I heard that Yugoslavia had markets and stuff, is that true?
China has markets, wage labour, multi-national corporations… yet people say they’re communist. Therefore yes, Yugoslavia was really communist.
Yugoslavia allowed “private enteprise”, but privately owned companies were limited to 5 employees. Yugoslavia was instrumental in forming the Non-Aligned Movement. Pretty much every country that wasn’t in NATO or Warsaw Pact was in NAM, including Cuba, DPRK, and other socialist states.
inb4 “muh debt!” Go check it out. Yugoslavia as a whole had a much lower debt than each former Yugoslav state has now. Yugoslavia exported a lot, its debt wasn’t a problem, the problem was that US, IMF, and other creditors demanded the principle paid in full immediately. This caused inflation to skyrocket and Yugoslavia to default on its debts.
Funny how smaller, neoliberal states with a diminishing and aging population who don’t produce or export anything can maintain a debt that is some 10-20x larger than Yugoslavias (a country with a growing population and billions in exports). The Economy works in mysterious ways.
Well isnt the fault still the debt? Since Yugoslav leaders trusted the IMF to uphold proper conduct?
Sure. The debt was a catalyst, though. If not debt, it’d have been something else. The US wanted to break apart Yugoslavia after the fall of the Soviet Union, to create states friendly to it who’d eventually join NATO. Local nationalists collaborated with foreign capital to sell off all the means of production and state-owned capital. Same thing happened in Russia, the Baltics, and every other socialist state that turned neolib (shock therapy).
How long does it take for CIA to declassify documents? I wouldn’t be surprised if we read about their activity in Yugoslavia in the 80s to find they stoked separatism.
That’s what confused me, Cuba was clearly aligned with Soviet Union so how could they be a part of NAM?
Even before Cuba was removed from the OAS and the American embargo was enforced, Castro was already making plans to outmaneuver the Americans in a way that would also result in them asserting their independence as a nation against the Soviet Union. Thus, in 1961, Cuba joined the Nonaligned Movement (NAM) and became the only member of the organization in the Western Hemisphere.[8] The purpose of NAM is to “protect the right of nations to independent judgements and to counter imperialism while also committing itself to restructuring the world economic order,” which not only coincided with Cuba’s very core ideals, but it also encouraged multilateral cooperation and thus, aided Cuba economically by providing it with more allies to trade and collaborate with.[9] Although Cuba did not perfectly fit the criteria for the ‘non-aligned movement’ as they were affiliated with the USSR, they joined the organization to help differentiate themselves from the Soviets as they wanted to display how the country could act independently and sometimes even against Soviet wishes, but to also show how even with the strong American influence throughout the world, it could not prevent every political move that Cuba made.
