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Boris Kidric, visionary architect of Yugoslavia's socialist alternative
Tito's famous split with the USSR to walk the path of a mixed economy and the 'self-management' of production was the work of a former partisan hero whose transformative economic project's success still has much to teach us today, argues JOHN CALLOW
It fell to Kidric, as the chief economic thinker within the new socialist government, to go far beyond the reconstruction of pre-war industry in order to create an entirely different form of society, whereby capital was subordinated to labour, exploitation would be ended and productive capacity would rise hand-in-hand with the living standards of the working class

SOME monuments endure. Tucked away behind the parliament building in Ljubljana, an oversized and strangely hectoring statue memorialises Boris Kidric, one-time prime minister of Slovenia and architect of self-management in Yugoslavia.

He is hardly a household name in the West. A tragically early death from cancer; being written-out of Milovan Djilas’s self-serving memoirs; eclipse on account of his friend and comrade Edvard Kardelj’s longevity at the heart of government and overshadowing by the personality cult surrounding Marshal Tito, are more than enough reasons to explain his omission from the socialist pantheon or from considerations of alternative economic strategies.

Yet, we ignore him and, by extension, engagement with transformative socialist economics, at our peril.

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