Page 169 - Mellinato, Giulio, and Aleksander Panjek. Eds. 2022. Complex Gateways. Labour and Urban History of Maritime Port Cities: The Northern Adriaticin a Comparative Perspective. Koper: University of Primorska Press.
P. 169
Workers of the Port of Koper and the Economic Reform Period in 1960s Slovenia
workers from Southern/Eastern Europe in USA in the late nineteenth
century (1987, 49–50). An alternative response was workforce flight (of-
ficially called fluctuation), which took place on a massive scale in the late
1960s. It is a spontaneous resistance strategy used by the working class
from the beginning of capitalism to our own times (Arrighi, Hopkins,
and Wallerstein 1989, 29).
Tito and his conservative associates may have put party ‘liberals’ like
Stane Kavčič in their place in 1972 for threatening the LCY monopoly on
power (Repe 2003, 89), but the stakes and issues were much more sub-
stantial than the mere prestige of aging revolutionaries and autocrats.
From 1968 to 1971, students rose up in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana,
and not only around issues of democracy and freedom. Their demands
and concerns also contained elements of social justice (Repe 2003, 278–
9). Reluctance over the reforms of 1965 may have been conservative at its
core, but it also contained a sincere and legitimate concern that socialism
may have already reached the point of no return. After all, Petrinja’s gen-
eration knew first-hand the price that had to be paid to develop a new so-
ciety. But where/when does socialism end and capitalism begin (and vice
versa)? Lenin may have been wrong about many things, but not in his as-
sumption that revolution is essentially about the conquest of state pow-
er; it does not generate a new society automatically (Centrih 2019b, 324–
5). The latter takes time and countless struggles, and lots of mistakes,
tragedies, setbacks, illusions, coincidences, reforms etc. To put it sim-
ply: socialist revolution as the Event is not the same as socialism as the
Process. So, the first multiparty elections in Slovenia (since the 1930s) in
the spring of 1990 only officially ended the Party’s monopoly over state
power, but neither destroyed socialism nor delivered capitalism. The cru-
cial events that would eventually determine the shape of capitalism in
Slovenia took place long before and long after 1990.2
Was the (failed) reform of 1965 one such event? Had the victory over
leaders like Kavčič only been a temporal break, a desperate attempt to
stop the inevitable – the introduction of a fully capitalist market econo-
2 Similarly, J. Piškurić, in her recent in-depth study on everyday life in socialist Slo-
venia, challenges perception of transition as a linear process, a sharp break be-
tween socialism and capitalism. According to her, important political and econom-
ic changes happened already in 1980s. And further, many widespread everyday life
practices – which actually predated socialism – based on networking, reciprocity,
solidarity, mutual help, etc, survived up to the present day also because they were
solidified in socialism (Piškurić 2019, 332–9).
169
workers from Southern/Eastern Europe in USA in the late nineteenth
century (1987, 49–50). An alternative response was workforce flight (of-
ficially called fluctuation), which took place on a massive scale in the late
1960s. It is a spontaneous resistance strategy used by the working class
from the beginning of capitalism to our own times (Arrighi, Hopkins,
and Wallerstein 1989, 29).
Tito and his conservative associates may have put party ‘liberals’ like
Stane Kavčič in their place in 1972 for threatening the LCY monopoly on
power (Repe 2003, 89), but the stakes and issues were much more sub-
stantial than the mere prestige of aging revolutionaries and autocrats.
From 1968 to 1971, students rose up in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana,
and not only around issues of democracy and freedom. Their demands
and concerns also contained elements of social justice (Repe 2003, 278–
9). Reluctance over the reforms of 1965 may have been conservative at its
core, but it also contained a sincere and legitimate concern that socialism
may have already reached the point of no return. After all, Petrinja’s gen-
eration knew first-hand the price that had to be paid to develop a new so-
ciety. But where/when does socialism end and capitalism begin (and vice
versa)? Lenin may have been wrong about many things, but not in his as-
sumption that revolution is essentially about the conquest of state pow-
er; it does not generate a new society automatically (Centrih 2019b, 324–
5). The latter takes time and countless struggles, and lots of mistakes,
tragedies, setbacks, illusions, coincidences, reforms etc. To put it sim-
ply: socialist revolution as the Event is not the same as socialism as the
Process. So, the first multiparty elections in Slovenia (since the 1930s) in
the spring of 1990 only officially ended the Party’s monopoly over state
power, but neither destroyed socialism nor delivered capitalism. The cru-
cial events that would eventually determine the shape of capitalism in
Slovenia took place long before and long after 1990.2
Was the (failed) reform of 1965 one such event? Had the victory over
leaders like Kavčič only been a temporal break, a desperate attempt to
stop the inevitable – the introduction of a fully capitalist market econo-
2 Similarly, J. Piškurić, in her recent in-depth study on everyday life in socialist Slo-
venia, challenges perception of transition as a linear process, a sharp break be-
tween socialism and capitalism. According to her, important political and econom-
ic changes happened already in 1980s. And further, many widespread everyday life
practices – which actually predated socialism – based on networking, reciprocity,
solidarity, mutual help, etc, survived up to the present day also because they were
solidified in socialism (Piškurić 2019, 332–9).
169
