ABSTRACT
The Western press and many Western scholars still look at the world in bipolar terms: capitalism or socialism. A historical discussion of the current economic reforms in the socialist world should begin with Yugoslavia which from the 1950s moved from the state socialist model towards a model of self-management socialism. In the Yugoslav self-managed firm, the two membership rights, the control rights and the net income rights, are at least partially assigned as personal rights to the workers in the firm. The assignment of the control rights to the working collectivity of the firm is attenuated by the hegemony of the League of Communists in the surrounding social structure, e.g. in the local government. The valuable analysis of the property rights deficiencies in the “social property” structure of many labor-managed firms is often packaged together with the perversities of the Illyrian model in academic literature.
