CHAPTER 6 Class and Culture in Yugoslav Factory Newspapers Sven Cvek In 1990, socialist Yugoslavia was already several years into preparation for the privatization of socially-owned property, as well as under an almost decade-long regime of austerity implemented by the local political elites under the auspices of the country’s international creditors, IMF and the World Bank. Social tensions were high not only because of the political crisis that was rapidly escalating into a new, ethno-nationalist “authoritarian populism” (Hall 1988: 138), but also because years of economic crisis and reforms had caused a serious decline of the oncerespectable living standard, and provoked massive labor unrest.1 In this situation, with new laws in place to secure the beginning of what will turn out to be an instance of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2003: 145), a seemingly minor development takes place. Factory newspapers—the periodicals published by Yugoslav industrial enterprises with the goal of informing the workers about the life of their irm—were being either shut down or radically transformed. The oficial reason for this was a “purely economic” one: the rationalization of business operations. A contemporary justiication of this development was that “there is no ideology involved in the discontinuing of the factory newspapers, it is This research is part of the project “A Cultural History of Capitalism: Britain, America, Croatia,” funded by the Croatian Science Foundation. © The Author(s) 2017 D. Jelača et al. (eds.), The Cultural Life of Capitalism in Yugoslavia, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47482-3_6 scvek@ffzg.hr 101 102 S. CVEK merely a part of the process of economic recovery.”2 Although relegated to the realm of “peripheral detail” by political structures,3 this development is a telling one. In the crucial moment of the restoration of capitalism in the former socialist world, and at the time when most media are busy reporting on the rising and increasingly violent nationalist politics, one of the few means of communication that followed closely—indeed irst-hand—the dramatic transformations taking place in the sphere of work was being eliminated under the pressure of the market imperative. As the above quote evidences, this development was represented as the outcome of objective economic laws, or the inevitable playing out of “the end of history” (Fukuyama 1992). The apparent neutrality and inevitability of the phrase “economic recovery” should not be taken for granted: the “restructuring” of Yugoslav enterprises implied both a complete change in property relations (a massive redistribution of wealth through privatization), as well as layoffs for around 20% of those employed in Yugoslav manufacturing industry. The World Bank referred to this, somewhat poetically, as the “shedding of surplus labor” (World Bank 1991: xi). In fact, since the enterprises were socially, i.e. workerowned, restructuring meant laying off a signiicant part of the stilllegal owners of the wealth created during the decades of socialist rule. The legitimating moment of this transformation, the appeal to a market-driven “recovery,” points to the shift in the political-economic priorities of the Yugoslav society. With the demise of socialism, the place once occupied by “labor” was now completely taken over by the “market” (and, certainly, the nation understood in ethnic terms). It is true that Yugoslavia was experimenting with market solutions since the introduction of self-management in the 1950s, but in the discussions about economic reforms around 1990 “market” was, in effect, a code for capitalism. In order to elaborate on the world-historical signiicance of this political-economic event, and in order to point to some continuities in the cultural formations of labor, I trace the emergence of regional class cultures in relation to nineteenth-century print (through the example of The Worker’s Friend), and then focus on one particular socialist factory newspaper, the weekly of one of the biggest Yugoslav industrial systems, Borovo—a socialist corporation whose main products included shoes, tires, and various rubber products. The case of Borovo and its newspaper are particularly interesting for this kind of analysis, as they allow us not only to think of the end of actually existing socialism in very concrete scvek@ffzg.hr 6 CLASS AND CULTURE IN YUGOSLAV FACTORY NEWSPAPERS 103 terms, but because they can provide an entry point for a reconstruction of the cultural history of labor in Yugoslavia. I What later became Borovo, and its industrial town of Borovo Naselje, was established in 1931 near Vukovar (Croatia, at the time Kingdom of Yugoslavia) as a branch of Bata shoe factories with an integrated urban complex. At the time of Czech industrialist Tomaš Bata’s worldwide presence and expansion, the site near Vukovar was chosen for its strategic location—it was Bata’s connection to the eastern markets—as well as the availability of Bata’s preferred workforce, the peasants from the surrounding countryside. After 1945, and the social revolution lead by the Yugoslav Communist Party, the factory was nationalized. In many ways, the development of the factory and its town during the subsequent 45 years of socialism represented an expansion and continuation of the modernization, industrialization and urbanization of a still predominantly peasant society initiated by Bata. Certain continuities were more narrowly cultural: the emphasis on work and production that existed under Bata and that represented the central point around which the regulation of