With many of David Riddell's points in "Plennins, Centralisation and the Market in Yugoslavia"I am in agreement, His criticism of the views I stated in Towards Socialism and again in this debate does not in fact meet them, but is to some considerable extent concerned to rebut opinions I do not hold, The first important point we can agree on is that Yugoslav self-management is an experience which is “crucial in discussing the problems of interrelating planning, self-management, centralisation and freedom of choice," Secondly, we agree that apathy, fragmentation and similar disorders are certainly no worse in Yugoslavia than they are in the Soviet Union or the East European countries, to put it rather mildly. Thirdly, my feers about ‘bureaucratic anarchy! were in no sense intended to characterise the present regime in Yugoslavia, but rather to indicate the dangers in the present trends, which, if uninterrupted, will foster the growth of the kinds of difficulty chout which I was speculating, Fourthly and lastly, if central planning means "a plan weighing 1$ tons," specifying the “exact number of glass containers for medical use" and so on, we are united against any such buresucratic monster, That is not ct ell what I mean by democratic planning - it is rather an instance of technocratic imbecility, and has nothing wh>tever to do with the assertion of democratic social priorities,
What we are really arguing about is the extent to which the market must be held under control in the transition towards socialism. My view is that the more undeveloped an economy is, the more vital it is that its basic decisions should be centrally controlled and regulated both in order that social priorities be determined in the most democratic mavior possible, and in order precisely to accelerate the "take-off" into industrialisation in the most decisive possible way. To the extent that market priorities remain sovereign, backward arcas remain "unprofitable", basic industries become "risks", and "incentives" produce increasing stratification. In a poor country, housing for the poor is far less "profitable" than it is in England, which is saying something, Naturally, the explosion of social welfare provision in Yugoslavia took place exactly on the basis of the subordination of the market: housing for managers would have been much more profitable than workers! flats, for instance. The question is not whether the Yugoslavs have in the past established healthy norms in these spheres: it is whether their line of advance is continuing on this course or not. Is the Yugoslav market a "domesticated" beast ? It was: there are strons grounds for saying that today it is dangerously close to reverting back towards savagery. The end of a long process, increasingly subordinating national decisions to criteria of profitability, came this July in the economic crisis which resulted in the drastic devaluation of the dinare The remedies chosen by the Yugoslav administration to accompany this measure were very serious. The main one was to rely to a very great extent upon foreign, predominantly capitalist, competitiom. Devaluation to a rate of 3,500 dinars to the £1 was conjoined with a reduction of tariffs from an average of 23% to 11.8%, The effect of these measures was to greatly stiffen foreign competition in Yugoslav markets, to encourage ° Yugoslav exports, and to curb inflation by sharp cuts in Yugoslav living standards, Part of the "domestication" of the market in Yugoslavia had involved strict controls over the disposal by firms of their foreign earnins, These controls were apparently considerably
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