228 The Postwar Period
simplified, that we should give over the factories to the workers and just col-
lect taxes. Essentially as in the Western businesses, preserving however socialist
relations.... I remember well being seated with Kardelj and Kidrič in the car
before my villa.... It was raining and we spoke at length. I mentioned my idea
about self-management, which could help us to simplify many things. They
replied that it was too early, that the idea itself was not bad but premature.
After two or three days Kidrič calls and says: ‘This is really a good idea. It’s
feasible!’ Kardelj too agreed and we started to work.”^401
In the late spring or early summer of 1949, during a visit to Split, where Tito
was vacationing, Djilas, Kardelj, and Kidrič discussed this project with him. At
first he reacted negatively, since he did not completely understand what they
wanted to do. The idea of “self-management” was foreign to his experience,
aside from which, as far as he knew, the Yugoslav proletariat was not mature
enough for it. But when they explained that self-management could save them
from the trap of Stalinism and could become a model for other countries as well,
proving their point with quotations from Marx, he understood and became
enthused. If the aim of the class struggle was to free the proletariat from
its dependency on capital, it should also be freed from that of the state. “All
right, let’s do it and let’s launch the idea with the slogan: ‘the factories to the
workers,’” he said.^402 They therefore decided to create a global plan based on
the experience of the People’s Councils, which had existed during the war in
order to change the entire management of the “social means of production.”
The party initially introduced these measures in the fifteen most important
factories and enterprises, with the purpose of reinforcing its position in the
working class. In this way the embryos of the worker’s councils, or similar
organisms that seemed promising, began to take shape.^403
The idea of a new economic and political policy went ahead at the leader-
ship level, although it was at odds with the entire postwar, highly centralized
administrative experience. At first it encountered many obstacles, both because
of objective difficulties and because of strong resistance from the bureaucratic
structures. As Kardelj remembers, “It was not easy, in the factories or in the
unions, or in the party,” where “ferocious opposition appeared on the part of
those comrades who were against dogmatism, against the Cominform, but still
nurtured centralist ideas. The first law on self-management was approved only
the following year.”^404
Tito submitted “The Basic Law on the Administration of State Factories
and Main Industrial Enterprises by Workers’ Collectives” to a special session of
the Federal Assembly on 27 June 1950. He said on that occasion: “The slogan
‘factories to the workers, the land to the peasants’ is not an abstract propagan-
distic slogan, but has a profound significance, as it reassumes the entire agenda