Ebook: Socialist Unemployment - The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945-1990

This political analysis of unemployment in a socialist country argues that the Yugoslavian conflict stems not so much from ancient ethnic hatreds, as from the political and social divisons created by a failed socialist programme to prevent capitalist joblessness. Under communism, the concept of socialist unemployment was considered an oxymoron; when it appeared in postwar Yugoslavia, it was dismissed as illusory or as a transitory consequence of Yugoslavia's unorthodox experiments with worker-managed firms. In Woodward's view, however, it was only a matter of time before countries in the former Soviet bloc caught up with Yugoslavia, confronting the same consequences of economic reforms required to bring socialist states into the world economy. By 1895, Yugoslavia's unemployment rate had risen to 15 per cent. How was it that a labour-oriented government managed to tolerate so clear a violation of the socialist commitment to full employment? Proposing a politically-based model to explain this paradox, Woodward analyzes the ideology of economic growth and shows that international constraints, rather than organized political pressures, defined government policy. She argues that unemployment be