the wider social sphere took place—Bata’s ideal, after all, was Ford—was certainly still there during socialism. Yugoslav socialism, in its productivist ethos and tendency to organize social life around work, was deeply Fordist in inspiration (like other twentieth-century European socialist projects).4 However, work was now not celebrated merely in the name of productivity and eficiency, but in the name of labor and its emancipation, which was an ambition of the local labor movement since its beginnings in the second half of the nineteenth century. Borovo, as one of the most complete instances of Fordist planning, in a region with a strong tradition of labor organizing—it was in Vukovar that the Socialist Workers’ Party changed its name to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia—allows us to see how what began as capitalist modernization becomes appropriated, intensiied, and developed as a socialist modernizing project. It also allows us to relect on the longer labor and socialist history that emerged within capitalist modernity, as the latter reached the (semi-)periphery of the world-system. The social and socialist revolution in Yugoslavia should be viewed in the context of the decades of labor organizing that preceded it, but that are rarely discussed. The conditions scvek@ffzg.hr 104 S. CVEK in which this organizational work took place—for our present purpose, the simple fact of mass illiteracy among the Slavic population of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia—demanded that it involved cultural work in important ways. Raymond Williams reminds us that “most writing, in any period, including our own, is a form of contribution to the effective dominant culture” (Williams 2005: 45). We should think of these words in the context of Williams’ equally emphatic claim, that “there are always sources of actual human practice which [the dominant mode… a conscious selection and organization] neglects or excludes” (43). Furthermore, the neglected or excluded cultural elements or forms “can be different in quality from the developing and articulate interests of a rising class” (43). Here, Williams usefully points to the relationship between cultural shifts, the emergence and disappearance of cultural forms, and the historical continuity of class struggle. The basic assumption of what follows it that the “organization and selection” of the present-day post-Yugoslav cultural tradition is inseparable from the social processes by which new class relations emerged at the historical limit of our contemporaneity. This transformation occurred at the beginning of Croatian, and at the time still Yugoslav, “postsocialist transition,” whose beginning can be loosely located in the late 1980s.5 One cultural form that got “neglected” and “excluded” from national self-representation at this point was the socialist workplace periodical, the “factory” or “workers’” newspaper, as it was variously called. The factory newspaper, I argue, was not a simple “expression” of a class—be it the working, managing, or ruling one—but a distinct cultural form of a socialist society, as well as an articulation of its class relations.6 This society should itself be understood as a historical formation shaped by social processes of longer and shorter duration. My purpose is not only to show what is fairly obvious—namely, that the demise of socialism involved discontinuities and radical changes in the cultural ield—but also that a look at this particular cultural form can tell us something about the relationship between class and culture. Although socialist workplace periodicals represent an instance in which a dramatic shift in the relations of production and property corresponds to a disjunction in the sphere of culture, the processes of culture and class should not be thought of in terms of synchronous temporalities. The latter becomes apparent if we consider Yugoslav factory press within a longer history of labor organizing, and recognize its debt to the historical conditions in which the socialist revolution in scvek@ffzg.hr 6 CLASS AND CULTURE IN YUGOSLAV FACTORY NEWSPAPERS 105 Yugoslavia took place, and the lines along which its modernizing impetus was set. My take on this complex subject is roughly delimited by three temporal coordinates: the emergence of the modern working class and the beginning of labor organizing in Croatia (the second half of the nineteenth century); the decade before the revolution (the 1930s), and the moment of socialism’s and Yugoslavia’s collapse (around 1990). Starting with the latter, I offer a look at the origin of workers’ newspapers, only to return to the moment of their demise. II But irst, let me briely comment on the rather under-researched topic of Yugoslav workplace periodicals. Although in the more recent work on Yugoslav socialism these have been recognized as valuable archival sources, as a cultural form they are only now beginning to be studied. Rory Archer includes in this category “various documents” whose aim was “to inform workers about their place of employment,” and which ranged from strictly “internal documents or bulletins” to “periodicals in a magazine or newspaper format” (2015). Depending on the format, workers’ newspapers could cover some or all of the following: the meetings of workers’ councils, reports from and resolutions of party meetings, the work of management, developments on the shop loor, luctuations in foreign and domestic markets, news on local sports and culture, informative and educational texts (e.g., on legal matters or economics), jokes, and cartoons. My main source, the weekly of