Goran Musić

Could the self-managed bodies have stopped the expressions of nationalism that tore Yugoslavia apart?Why did the workers seem so eager to support market reforms, and abolish the very institutions that gave them so much power?In this long-awaited monograph, Goran Musić seeks to answer such questions by underlining the agency of the working class-not simply as a heroic actor, as the communist party depicted it for so long, nor as just a pawn in the hands of the elite, as decried by liberal critics.Instead, as Musić describes, workers act through the shifting alliances between factory management, the party apex, and their own occupational communities-which are themselves segmented according to age, skill, gender, and origin.The result is a dense and lucid analysis that pays equal attention to the institutional changes, class relations, and the shifting common sense that framed Yugoslavia's labor politics from 1945 until 1990.Musić compares two automotive giants-Industrija Motora Rakovica (IMR), a motor producer on the outskirts of Belgrade, Serbia, and Tovarna Avtomobilov Maribor (TAM), a truck manufacturer in the Slovenian province of Lower Styria.The choice is apt because these two companies both collaborated with and competed against one another-both emerging from World War II manufacturing into the years of "socialist competition"-but also because they exemplify what the author sees as the two faces of self-management: the collectivist and the liberal one.The former pictures the market as the main danger and underlines the freedom of direct producers to decide over the products of their labor.The latter portrays the alienated state as the main culprit, and evokes an image of a united factory, free from internal antagonisms.Which of these two understandings of self-management dominated, Musić shows, depended on whether "economic particularism" or "bureaucratic centralism" were seen as the greater evil in a given moment, and on the particular constellation of forces that prevailed in the enterprise at hand.In IMR, which had been an urban partisan stronghold, blue-collar workers developed strong class-based identities, opposing the managers and white-collar workers, and utilizing Tito's symbolical leverage against the management.In TAM, peasant commuters were much slower to create an

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