ABSTRACT
Two organizational principles are in contradiction: centralization and decentralization. But the decentralization of liberal capitalism did not prove to be a permanent organizational form. Free competition leads spontaneously and steadily to the concentration and centralization of capital, and subsequently to extremely centralized industrial structures — monopolies. Socialists have explained the superiority of centralism by the economic efficacy of a centralized planned economy. The opponents of socialism have pointed to centralization as the disadvantage of socialism, since it denies the personality. Marx and Engels firmly avoided giving any systematic descriptions of socialist economy. This chapter discusses two groups of propositions from the classics of Marxism. The nature of technological processes and the organization of production and distribution make the modern economy centralistic. Self-government and decentralization are not the universal panaceas to the problems of socialist construction. Monopolistic abuses do not seem, qualitatively, to be of great importance in the Yugoslav economy today.