the Borovo industrial system (called simply “Borovo”) was likely among the most wide-ranging factory newspapers in Yugoslavia, as it covered all of the listed topics. Systematic data about the popularity of such newspapers is not available, but some sense of their inluence can be gathered from statistics scattered in different publications, including the workplace periodicals themselves. In the 1950s, when the local union was still busy organizing literacy courses for the Borovo workforce, about half of the workers were subscribed to the factory newspaper.7 This percentage remained more or less the same in the next decade.8 Later sources suggest the readership grew. For instance, a study of the “culture of working-class youth” from 1986 found that about 77% of young workers in Croatia read factory newspapers regularly (Ilišin 1986: 99). In my interviews with people who worked in Borovo in the 1980s, I have often heard that on Fridays “everyone” was impatient to get their hands on the new “Borovo” issue.9 scvek@ffzg.hr 106 S. CVEK All this suggests that the factory press was recognized by the workers, indeed by everyone employed in a socialist irm, as an integral part of the cultural experience of work. In one of the few articles on this topic, Boris Koroman locates the beginning of factory newspapers in Yugoslavia in 1947, when, based on an initiative of Yugoslav unions, the irst newspapers of this kind were established. Koroman suggests that the practice of factory press, which included lealets, bulletins, wall newspapers, and newspapers, represented an outgrowth of the agitation and propaganda activities of the Communist International.10 It is undoubtedly true, as he shows, that in factory newspapers the Communist Party saw an important political instrument. (We might presume this was especially so in a situation as luid, turbulent and demanding as the one immediately following the end of the war.11) However, since the historical experience of Yugoslav socialism cannot be fully accounted for by way of a simple model of political domination from above—especially if we are to give any serious consideration to the sphere of culture—a discussion of factory newspapers as a cultural institution of labor cannot proceed by simply positing the party-state as the commanding “other” of the working class and the society as a whole. This does not mean we should not recognize the reality of the existence of a political class in socialist Yugoslavia. I would agree with those who argue that the fundamental class relation in socialism was between the “agents of the plan” on one side, and “the workers” on the other, with the “mediating” class occupying the third position (cf. Lazić 1987: 37). With this in mind, it seems to me more productive to view the workers’ newspapers as participating in the construction and maintenance of a socialist hegemony, both before and during the time of actually existing socialism. If we leave aside, for the moment, the issue of how “free” the factory press was, and focus on its structural properties, one thing seems to be beyond dispute: the workplace periodical represented and gave voice to all social forces shaping the life of the socialist enterprise (or the “organization of labor”). The former editor-in-chief of “Borovo” still insists that the position of his journalists and newspaper editors was entirely independent from the company management, as well as politics. In my view, the functioning and limitations of workplace periodicals were quite comparable to those of the workers’ self-management, primarily in the sense that both revolved centrally around the workplace.12 “Borovo” thus documents actions, opinions and demands of workers scvek@ffzg.hr 6 CLASS AND CULTURE IN YUGOSLAV FACTORY NEWSPAPERS 107 (those from town, the countryside, from the shop loor and the administration, unskilled and skilled), of managers, the local party organization, the city (Vukovar), as well as republican (Croatian), and federal (Yugoslav) government. Generally, the newspaper represented these positions quite democratically, always centering on issues of work and labor. Here we should take into account Susan Woodward’s claim that in Yugoslav socialism the workplace was “the centre of one’s social universe” (2003: 45), a fact that is related to the central social, political and ideological role of work in Yugoslav socialism, be it in the form of employment as a guarantee of rights, such as the right to housing, or as the main legitimating principle of government, which ruled “in the name of the working class.”13 These were not “merely ideological” pronouncements of an alienated ruling class—at least not until the last decade of the country’s existence—but rather the foundational principles of a social order, based on the historical experience of socialist thought and practice. Another way to put this is to say that socialist factory press aimed at representing the factory and (in)forming a kind of working-class subject: one interested in work, business, in the social and cultural life of the local community, in the economic success of her or his factory, aware of the political and class realities of the company and the larger society, as well as the realities of a world market. Indeed, these newspapers did not shy away from a certain didacticism (such as, for instance, “Borovo’”s “Little Economic Lexicon,” which explained the basic terminology of economics). In that sense, the factory press was part of a class culture, and it was a cultural form shaping a class. This does not mean it was in any simple way an outgrowth or a relection of some