Shared Spending

We’re leaving for our journey. It is the age of socialism, as my friends would say, from parts of the world where such an age in the form of collective ownership did not occur, at least not to any significant degree. For a moment, it seems like they would agree with Marx’s scheme of historical stages and progressive flows. Except that Marx did not envisage the stage of social re-enactment, a mechanism inherent to the postmodern condition. It is interesting that the controversial discussion that shadowed socialism from its beginnings was not present in the wider social discourse between 1989 and 2008, the year of the financial crisis, when it inspired reflection on finance capitalism and its social problematics.

Nonetheless, despite that, socialism is still considered a largely historical fact.

In the 21st century, the notion of social development is broadly construed in terms of projects, experimental settings, and corrective activities. It is likewise thwarted by national revivalism, which is regressive in spirit and has been growing ever more pronounced since 2015; a politics of national subjects, clashing with the desire of a society permeated by globalisation to transcend the confines of the nation state. Nationalism is being offered as the answer to the social consequences of global economic development, although development itself, at least in its basic conception, promises the idea of planetary democracy: “Precisely because it is pervasive, decentered, and deterritorialized, globalization offers an opportunity to think of a planetary democracy whose universality is no longer bound by the territorial borders of a nation.” (Cavarero 2005, p. 203)

However, the question of how to imagine this planetary democracy as part of a social idea, and above all in terms of social democracy in the workplace, as well as in time outside the context of production, remains open.

Let us briefly return to the second half of the 20th century, the time of the Social Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, to the beginning of the month of June.

Getting up early. Still dark outside. School is out for the summer, mum is ready, and so are we. We’ve completed our shopping at the department store and other places, and slipped into our blue shorts made of terrycloth, yellow t-shirts and new sandals, so we can relax and surrender to the fragrance of pines. But we have a long journey ahead of us, all the way to the port at Kardeljevo, where ships are loaded with steel. And the train is packed, and the journey not that short.

But the trains do run — excellently from today’s perspective. Without the railway, Zenica would not have become one of Yugoslavia’s industrial centres. To what extent that was a good thing might also be discussed, now that enough time has passed and in light of the smog that made us feel weary. There are bags above our heads, under our feet, next to us. Passengers hugging their luggage or, at last, a moment of respite from their everyday lives at school and work.

Some are going to their company-owned resorts, others to their private houses, which they or their relatives built, and others to their grandparents’ homes. The trains were just regular trains. I can’t recall anymore, whether they were new, old, dirty or sparkling clean, but I can remember all those bags enveloping people on board.

In Yugoslavia’s socialist self-managed society, solidarity was meant to apply to holidaymaking as well, in terms of companies securing accommodation for their employees, which collectively owned their companies. A part of their total earnings was invested into developing these resorts. It was a way to escape the reality of work and replace it with natural surroundings and ideologically shaped leisure time, the advantages, problems, imaginaries of which one could argue about. Among other things, that issue is broached in Bojana Marijan’s film Merry Working Class (Vesela klasa), as well as in Harun Farocki’s video work Workers Leaving the Factory (Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik).

Farocki collects archive footage of workers leaving their factories, taking his cue from Louis and August Lumière’s La Sortie de l’Usine Lumiere à Lyon. Walking hurriedly or even running away, workers are shown leaving their factories in Farocki’s video work, hurrying to embrace the time that they can distribute themselves and manage as they please. Farocki observes: “Most narrative films take place in that part of life where work has been left behind. Everything which makes the industrial form of production superior to others – the division of labour into minute stages, the constant repetition, a degree of organization which demands few decisions of the individual and which leaves him little room for maneuver – all this makes it hard to demonstrate changes in circumstances.” (Farocki 2001, p. 232)

The workers are shown going back to practising their everyday lives, where they give rise to a new “art of use” all by themselves. Reflecting on Merry Working Class (1968), which thematises the issue of how workers spend their “free time”, Branislav Dimitrijević concludes that “the film offers the workers an unexpected opportunity to activate themselves culturally.” (Dimitrijević 2016, p.142f.) In the film, by singing, acting, making music, dancing, reciting, playing the gusle, playing pantomime, the workers respond to the fundamental misunderstanding occurring between them as the workforce and those who orchestrate the modes of production and their vicissitudes, Dimitrijević writes.

Nevertheless, despite its many contradictions, the concept of solidarity, although highly ambivalent in practice, enabled a large number of Yugoslav citizens to enjoy their holidays on the coast and in the mountains. Tourism was a sector that was a significant net contributor to Yugoslavia’s economic output; accordingly, its seven-year plan for the development of tourism adopted in 1964 stated that Yugoslavia ought to put additional effort into the rise of Yugoslavia's participation in (as they call it) the international division of labour, especially through the development of the tourist infrastructure. In 1964 29,3% of tourists in the country came from abroad and 70,4% from Yugoslavia. In 1970 the plan was that 45% of tourists would come from foreign countries and 55% from Yugoslavia. (Savezni komitet za turizam 1964)

It is stressed again and again how important the promotion of domestic tourism is, which, among other things encourages the urbanisation of places and increases the living standards and health conditions of Yugoslavs. At the same time the tourism industry should attract foreigners to visit the country and this income is an important contributor to the Yugoslav economy. It is striking, however, that both domestic and foreign tourists within the studies and the development plan are primarily considered as consumers.

And this is an interesting moment – the workers are the owners of the companies and also the decision-makers, but outside of the company they are the ones whose consumption should be increased by market mechanisms. For example, the daily consumption in tourism was calculated, and here it is noted that in Yugoslavia both domestic and foreign tourists consumed less than, for example, in Austria, Germany, Italy, etc.

“It is estimated that the average consumption of the European tourist was about 17 dollars in 1962, while in our country it was only 7.6 dollars in 1962 and 8.6 dollars in 1963. The average increase in consumption between 1957 and 1963 was 6.7%.” (Savezni komitet za turizam 1964, p. 41)

One of the arguments why the daily consumption of local tourists is even lower than that of foreign guests is the catering offered in the worker resorts, a benefit that the collective led companies provided to their owners.

The memories of travelling to and along the Yugoslav Adriatic coast are gradually receding, fading away. Much of it was never archived or has simply disappeared, the architectural achievements are being demolished to make way for new conceptions, but also because they do not conform to new standards. When we recount those summer tales, between us, with ourselves, many of us remember them fondly, those carefree days of summer holidays, when we achieved social equality and assimilation with our natural environment by socialising.

In the summer months of 2018 and 2019, under the auspices of a project entitled “Collective Utopias of Post-War Modernism: The Adriatic Coast as a Leisure and Defence Paradise”, an attempt was made to outline memories of these carefree days along with their ragged edges, time lapses, and factual stories. The idea was to talk about time, its notion of spending and non-productivity on a self-managed social stage straddling the iron curtain of the Cold War.

Excerpt from the text "SHARED SPENDING AS THE PATH TO SOCIAL FREEDOM" by Anamarija Batista, published in Irena Borić, Mirjana Dragosavljević, Dušica Dražić (Eds): SYMPTOMS OF THE FUTURE, Onomatopee Z0033, Eindhoven 2021