Unfortunately our e-mail has been down for the past couple of days so I have not been able to respond to the Slovenia thread until now at which point it has gone off in several directions. Let me begin by quoting Branko Horvat in a private correspondence he sent me after I had sent him a long paper on the rise and problems of the yugo economy-- "as usual in Yugoslavia", he wrote, "it is not quite so simple." That was the jist of my response to Louis. Neither is the debt problem so simple. I did write upon this in an article in Monthly Review. I am not trying to impress anyone with quotes, just that I can't reproduce a decade of articles and analysis in a few short lines here. But in order to understand the foreign debt problem that developed in Yugoslavia in the 1980s, one has to understand the internal political (regional- enthnic) problems at the time that Tito was dying around 1980, and the structure of the banking institutions that resulted from the constitutional changes i the mid-seventies that -- and this is for Louis -- were motivated by Kardelj's utopian conception of the ideal Marxist state. Now I have a great deal of respect and appreciation for this utopia (Djilas' claim that it was his is, as far as I have been able to authenticate, absolute nonsense), but it led to a breakdown in rational economic planning which we try to illustrate in our book. The reason that I said I couldn't deal with it on Pen-l is that our argument/evidence is 120 pages which (obviously) I can't reproduce here. However, let me say one thing in defense of my "utopia". A year ago I took part in a workshop with Slovenian union shop stewards on how to maintain control of the work place -- through ownership and through trade union and political action. My presentation was on the threat to workers participation and control of the North American model. They were miles ahead of North American workers. If I can quote one business commentator "... the main reason for the attractiveness of internal subscripition [worker buyouts] lies basically in the sense of commitment that employees have to 'their' companies. Oviously, the majority of employed Slovene citizens consent to a property struct which assures the continuation of the existing [self] management structure without introducing major change." Boy! does that rile the apologists for neo-liberal capitalism!! In short, I think there are very good lessons from the Yugo experience, particularly in Slovenia, for socialists and marxists. Also, as my good friend, the Ambassador or Macedonia to Slovenion, points out, don't write off Macedonia. It is doing better than the western press ignores. Nasvidinje, Paul Phillips, Economics, University of Manitoba