predetermined “class consciousness,” but rather the cultural articulation of social relations in which it emerged. These, however, have a historical existence that needs to be accounted for (especially if we are to escape the analytically unproductive binary of “workers” versus “party bureaucracy”). In order to grasp the dynamic between class and culture in workplace periodicals, we should move beyond the period of actually existing socialism, and consider the tradition of workers’ newspapers before the socialist revolution in Yugoslavia. It is by outlining this longer history—which is a history of class struggle—that we can grasp workers’ newspapers as an integral part of a socialist cultural and political tradition. Again, the case of “Borovo” will provide us with an instructive starting point. scvek@ffzg.hr 108 S. CVEK III The post-Second World War “Borovo” weekly was very much based on the corporate newspaper of the same name established by Bata in 1932 and aimed primarily at the skilled and white-collar workers of his factory. The editor-in-chief of the socialist “Borovo” weekly, Božidar Markotić, who worked in Borovo from 1953 to 1991, explicitly drew on the tradition of the newspaper’s capitalist predecessor from the 1930s, as he stated in interviews. When the Yugoslav trade unions decided to develop and institutionalize this practice elsewhere, they turned to “Borovo”, the oldest factory newspaper in Yugoslavia, for inspiration and advice.14 However, this corporatist or Fordist line of continuity is only one part of the story about the Yugoslav factory press. In the 1930s, along with the corporate “Borovo”, another newspaper, The Associate (Saradnik) was published and distributed illegally by the local communist and union organizer Josip Cazi. Later on, Cazi would become the secretary of the Yugoslav union in charge of the “cultural-educational department” (cf. Cazi 1980: 723). He held this position between 1945 and 1948, exactly at the time when factory newspapers were starting to be established country-wide, as Koroman claims, following the union initiative.15 The Associate that Cazi published in 1934 and 1935 called itself “the organ of organized Bata workers,” and was explicit about its mission to “defend” their “spiritual and material interests.”16 This involved informing the workers about their rights, working conditions, labor struggles in Yugoslavia and the world, about the rise of fascism in Europe, but also publishing entertaining and educational articles in order to “uplift the workers intellectually and culturally,” and “enable them to become not only good workers, but also people aware of their rights and interests, as well as good citizens of this country”. This brief overview of The Associate’s content is meant to point out the socialist Borovo weekly’s dual heritage. One is the corporate-Fordist heritage of Bata; the other, easily forgotten in the oficial annals of “Borovo”, belongs to the cultural history of organized labor, and points to the role of print culture in the longer history of the Croatian and Yugoslav working class. This history could be written from the perspective of its relationship to what Benedict Anderson called “print-capitalism” (cf. Anderson 2006). Assuming that his coinage may pertain to issues other than the rise of nationalism, as it points to the fundamental cultural-technological infrastructure of capitalism in the nineteenth century, and following the scvek@ffzg.hr 6 CLASS AND CULTURE IN YUGOSLAV FACTORY NEWSPAPERS 109 central argument of Imagined Communities, such project would imply relecting on the relationship between the processes of nation building and class formation. The temporalities of these processes will necessarily vary geographically, and their dynamics will depend on conjunctural determinations. Still, some general observations can be made. The same print-capitalism that allowed for modern nations to emerge also made literacy a requirement for social inclusion within the conines of the nation. If we take into account the fact of mass illiteracy in nineteenth-century Europe (our present geographical horizon), the crucial role in this process Anderson assigns to “reading classes” or “people of some power” becomes more palpable (76). Anderson is adamant about the class character of modern nation building: “in world-historical terms bourgeoisies were the irst classes to achieve solidarities on an essentially imagined basis” (77). These were, writes Anderson, “in addition to the old ruling classes of nobilities and landed gentries, courtiers and ecclesiastics, rising middle strata of plebeian lower oficials, professionals, and commercial and industrial bourgeoisies” (76). But this also means that the expansion of literacy, as well as its uses became an inseparable part of class struggle. For nineteenth-century socialists, print was an essential, indispensable means of organization and political action. In the Croatian case, where the formation of the modern nation and the working class occurred more or less simultaneously, in a place where, after the arrival of capitalism in the second half of the century, more than 80% of the population were peasants exposed to proletarianization (Korać 1929: 45, 73), the matters of print and literacy were high on the agenda of those who worked in the interests of the working classes. When it appeared on the historical stage, the Croatian working class was largely illiterate. (It was also far from numerous: Cazi estimates the number of waged workers around 1857 at about 50,000; around 1900, they were less than 150,000 in number, according to Korać [1929: 