Titoism in Action

Titoism in Action: The Reforms in Yugoslavia after 1948 offers the first sustained, English-language account of how a Communist state attempted to reinvent itself after breaking with Moscow. Fred Warner Neal traces Yugoslavia’s dramatic passage from Cominform excommunication to an experimental socialism grounded in decentralization, workers’ self-management, and constitutional redesign. Moving from the psychological shock of 1948 through the policy pivots of 1950–53, Neal reconstructs the intellectual and institutional architecture of “Titoism”: factory councils and a recast planning mechanism; a stronger role for republics and municipalities; retreat from Soviet-style collectivization; and a redefinition of the party’s supremacy amid widening—if bounded—public debate. Anchoring analysis in speeches, statutes, and elite testimony, he shows how Yugoslav theorists framed their program as a return to “real” Marxism-Leninism and the “withering away” of the state, even as they borrowed selectively from Western administrative practice and revolutionary precedents.

Equally attentive to results, Neal probes the tensions that made Yugoslavia a laboratory rather than a model: the gap between law and practice; the frictions between decentralization and macro-planning; the party’s continued monopoly alongside expanded civic space; and the uneven capacity of a largely peasant society to absorb rapid institutional change. Set against evolving Cold War geopolitics—from Soviet blockade to U.S. drought relief and cautious rapprochement—this study illuminates how ideology, national sovereignty, and material constraints interacted to produce a distinctive variant of socialism. Essential reading for scholars of Eastern Europe, comparative political economy, and the global Left, Titoism in Action explains not only what Belgrade changed, but why those changes mattered—clarifying the stakes of self-management, the limits of de-Stalinization, and the enduring question of whether a planned economy can democratize without ceasing to plan.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1958.