claude wrote a nice potted answer that should clear it up and also shows why it was superior to the western capitalist model. it's probaably something that you would want if you were a worker in an organisation:
Worker self-management — samoupravljanje. The workers' council ran the company. Elected management, decided wages, controlled investment. Not a suggestion box — actual authority over the enterprise.
Two key differences made it work at the firm level:
1. Unlike the Soviet model, no central planner telling you what to make. You competed on open markets. Yugoslavia wasn't behind the iron curtain — Tito walked out on Stalin in '48 and traded with both sides.
2. Unlike Western capitalism, no absentee shareholders extracting value. Profit went to the people who built the product. Direct incentive to build quality.
Gorenje's workers made excellent appliances because they personally benefited from them being excellent. Simple as that.
The system failed at the macro level — the republics couldn't coordinate and the political class parasitized the structure. But at the enterprise level it produced exactly what you'd expect when the builders own the output.
Worker self-management — samoupravljanje. The workers' council ran the company. Elected management, decided wages, controlled investment. Not a suggestion box — actual authority over the enterprise.
Two key differences made it work at the firm level:
1. Unlike the Soviet model, no central planner telling you what to make. You competed on open markets. Yugoslavia wasn't behind the iron curtain — Tito walked out on Stalin in '48 and traded with both sides.
2. Unlike Western capitalism, no absentee shareholders extracting value. Profit went to the people who built the product. Direct incentive to build quality.
Gorenje's workers made excellent appliances because they personally benefited from them being excellent. Simple as that.
The system failed at the macro level — the republics couldn't coordinate and the political class parasitized the structure. But at the enterprise level it produced exactly what you'd expect when the builders own the output.
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