Privatization and self-management
EVEN before the break-up of Yugoslavia the republic of Slovenia, now independent, had a relatively developed pluralist political culture. Now, as privatization and opening to the world market are pushed forward, new debates on the future of the country s soclo-economic system are developing.
One sign of this was a demonstration on
September 10, 1991, calling for a referendum on a new property law being discussed in
International Viewpoint #222 • February 17, 1992
SLOVENIA parliament.
CATHERINE SAMARY
T HE September 10 demonstration
against the new property law brought out only 5,000 people - but this is not so few in a country with a population of 2 million. It had the support of all the feminist groups (women from the union self-management managers have their own organization and there are also women's neighbourhood and antiwar groups). The demonstrations was very spectacular, with chains of buses throughout Ljubljana. And it was enough for the vote in parliament to be deferred. The parliamentary debate had not ended by January 1992.
The rightwing parties are divided after the resignation last November of prime minister Jose Mencinger, an economist who disagreed with the draft laws. The arrival in Slovenia of Jeffrey Sachs, who had advised the Bolivian government before raging through Poland, made the strategic divisions reappear: shock therapy or not, rapid privatization or not, and to whose benefit - that of the former managers or new entrepreneurs?
But if the property relations in the exSocialist countries (where the bureaucracy was not the legal owner, but ruled "in the name of the workers") are unclear, property in the the country of self-management is even more evidently "nobody's because it is everybody's" The last constitution of Tito's time explicitly ruled out any notion of state property or group property. In this situation, who can decide about privatization? And who should benefit?
As elsewhere, proposals for workers' share ownership have been floated as a means of sugaring the pill. But they are not especially attractive at a moment 10 by the unprecedented shock of the direct when the economic crisis is exacerbated confrontation with the world market. Furthermore this is a regression in Yugoslavia. The workers are to be "sold" rights to management that they had previously possessed for free, regardless of what the real practice may have been. For the workers' self-management was a kind of power of veto and did not have the means within the Yugoslav system to achieve overall coherence. It meant, unequally according to area, a right to oversee or participate in decisions concerning both questions of income and collective consumption and investment.
### Connivance between workers and management
It took the form, even more than in other East European countries, of specific relations of unharmonious connivance between workers and managers. Strikes would break out when the tacit bargain was broken or when decisions made on the basis of self-management were not respected. It is thus not surprising that some of these former managers, particularly where the relation of social forces does not permit a more open break, are seeking to use these traditions to consolidate their power.
One of the basic features of the line defended by the former prime minister was that he sought support from the former managerial teams in the enterprises, giving them the preponderance in a "soft" privatization process designed to benefit them, particularly in small and medium-sized enterprises, but also in 300 large enterprises. This plan was opposed by that of Jeffrey Sachs who proposed the setting up of financial institutions charged with managing the Common
Sale Funds (share portfolios, a significant proportion of which were to be distributed free to the population, with a hard core controlled by the state until credible purchasers can be found). The logic here was the concentration of effective power in the hands of institutions controlled by leadership groups appointed on clearly capitalist criteria.
This model, which aims at destroying as quickly as possible all ambiguity about property forms that might arise from any sort of retention of self-management rights or relations of connivance between workers and managers, is proposed everywhere by Sachs. It implies for the transition period a sort of state ownership.
This draft law passed through two of the three chambers of the Slovene parliament. but not the third, that of "associated labour", another inheritance from Tito's time. Here, unlike in the other two chambers, the majority are behind the Mencing er plan, using as their main argument opposition to state control. The right itself is divided over this, trapped by its own liberal arguments.
The left wing organizations meanwhile present a range of positions with more talk of workers' participation than of self-management. They too are more or less critical of the possibilities of entering the capitalist world without economic or social regression. They look towards different forms of regional community. The question of relations with the republics of the ex-Yugoslavia depends on the development of the Serbian regime and of the war. But these organizations are at an early stage of development, and instability, splits and regroupments make it all the more difficult to work out an alternative project. *
Peace on the razor's edge