This article highlights the historical significance of self-management practices in Yugoslavia as inherently anti-capitalist and anti-colonial. The Yugoslav model’s institutional structure embodied principles that degrowth theorists advocate, offering relevant insights for future provisioning systems in a post-growth and post-development context.
In an era when climate breakdown demands radical alternatives to endless growth, we might find unexpected wisdom in a largely forgotten experiment from the periphery of Europe’s recent past. For over four decades (1945-1991), Yugoslavia pioneered a unique form of economic democracy that shifted power from political elites to working people – anticipating many principles that today’s degrowth and post-growth movements advocate.
This wasn’t just another form of socialism. Yugoslav self-management represented what Erik Olin Wright would call a “third way”—simultaneously transcending capitalist structures while neutralizing capitalism’s harms. Unlike Western “worker participation” schemes that merely consulted workers within capitalist frameworks, or Eastern Bloc systems that concentrated power in state bureaucracies, Yugoslavia’s self-management model aimed to re-allocate the powers by giving workers direct control over production, surplus distribution, and community development.
From Alienation to Autonomy: The Revolutionary Shift
The Yugoslav experiment began with a profound recognition: that abolishing private ownership alone wouldn’t eliminate exploitation if power simply transferred to state representatives. By 1950, just five years after WWII and anti-fascist victory, Yugoslav revolutionaries made a second revolutionary leap by dismantling state capitalism itself.
The Basic Law on the Transfer of State Enterprises to Labor Collectives (1950) marked this transformation. Workers didn’t just gain consultation rights; they assumed direct control over the means of production and management of enterprises, deciding how to distribute company surplus between personal income, reinvestment, amortization and what they called “social and common needs”— essentially universal basic services for education, healthcare, culture, and environmental protection.
This shift addressed Marx’s core concern about alienation, but went further. Workers weren’t just reclaiming control over their labor; they were democratically determining how collectively created surplus would serve broader social reproduction. Self-management in Yugoslavia meant management from the working class collective Self.
The Roots of Self-Management. Source: Authors’ contribution
Direct Democracy Beyond the Workplace
Unlike contemporary discussions of workplace democracy that remain confined to individual enterprises, Yugoslav self-management extended democratic control throughout society. The 1974 Constitution law established an intricate system where workers’ councils, local self-management units, and self-management interest communities created horizontal networks between economic and non-economic spheres.
These weren’t token consultative bodies. Local self-management municipal units (original mesna zajednica) became the foundation of territorial democracy, enabling communities to directly decide on spatial planning, housing, education, culture, and environmental protection from below. Workers from profitable sectors could democratically allocate portions of their surplus to finance universal access to these services, by creating what we might now recognize as a community-controlled universal basic provisioning services system.
This “democratically empowered decentralization” allowed real power and resources to flow to communities closest to problems, anticipating what theorists like Wright advocated for 21st-century democracy. Rather than representative democracy’s periodic elections, Yugoslav self-management created ongoing participatory structures where affected communities could shape decisions about their daily lives.
The Commons in Practice
Perhaps most remarkably, Yugoslav self-management operated as a living commons. Social ownership as distinct from both private and state property, meant that means of production belonged to society as a whole. Productive force was managed through democratic participation rather than market transactions or bureaucratic allocation.
Workers collectively decided how to use shared means of production and distribute labor surplus. Part funded personal income, part went to enterprise development, and critically, part supported “commoning” activities — the non-monetized provision of education, healthcare, culture, and environmental stewardship that sustained community life.
This commoning wasn’t charity or welfare, but recognized as social reproduction and essential sphere that deserved collective support. Cultural activities, environmental protection, and education weren’t commodified services to be purchased individually, but shared responsibilities funded through democratic surplus allocation.
Post-Growth Before Degrowth
While Yugoslavia operated during the height of 20th-century growth paradigms, its institutional structure embodied principles that degrowth theorists now advocate. By 1965, economic reforms strengthened market mechanisms within Yugoslavia’s self-managed socialism—but these operated alongside non-economic “quasi-markets” where social needs took precedence over profit.
The system’s logic anticipated contemporary degrowth insights: that economic outcomes should be socially constructed policies ensuring collective welfare rather than endless accumulation. Workers could choose to “simply reproduce themselves without growth”—maintaining living standards through solidarity and reciprocity rather than expanding material throughput.
The financing of universal basic services through democratic surplus allocation created what degrowth theorists call “provisioning systems”—meeting human needs through cooperation rather than competitive consumption. This approach resonates with current arguments that post-growth societies require robust public services and commons to maintain wellbeing while reducing economic growth.
Autonomy and Radical Democracy
Yugoslav self-management demonstrated how economic democratization transforms political power relations. Unlike liberal democracy’s formal political equality alongside economic inequality, or state socialism’s economic equality under political authoritarianism, the Yugoslav model pursued simultaneous economic and political democratization.
