398 The Later Years
system. In reality, it guaranteed the survival of the only structures that, after the
general fragmentation, still had a strong internal organization: the armed forces
and the police. In this sense, the “Law of National Defense” (1974), which
strengthened the control of the army over territorial defense, and the “Law of
State Defense and Its Socialist Order” (1975), which stiffened penalties for the
“enemies of the people,” were significant. In this latter law, the infamous Article
133, in clear Leninist style, spoke of “hostile propaganda” and “counterrevo-
lutionary activity,” including in this definition all criticism of the regime. The
law was formulated in such a generic manner that it allowed the authorities to
act against anyone daring enough to defend fundamental human rights. “The
police interrogate, arrest, threaten, invite to cooperate,” wrote Dobrica Ćosić to
denounce the actual situation.^30 The latter phrase, “invite to cooperate,” was a
euphemism for spying on one’s friends.
The Law on Associated Labor and the
Destruction of the Yugoslav EconomyIn this period of busy legislative activity, the most significant law was the Law
of Associated Labor, voted in on 25 November 1976 after a public discussion of
five months in which Tito did not take part. This “mammoth” law of 671 arti-
cles, rightly described as the “small constitution,” aimed to “strengthen, regulate
and make more efficient self-management in the conditions of a socialist mar-
ket economy.” Kardelj asserted that it would defend the economy from both the
Stalinist and the centralist dangers present in the system, but also from the
“anarchy” that the market constantly created, although unlike Bakarić, he knew
little about economics. “He always looked at economics,” said Stane Kavčič,
“from an ideological perspective, trying to find means and measures to direct the
economy through this lens.” Bakarić thought of the economy as a wild horse
that could not be fully tamed. Kardelj, on the contrary, thought that it was pos-
sible to tame it with the help of will, science, and communist consciousness.^31 In
the name of the “agreed economy,” as its critics scornfully called the consciously
non-competitive economy, and in the name of self-managing agreements, he
rejected not just the traditional laws of the market economy but also every
attempt at rational planning.^32 The Bolshevik slogan “factories to the workers”
was supplemented by “all earnings to the workers,” in the conviction that, in
this way, political power would be guaranteed to “free producers.” This assump-
tion was based on the belief that Yugoslavia had reached a stage of social devel-
opment in which products were not exchanged according to their market value
but according to the amount of work invested in them. The law introduced the
Grassroots Organizations of Associated Labor (Osnovna Organizacija Udru-
ženohg Rada) and the Complex Organizations of Associated Labor (Složena