reversal of privatization in Yugoslavia

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I just received mail from Michael Pugliese who was expelled from this list
a while back for flaming people who disagreed with him on Yugoslavia. He
sent an article on Yugoslavia that is too long to forward to the list (>
50k bytes), but it basically states that early attempts at privatization in
Yugoslavia were reversed. Under something called the Property
Transformation Revaluation Act of 1994, privatization was annulled in 1556
or 87% of transformed enterprises, employing 80% of the labour force in
Serbia. The state privatization agency declared property transformation
legal in only 222 exclusively small enterprises. To quote the article, "the
bulk of the economy has been returned to--more or less direct--state
control". Since Michael, who is a social democrat, hates the Milosevics
with a bottomless fury, I must assume that he was trying to make the point
that Yugoslavia is a nasty Stalinist country with zero political and
economic freedom. Unlike him, I view all postcapitalist
societies--including the USSR under Stalin--as worthy of defense against
imperialism. It is the working class that needs to change the government,
not Nato bombs.

Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/