The Later Years 399
Organizacija Udruženog Rada), inaugurating an enormous bureaucratic body
that reached macroscopic dimensions: it has been calculated, wrote Bilandžić,
that more than a million norms were implemented, most of which were never
put into practice.^33 In order to respect these norms, at least in part, a business
of five thousand employees wasted, by reckoning, more than a million working
hours per year. The result of this legislative inflation and of administrative
superstructures was the paralysis of the economy: over the following decade,
the annual growth rate collapsed from 13 percent to zero. At the end of 1977, a
survey by the federal government showed that “one third of all organizations of
associated labor failed to create a penny of profit.”^34 The worst effects of this
situation were temporarily forestalled thanks to massive foreign loans, which
were easy to get since Western banks bubbled with “petro dollars” that were
distributed left, right, and center, without any serious control. The republics
and the provinces squandered money, and the federal government suggested
that a lot of it probably “wound up in the Swiss banks.” This was confirmed by
the Swiss finance minister, who revealed that Yugoslav citizens had squirrelled
away nearly $13 billion in interest-free Helvetic accounts.^35
In formulating his concept of “integral self-management,” Kardelj could not
ignore the challenge of the Italian and Spanish communist parties, which had
renounced the dogma of proletarian dictatorship in the mid-seventies, recog-
nizing political pluralism and parliamentary democracy as essential premises of
a healthy society.^36 Kardelj hailed “Eurocommunism” as a positive phenomenon
within the framework of the international workers movement, stressing espe-
cially its critical attitude toward Brezhnev-style hegemony. He considered the
new variant of Marxism appropriate only for specific Western conditions, and
not a “recipe” or a model Yugoslavia should adhere to. According to him, at the
stage of mature socialism his country had achieved, political pluralism would
mean a step backward. The results of these considerations were summarized by
Kardelj in his essay “Developing Trends of the Socio-Political System,” published
in November 1977, as a starting point for the Eleventh Congress of the LCY.^37
He tried to square the circle, combining the ruling socialism in Yugoslavia with
pluralism—not political pluralism, but pluralism of “self-managed interests.”
According to Kavčič:
Kardelj attempted to make his vision of socialism as democratic as possible. In this
vision there is one political subject, the party, organized according to the model of
the Bolshevik party. He was not able to overcome these limits and did not believe
it was possible to do so as he believed socialism should be determined by Marxism-
Leninism. In his view, Marxism was not just an ideology, but a science. He over-
came the bonds of the Comintern on a tactical level, but not on a philosophical