Social inequalities and working class grievances in late Yugoslav socialism- Dr Rory Archer (UCL SSEES)

Socialist countries like Yugoslavia garnered legitimacy through appealing to social equality. Yet social stratification was characteristic of Yugoslav society and increased over the course of the state’s existence. By the 1980s the country was divided on socio-economic as well as republican and national lines during a decade of sustained social, economic, and political crises.

Recent historical and sociological scholarship revisits debates about the nature of these inequalities and their manifestations. Such approaches place the case of Yugoslavia in broader and comparative frameworks and thus (belatedly) bring Yugoslavia into dialogue with social history and everyday history in other socialist contexts, global labour history and postsocialism (representing a departure from conceiving of Yugoslavia primarily in terms of state breakdown and ethnically framed war).

Situating my own work within this body of scholarship, through oral history and research in factory archives, I problematise the gap between Yugoslav ideology and social reality as experienced by workers in late socialism. By ‘gap’ I mean an increased awareness on the part of ordinary people that there was a growing discrepancy between the way the Yugoslav system was supposed to function and the way in which it was actually functioning. I explore some of the ways in which workers understood, mediated and narrate such a discrepancy in everyday life by focusing on the limited resource of housing. As housing was (theoretically) provided by the employer or supported by credits from the workplace, through it one can witness a range of mutually constitutive interactions between the worker, the workplace, private initiative and the institutions of self-management and state in late socialist Yugoslavia.

A seminar hosted by the UCL SSEES South-East European Studies Seminar Series.
Convenor: Dr Diana Georgescu