubt they'd meet whatever bar you set for "economic powerhouse".
The conflict was due to it being a federation of several culturally quite different nations. When Tito died, the politicians that replaced him started heavily pushing nationalist ideologies amidst the 1980s economic crisis (which was not limited to Yugoslavia).
PS. You're arguing with people who lived there. How can you be so certain you know better than those of us who saw it first hand? And I'm in no way saying it was a perfect system, btw.
If you had lived in then you should know the standard of living was poor. More then a million people left to work in Germany as Gastarbeiters to send money home. Gas was limited. Common goods had to be brought through the border with Austria or Italy. Inflation was crazy, everybody bought German Marks the same day they got their paychecks, otherwise the money was worthless by the next day. What happened to you if you were caught as a political opposition in Yugoslavia is a story on its own.
Are you asking about diets? During most of the Cold War period, average people in Yugoslavia generally had more and better food than the USSR or China but less than the USA. They ate a lot of bread and potatoes. You probably won't find detailed records with percentages.
That is such a big lie. There was no worker self-management in practice. All the companies had leadership structure like most companies have today. Those leading them, were loyal members of the communist party and were politically appointed. They were the betters, the avant-garde and had access to things a normal worker couldn't dream of, like special stores which had western goods. No worker had any say how a company will work and had no share of the profits besides a paycheck.
Any company with more than five employees had to be run as a worker-run coop. The board and execs were elected by the workers. Companies still competed on the market.
This would solve for the problem of alienation while still having an environment of competition.