Less than ten years after the introduction of workers’ self-management, the makers of the system were seriously shaken by an open workers’ revolt: the strike of the Trbovlje miners in Slovenia in 1958. Pressured by the high costs of coal and electricity production, the workers and their representatives had unsuccessfully appealed for help from local, republican, and federal authorities. They turned to strike action as a last resort. The rebellion spread from Trbovlje to two nearby mines, in Hrastnik and Zagorje ob Savi. The leadership, shaken by the strike, quickly rushed to meet the workers’ demands.

From then on, workers’ rebellions continuously shook Yugoslav society, revealing the reality of class inequalities and conflicts beneath the surface of the allegedly established rule of the working class. They exposed the cracks in the decreed myth of the “association of self-managers”: workers did not have the decision-making power of factory directors and management boards, nor could they match the political weight and influence of members of the nomenklatura in shaping social life. While the dominant trend in historiography over recent decades has been to highlight intellectual elites or national demands as the main opposition to the system, it is clear that the top of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia was greatly concerned about workers’ unrest.

The leadership was aware of the system’s shortcomings, from time to time speaking about the “introduction” or “establishment” of socialism and self-management even many years after they were officially introduced. Over the years, the frequency and diversity of criticisms of the self-management system – sometimes more, and sometimes less justified – grew, both from within and from outside the regime. During the student demonstrations of 1968, various ideological positions from which the system was criticised – socialist, liberal, and conservative – came to the fore. The crises of the 1970s and 1980s can, in part, be interpreted as different and often conflicting attempts by ruling factions to channel grassroots movements to their own advantage.

The attached documents testify to different periods and forms of criticism and resistance within the Yugoslav system, as well as to systemic interpretations and responses to some of these rebellions. They reveal multiple lines of tension and mistrust that existed not only between members of the working class and various levels of the party-state apparatus (trade unions, the party, the police, etc.), but also within the apparatus itself. Organised communists among the working class were torn between solidarity with their colleagues at the workplace and the party line, just as the unions balanced between fighting for workers’ demands and following directives from “above”. Strikes and protests thus brought class struggle back into the everyday life of a society that claimed to have overcome it.