Yugoslavia was unique amongst the Eastern European socialist countries, in that it moved between two dramatically different forms of labour organization. At its inception, socialist Yugoslavia followed a Soviet style, Stalinist mode of organising its economy and labour process, but in 1950, Yugoslavia changed course and promulgated a system called “self-management,” where workers theoretically enjoyed greater decision making power within firms (Kirn 110).
In 1950, the Basic Law and Constitution declared that Yugoslavia would be organised based on principles of self-management. At plant level, this meant that each factory was to be co-governed by a workers’ council (who would be chosen from the shop floor by election), a director, and a managing board (Music 175). On a macroeconomic level, this meant that the economy would not be centrally planned. Rather, decision-making around targets, outputs, working conditions, and so on would be located at factory level. Technicians, technocrats and managers would bring plans before the workers’ council for approval (Kirn 121). By incorporating both command and market approaches for coordinating economic life, Yugoslavia was attempting to build a hybrid system that wove between the capitalist/socialist Cold War polarity.
Self-management evolved dramatically over time, as each successive constitution deepened the self-management system’s commitments to market economics. The 1965 Constitution drastically reduced tax rates, allowing firms to pocket a larger share of profits as incentive for increased efficiency and productivity (Patterson 35). In turn, the 1976 Constitution restructured self-management as “associated labour,” triggering the “subdivision of workers’ councils,'' replacing the formerly single cohesive workers’ council with small sub-committees requiring even more comprehensive infrastructures for coordinating economic activity and decision-making (Lampe 309).
At each stage of self-management’s history, workers had an informational problem: if workers were going to be the primary decision-makers in the firm/factory, they needed to have access to all of the relevant information about an entire factory. These factories were enormous complexes employing thousands of workers at a time. How were they to have accurate, reliable, and thorough information about the outputs and needs of each sector of the factory, if they were going to be voting and making decisions about those plans and outcomes? Reports and reports about reports proliferated, as workers attempted to document and make sense of factory planning, creating a “crawling paper trail of self-managed bureaucracy” (Rebernjak 51). Eventually, following Rebecca Rebernjak’s analysis: the “slow, inaccurate and overly complex reports were often decried as one of the main causes of inefficiency plaguing self-management” (Rebernjak 52).
By the mid 1960s, one firm – Rade Končar – a major firm that produced technological equipment attempted to solve this problem by creating a “cybernetic” information infrastructure (Rebernjak 51). Rade Končar hoped to use a system of linked IBM System 360 mainframe computers to facilitate “real-time computer-aided management” (Rebernjak 51). Rade Končar thought their system could scale upwards: “dispersed across the Yugoslav territory… terminals and control rooms” could form a “networked power” for statewide economic coordination (Rebernjak 68). Even philosophers began to call this imagined computer network “the infrastructure of society” (Rebernjak 70), while envisioning a cyborg/assemblage of man as “a kind of machine, an even more efficient, frictionless, and interchangeable cybernetic organism” (Rebernjak 72). (Although, I must note, this desire for efficiency and frictionless-ness sounds profoundly reminiscent of capitalist desires for the same.)
Rade Končar’s (fantasized) use of networked information technology could not be deployed in the rest of Yugoslavia. Rade Končar was, after all, probably the most technologically advanced firm in the entire country. The vast majority of other Yugoslav factories vastly lacked the resources and technical know-how to embark on cybernetic experiments.
Rather, the rest of Yugoslavia’s workers needed an analog information infrastructure, which they created in the form of factory newspapers. These newspapers contained reports on all aspects of factory life and production. They were also sites of debate and discussion regarding important decisions, and also outlets to vent frustration or complaints regarding the factory’s directorship. Newspapers don’t really sound like they are infrastructures, and regular newspapers may not be. But let us consider the newspaper in the self-managed socialist factory, which I believe does constitute an information infrastructure.
The newspaper is is an infrastructure: it is embedded in a social arrangement as it exists to support the self-management governance and ownership structures; the newspaper is transparent, in that it is used to publish and communicate information whenever there is new data or news to be published; the newspaper has temporal reach, in that it is archived by the company and referred to at later dates; participation in the newspaper is certainly learned as a part of membership – workers learn that part of their responsibility as workers and self-managers is contribution to the factory newspaper, whether through writing articles or participating in interviews; newspapers are linked to the conventions of practice of reading and printing; they embody standards through language standardisation – a particular challenge within the Balkans, due to the plethora of dialect variations spoken by the multiethnic workforce of Yugoslav factories; socialist factory newspapers are built on the installed bases of printing technology, inherited from previous printshops; and lastly, the limitations or failures of the newspaper become highly visible upon breakdown – if workers are unable to obtain accurate information about factory production, they are unable to participate in decision-making and governance.
The section that follows depicts my foray into the world of socialist factory newspapers. It was only meant as an exploratory trip to the field, not the bulk of my archival work. That was supposed to take place over an entire summer, but it never happened: the world shut down and I created a completely different project. The fragments of interviews and archival findings I did gather, I never used, until right now.