77]). In order to be able to participate fully in “print-capitalism,” it had to teach itself to read and write.17 This process was understood as the enlightening and modernizing work of “culture.” (It would appear that this conception of culture is inseparable from the conditions of emergence of the new social class.) The labor historians consulted here, Vitomir Korać and Josip Cazi, write about literacy as one of the important problems of early labor organizing (Korać adds nationalist divisions, a strong patriarchal culture, and alcoholism to the list). In 1910, over 70% of Croats and Serbs in “Croatia and Slavonia” were illiterate scvek@ffzg.hr 110 S. CVEK (Korać 1929: 25). At the dawn of labor organizing, in the second half of the nineteenth century, these numbers were even higher. In the irst issue of The Workers’ Friend (Radnički prijatelj, 1874), the irst Croatian workers’ newspaper, we read about the lack of schools and the need for establishing workers’ associations as a way of solving the problem of illiteracy.18 In the subsequent series of articles about workers’ associations, The Workers’ Friend insists that one of their primary uses for the working class—at the time regarded as a “lowly mass, little more than domestic animals” (Korać 1933: 87)—is the educational one.19 Simply put, organizing meant educating, and educating meant irst and foremost spreading—together with socialist ideas—the culture of literacy. It is no wonder, then, that the irst organized workers, and the irst to win a collective bargaining agreement (in 1872), were the Zagreb typographers. The year before, they were also the irst ones to attempt, albeit unsuccessfully, to publish a workers’ newspaper. This would be achieved only a decade later, since in 1871 the police had banned the newspaper before its release, seeing it as part of the typographers’ organizational strategy towards achieving collective bargaining rights (Korać 1929: 98). Indeed, both workers’ “educational associations” and their newspapers and other means of communication were the target of open and permanent state repression (Cazi 1957: 12, 38). These early labor struggles took place in the print shop of Ljudevit Gaj, usually considered the central igure of the nineteenth-century Croatian “national renaissance.” In light of the present discussion, it seems he should also be regarded as one of our early capitalist entrepreneurs. It is interesting that, according to Korać, Gaj employed only “foreign workers” (i.e. Germans), claiming they got their work skills already in “the mother’s womb,” while Croats “were good only for carrying guns” (Korać 1929: 96). A contemporary commentary provides a class perspective to this ethnically inlected statement (and, obviously, employment practice). In the aforementioned article from The Workers’ Friend, we read that “capitalism neglects and resents the Croatian working class,” which, impoverished and uneducated, always “had to hold a gun instead of a book and a pen in its hands.”20 Here we see how, along with the bourgeoisie as the nation-building class, another class emerges—one clearly “neglected and resented” by national historiographies, too—bringing with itself, alongside “merely economic” ones, a set of speciic cultural interests. These were intimately linked to the possibility of political action. For instance, in order to organize, at a time scvek@ffzg.hr 6 CLASS AND CULTURE IN YUGOSLAV FACTORY NEWSPAPERS 111 when the freedom to do so was virtually non-existent, workers had to have the articles of their associations approved by the government, a process that often took years, and whose success was “a rare event” (Korać 1929: 27). Understanding labor legislation, being able to read and write contracts and bargaining agreements; all of these demanded that the working class be literate in order to struggle within, and against printcapitalism. The irst organized workers in Croatia were German-speaking typographers not because they were “more revolutionary” than others— in fact, they were quite self-interested and conservative, characterized by what their critics called a “guild consciousness”—but because they were literate, or at least incomparably more literate than other workers, and had more knowledge and experience in organizing. If the story about the typographers and the irst collective bargaining agreement teaches us anything, it is that, at its beginnings, working class struggle required the assimilation of print culture. Print culture was also the means by which class solidarity was established across languages and ethnicities. The alignment of class and ethnicity in the quote from Gaj should be recognized as relating at least half of the truth about the contemporary working class. As we have seen, his reported ideological belief in the cultural inferiority of Croats was based on the actual, although unhistoricized fact of their illiteracy. Other ethnic groups within the Monarchy—Germans, Czechs, Austrians and Hungarians—were for the most part doing better. They were also the ones to bring “the socialist world-view” to Croatia (Cazi 1957: 35). In his typical anecdotal fashion, Korać reports on the “irst socialist” in Zagreb, the carpenter Josip Jaklin. Jaklin was born Josip Jackl, an illegitimate child of a Croatian mother who worked as a house servant. He was raised and educated in Graz, where he came in contact with the labor movement. Following his expulsion from Austria, several prison sentences, and a forced military service, he ended up in Zagreb. Speaking no Croatian, and wanting to make contact with the Zagreb labor movement, Jaklin resorted to