ABSTRACT
The starting point of this paper is the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s in former socialist Yugoslavia. I understand this moment of crisis as the time when the contours of our postsocialist present have started to be drawn. The origins of the trends that have escalated in post-Yugoslav states in the last 30 years, such as deindustrialization, rising unemployment, precarity, and the ideological normalization of capitalist social relations, could be located precisely in that period. I want to consider these problems by looking at the ways in which the workers’ response to the crisis of the 1980s and the concomitant changes in the industrial workplace have been articulated in contemporary sociology and the sphere of politics. Both sociological and political takes on this moment of crisis relied on the discourse of “postindustrial society” and have served as an apology for capitalism. By approaching the late 1980s turbulence in the sphere of labour in this way, I want to raise more general questions about the relationship between the production of knowledge, transformations of work, and class struggle. This essay is based on my research of labour strikes between 1988 and 1991 in Borovo, a paradigmatic Yugoslav socialist industrial system (located in Vukovar, Croatia).
