Renewing the role of the state in housing provision: self-management and access to the domestic space in late-socialist Yugoslavia (1974–90)

This article examines the issue of housing provision in late-socialist Yugoslavia when the reforms of the mid-1970s transformed the socialist system of self-management by promoting the Marxist principle of the ‘withering away of the state’. This new turn was intended to reduce state intervention and favour direct workers’ participation in decision-making to give birth to a more democratic socialist society. Housing policy was central to this model, as this responsibility was placed in the hands of the self-managed companies, which were in charge of drafting a rule book to organize the funding and the distribution of dwellings and housing credits. The transformations of Yugoslav late socialism thus made citizens place the fate of their domestic space under the control of their productive space. Indeed, the managers in the companies were enabled to define the housing needs of their workers and the criteria of priority for the distributions. This article aims to re-evaluate the state’s role in self-managed Yugoslavia by questioning the noti on of ‘mixed economy of welfare’. This paper thus addresses the dynamic interactions between the public actors of the socialist state, the companies that implemented their housing policies, and the workers’ participation in the self-management system. The author will mainly rely on sources from two medium-sized cities in Serbia and Croatia, including the documents from the municipal actors, and the ones from the main factories in the region. By confronting them, the author will give an account of the companies’ action in the making of self-managed housing provision, and will elaborate on the redefinition of public intervention in a country where the state was supposed to wither away.