a peculiar tactic. First, he convinced the owner of a local bar to subscribe to an Austrian socialist newspaper; then, sitting in the corner of the bar, he would take note of those interested in the paper. These were the people Jaklin would approach, and, eventually, work with: he would provide German and Austrian socialist press, and they would translate it into Croatian and distribute it. Korać suggests that this is where the idea for a “Croatian workers’ socialist newspaper” was born (Korać 1929: 105–106; Cazi 1958a: 64–65). Indeed, scvek@ffzg.hr 112 S. CVEK when it appeared, The Workers’ Friend was bilingual, Croatian-German, thus relecting the structure of its readership.21 IV Even a cursory look at the dynamic but arduous publishing activities of the labor movement in its various political and organizational forms in the decades leading up to the Second World War will reveal persistent interests, themes, and editorial practices in workers’ newspapers. Virtually all of the topics and sections present in The Workers’ Friend would transcend the ideological and sectional splits within the movement, and be found in newspapers published by left- and right-wing social democrats, communists, union organizers of the Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik kind, as well as in the socialist workplace periodicals. News from the world of politics, editorials, letters from the readers, information about labor organizations and struggles at home and abroad, about legislation, announcements and reviews of social, cultural and sports events, commentaries on the working and living conditions of workers, problems of hygiene and health; all of these populate the pages of nineteenth-century workers’ newspapers, various publications before the socialist revolution, and Yugoslav factory press after 1947. The concrete historical situation and institutional framework would always set speciic limits and give shape to individual contributions and publications. Still, evident continuities suggest it is reasonable to conclude that we are dealing with a cultural tradition and practice meant to “encourage workers’ to view various issues through the eyes of labor,” to paraphrase Cazi (1957: 75). The link implied in Cazi’s statement—between social, material being and its understanding—allows us to consider the work of culture as inseparable from the “class ways” in which people “live their productive relations” (Thompson 1978: 150). One of the described goals of The Workers’ Friend in 1874 was to “reach even the most hidden corners of workshops, and document and make public all the hardships and dificulties experienced by workers, in order to alleviate and eliminate them.”22 Since then, and in the period before their institutionalization during socialism, workers’ newspapers consistently published reports on and from factories and other workplaces. In the mid-1930s, Josip Cazi’s The Associate was no exception, as it published articles on an accident in the Kakanj mine in neighboring scvek@ffzg.hr 6 CLASS AND CULTURE IN YUGOSLAV FACTORY NEWSPAPERS 113 Bosnia, together with a call for inancial aid for the families of the 150 people killed; on a successful strike in a textile factory in Zagreb, caused by the new, “American” (i.e. Taylorist) organization of production; or on an accident in the Bata factory, where a woman’s hand got smashed by a machine. In the latter incident, The Associate explains, the “poor victim of the steel beast” was in fact the victim of the process of rationalization of production at labor’s expense. Such conceptualizations of life (and death) in the workplace were in line with the newspaper’s pronouncements, that “we do not want quixotic ights against machines and industrialization,” or “fantasies about the good old times,” but “the gathering of forces” in order to achieve “shorter working hours, higher wages, social security, civil rights, and better working and living conditions.”23 Some continuities between the tradition of workers’ newspapers and the socialist factory press were already hinted at. Their common focus on the workplace, evidenced in the above examples, is another case in point. It is important to keep in mind that, since its beginnings, the labor movement has been organized around different kinds of human social practice, and never exclusively around work and the workplace. In his account of “Vukovar in class struggle,” Josip Cazi mentions how, in 1919, in the center of social life of the Vukovar workers, the Workers’ Home (Radnički dom), there was a choir, a string (tamburitza) orchestra, regular literacy courses, a cinema, theater shows, lectures, and a “socialist library” (1955: 109–10). There is a line of continuity between these instances of popular culture and the nineteenth-century “culturaleducational associations” of Croatian workers,24 as well as, looking ahead, the social, cultural and sports activities of the Borovo workers and their families between 1945 and 1991. Bringing up these fragments of workers’ culture is meant to indicate that the socialist revolution in Yugoslavia marked the institutionalization not only of workers’ newspapers, but of many other existing cultural trends and traditions already present in the working class and the labor movement. The speciic social organization of the socialist federation, based on “work collectives” and (later) “organizations of associated labor,” put work at the center of one’s social experience. The interest in the workplace that characterized the tradition of workers’ newspapers would thus get a new, institutional framing in the factory newspapers and workplace