Workers gained autonomy not just as abstract individuals, but as members of collectives capable of self-organization. This collective autonomy enabled them to resist both market pressures and state control, creating spaces for democratic innovation that neither capitalism nor state socialism typically allows. The system’s radical democracy went beyond electoral participation to encompass direct decision-making regarding resource allocation, production priorities, and community development.
This prefigured contemporary movements for participatory democracy, community land trusts, and solidarity economies that challenge both market fundamentalism and technocratic governance.environmental impact.
Self-management system in Yugoslavia from 1974: Techno-economic and socio-economic structure. Source: Authors contribution according to Constitution law 1974.
Lessons for Contemporary Movements
Yugoslav self-management offers three crucial insights for today’s post-growth movements:
First, economic democracy as foundational – because political democracy remains limited when economic power stays concentrated. Yugoslav workers couldn’t just vote periodically; they directly controlled surplus distribution and investment decisions. This suggests that meaningful post-growth transitions require democratizing economic structures, not just changing consumption patterns or technologies.
Second, the commons require institutional innovation Yugoslav self-management created new institutions – workers’ councils, self-management communities, social agreements, which enabled democratic coordination between economic and non-economic spheres. Today’s commons movements might learn from these experiments in institutional design that went beyond market and state mechanisms.
Third, local autonomy needs systemic support – local self-management units in Yugoslavia weren’t isolated experiments but components of a broader system that channeled resources and power to communities. This suggests that scaling up post-growth alternatives requires more than local projects—it demands systemic transformation that empowers decentralized democracy from below.
Beyond Growth: A Degrowth Project Before Its Time
Yugoslavia’s experiment ended amid economic crisis and internal conflict in the 1980s-90s, but its deeper significance emerges when viewed through the lens of degrowth theory. By the 1970s, Yugoslav workers had achieved something remarkable: they could democratically choose to “simply reproduce themselves without growth,” maintaining living standards through solidarity and reciprocity rather than endless accumulation.
Workers directly decided on surplus distribution for both personal and social reproduction based on principles of solidarity, equality, democracy, and social welfare—institutionally supported by the 1974 Constitution. The system’s logic demonstrated that economic outcomes could be socially constructed policies ensuring collective welfare rather than profit maximization. When degrowth theorists today define their vision as “an equitable downsizing of the economy that prioritizes justice and prosperity while allowing people to meet basic needs,” they’re describing principles Yugoslav self-management had already operated in practice.
The Yugoslav model provides economic, social, and political ontology for envisioning a post-growth future. It dismantled alienation between individuals and between people and their work processes, achieving what could be explained as sufficiency in “exploitation” within its historical context. The interconnected concepts of autonomy, radical democracy, direct democracy, commons, and universal basic services that undergirded Yugoslav self-management are integral to contemporary post-growth and degrowth frameworks.
Perhaps most crucially, Yugoslavia demonstrated that such transformations need not await perfect conditions. The necessary shift toward post-growth can emerge from what theorists call “peripheral and south countries”—those positioned outside Western hegemony—as counter-hegemonic forces rising from historically disadvantaged positions.
The Revolutionary Potential of Forgotten Futures
Yugoslav self-management was a radical project that dismantled capitalist alienation while fostering an entirely new socio-economic paradigm. The historical evidence reveals that self-management represented a successful anti-capitalist strategy combining transcendence (eliminating private property), dismantling (abolishing state capitalism), and erosion (gradually building alternative power structures).
In a hypothetical scenario where renewable technologies had been available, this democratic socialist self-management would likely have evolved toward what we now call “self-managed eco-socialism”—supporting decreased material and energy consumption through collective decision-making rather than market mechanisms or state planning.
The Yugoslav experience reveals that economic democratization creates foundations for ecological sustainability: worker-controlled surplus enables community wellbeing over accumulation; commons management prioritizes regeneration over extraction. For today’s movements facing climate breakdown, Yugoslav self-management offers proven institutional models for post-capitalist transition, demonstrating that cooperative, democratic societies are achievable realities, not utopian dreams.
As we confront unprecedented challenges requiring rapid social transformation, these forgotten seeds of post-growth democracy deserve serious attention from anyone committed to creating just and sustainable alternatives to capitalism’s destructive logic. The revolution we need may have already begun—we just need to remember how to nurture it.
Note: This article has been adapted from “Yugoslav self-management: The forgotten anti-capitalist seeds of degrowth,” Revista Cultura Económica, Año XLII N 108 (2024): 50-85. https://doi.org/10.46553/cecon.42.108.2024.p50-85
Teaser image credit: Coat of Arms of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1946-1992). By Đorđe Andrejević-Kun – self-made, based on the work of Đorđe Andrejević-Kun (1904-1964), the original creator of the Coat of Arms of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.Andrejević created it in 1943 in Drvar, a town in Bosnia and Herzegovina, at the time part of the Independent State of Croatia., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4005466