periodicals of socialist Yugoslavia. scvek@ffzg.hr 114 S. CVEK V In a short and polemical text published in 2003, Yugoslav and Croatian economist Branko Horvat deines “postsocialist transition” as “the regression from [socialist] self-management to the predatory capitalism of the Yugoslav monarchy” (Horvat 2003: 522). The temporal structure implied in this deinition is one of return, restoration, and repetition, quite similar to the one suggested by the title of Želimir Žilnik’s 2009 ilm about Serbian transition, Old-School Capitalism (Stara škola kapitalizma). Reading the Borovo weekly from the years of economic reform in Yugoslavia, and 1990 in particular, we similarly encounter various kinds of uncanny returns. In early 1990, the Yugoslav Chamber of Economy released a position paper on “the tasks of company information services in the function of the economic reform.” The “market orientation” in business strategy and the “marketing approach” to the overall organization of production now demanded that factory newspapers be a “mobilizing factor” for the reform and for an “entrepreneurial climate,” and that they “encourage the cult of work and eficiency.”25 “Borovo” published the position paper without any explicit editorial comment. However, the irony of placing it on the same page as an article about the anniversary of the irst meeting of editors of Yugoslav factory newspapers was hardly accidental. Next to the announcement of the coming times, the factory weekly reminds the Borovo workers that the primary task of the factory press, as deined in the distant 1955, was to report on “the life of the [work] collective, work achievements, problems of production, workers’ self-management, and the life of the various organizations in the enterprise.”26 Here we see how “work” could gain different valences, and how what was once put in the service of labor was now subordinated to the magic, catch-all notion of the transitional period: the market. The editors of “Borovo” are explicit about the choice facing them, when, in an article entitled “Workers need the newspaper,” they write: “the newspaper can now take a marketing, business orientation, or it can keep its present physiognomy. In the case of the former, the paper would… serve to afirm the [position of the] management, neglecting the realities of life… We consider the present form of the newspaper to be more adequate.”27 It is interesting to note how the impossibility of objectively reporting on the dificult, if not outright impossible position of a socialist factory during its transition to capitalism becomes mapped onto the scvek@ffzg.hr 6 CLASS AND CULTURE IN YUGOSLAV FACTORY NEWSPAPERS 115 incompatible class positions of workers and management. Although the factory weekly did make some effort to adapt to the new times—ambivalent texts about “the market” are published, the reforms are nominally endorsed—it also published quite grim, critical reports on their consequences, which primarily included obvious defeats for labor. Like other industrial workers in Yugoslavia, due to the severe policy of monetary restriction that was supposed to allow Yugoslavia and Croatia to transition to a market economy, the workers of Borovo are at this point suffering from a chronic lack of work, they are being sent to furloughs, their salaries are late, and their factories are being placed in receivership. If “Borovo’”s reports about work in the new, capitalist conditions in early 1991 echo the reality of work depicted in the 1930s issues of The Associate, that is because the burden of the transition to capitalism was carried primarily by labor. “Borovo” thus noted that the “restructuring” program for Borovo “especially emphasizes” “the need for an increase in labor productivity and eliminating surplus labor,” as well as “better organization, including authority, responsibility, and incentive.”28 At the same time, the paper published stories about changing working conditions in factories under receivership. There, the eight-fold increase in productivity was achieved based on an intensiied—“Western,” as the weekly calls it—work rhythm, while, the journalist made sure to mention, those lucky enough to work still received a minimum wage. Accompanied by reprints of excerpts from the 1930s issues of Bata’s corporate weekly, reports such as these indeed testiied to a reconiguration of class relations in line with the logic of an “old-school capitalism.”29 Borovo’s recent attempt at a company newspaper, this time of the digital kind—which, although published in the 2000s in postsocialist Croatia, seems to follow the directives of the Yugoslav Chamber of Economy for a successful transition to capitalism almost to the letter—provides further proof for this view. In it, one of the more telling signs of the new (old) times is the observation that “in many [Borovo] stores customers feel depressed because of the exhaustion that can be seen on the faces of the staff.”30 Obviously, within the present text it is impossible to do justice to the variety of workers’ newspapers, both before and after 1945. This outline of workers’ newspapers function and history can perhaps serve as a proposal for a wider research agenda, one that would take as its fundamental object the problematic of class and culture, and, importantly, consider these within their concrete articulations, on their own terms, scvek@ffzg.hr 116 S. CVEK historicizing and localizing them in a way that does justice to the complexity of the phenomenon in question. NOTES 1. For a key reference see Lowinger (2009); for an elaboration of the Borovo case see Cvek et al. (2015). 2. “Ukidaju nam tvornički list!” Sindikalna javnost 11, July 16, 1990. (Archival sources will be listed only in the notes.) 3. Ibid. 4. For a more detailed account of this position see Cvek (2016). 5. Decades-long Yugoslav experiments with the market can certainly complicate any attempt at simple genealogies of “transition.” Still, in light of the contemporary economic and social policies, it is my view that the 1980s, and especially their latter half, represent the period in which a deinitive move towards capitalist social relations takes place. 6. On the relationship between class formation and cultural taste see also Petrović and Hofman, as well as the chapters by Luthar and Pušnik in this volume. 7. Ratko Vujadinović, “Za potpunu likvidaciju nepismenosti u našem kombinatu,” Trudbenik 1, no. 3, November 29, 1947: 3; “U Tvornici gume ima 875 pretplatnika,” Trudbenik 5, no. 3, January 19, 1952: 3. 8. “Čitate li ‘Borovo’,” Borovo, November 1, 1963. 9. This text is partly based on my participation in the research project “Continuity of Social Conlict 1987–1991: the Case of Borovo.” The project is run by the Center for Peace Studies and the Organization for Workers’ Initiative and Democratization from Zagreb. I would like to express my gratitude to my colleagues Jasna Račić and Snježana Ivčić, to whose work I owe much of the material presented here. 10. See Koroman (2016). Interestingly, two of the 1947 factory newspapers mentioned by Koroman come from Fordist industrial towns with strong traditions of labor organizing, Borovo near Vukovar and Raša near Labin. As Koroman writes, these were preceded by wall newspapers, which became insuficient as a workplace medium. 11. For a detailed discussion that provides valuable insights into organizational problems of the Croatian and Yugoslav unions following the end of the Second World War it is useful to consult Radelić (1987, 2012). The year 1947 marked the beginning of the irst Yugoslav ive-year plan: the factory newspapers initiative was undoubtedly part of that, more general social effort (cf. Pavićević and Kukoč 1948). 12. In reality, Yugoslav workplace periodicals undoubtedly varied in their autonomy from political structures. Novičić suggests that in the period scvek@ffzg.hr 6 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. CLASS AND CULTURE IN YUGOSLAV FACTORY NEWSPAPERS 117 immediately after the Second World War the factory newspapers were edited in a top-down fashion, whereas from the 1950s, and particularly after 1974, they functioned relatively autonomously, keeping a critical distance from all parties involved in the life of the company while, at the same time, aiming at representing the interest of their readers (and sometimes collaborators): the workers. The few existing scholarly texts on workplace periodicals, as well as my own reading of the Borovo weekly, seem to agree on this basic tendency. Rory Archer’s brief text on cartoons in workplace periodicals is especially interesting in this respect (2016). For an elaboration of this position see Woodward (1995) and also Cvek et al. (2015). This information is based on interviews with Božidar Markotić, conducted on July 7, 2014, and January 31, 2016. Koromanʼs source is The Voice of Labor (Glas rada), the oficial paper of the Croatian section of the Yugoslav union. According to his oficial biography, Cazi was the irst editor of “Labor (Rad), the newspaper of the Central committee of the Yugoslav union, from 1945 (cf. Koroman 2016; Cazi 1980: 723). The organizational structure of the Yugoslav union, as well as some aspects of the dynamic between the local organizations and the union central, is outlined in Radelić (1987: 69). “Naša reč,” Saradnik 1(1), March 31, 1934: 1. For a more detailed view of the relationship between left-leaning liberal political forces and the nascent labor movement in nineteenth-century Croatia, see Cazi (1957: 13–18), as well as his two volumes from 1958. “Dopisi”, Radnički prijatelj 1(1), October 4, 1874, 2. Cazi writes that the newspaper was proclaimed “the organ of the Yugoslav working class” in 1875 (1958a: 7). “Što će reći družtvo,” Radnički prijatelj 1(2), October 11, 1874: 3. Ibid. The names of the oficials of the Zagreb Workers’ Association, established in 1872/73, say a lot about the multi-lingual and multi-ethnic character of the movement: Topolšćak, Hoffmann, Grünhut, Novotni, Štiglić, Pintarić, Matlersdorfer, de la Rosa, Valušec, Popović, Husek, Zugel, Puher, Varović, Gamzer, Massony, March, Kale, Ćirili, Deanović… (Cazi 1957: 57–59). Radnički prijatelj 1(1), October 4, 1874: 1. “Katastrofalna eksplozija u dubini od 250 m – Oko 150 ljudskih žrtava,” Saradnik 1(3), April 28, 1934: 3; “Uspjeli štrajk radnika u tvornici Herman Polaka sinovi u Zagrebu,” Saradnik 2(1), February 7, 1935: 1–3; “Opet je krv oblila mašine tvornice Bata,” Saradnik 1(10), August 22, 1934: 4; “Mi i Bata,” Saradnik 2(2/3), March 28, 1935: 3. Obviously, not all of them could boast with a cinema—but all of them seem to have included choirs. scvek@ffzg.hr 118 S. CVEK 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. “Kult rada i eikasnog poslovanja”, Borovo 3119, March 9, 1990: 2. “Štampa značajnog utjecaja”, Borovo 3119, March 9, 1990: 2. “Radnicima trebaju novine”, Borovo 3147, October 19, 1990: 2. “Prestrukturiranje Borova”, Borovo 3170, April 12, 1991: 2. “Osam puta produktivniji”, “Povratiti izgubljeno povjerenje,” Borovo 3172, April 26, 1991: 1, 4. 30. “Tajni kupci sve češće u našim prodavaonicama,” Borovo Prodavač, January 2013: 8. REFERENCES Anderson, B. 2006. 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