Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0413/04131.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 34KB | 540 lines

$Unique_ID{COW04131}
$Pretitle{299}
$Title{Yugoslavia
Chapter 2C.   Social Groups}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Patricia A. Kluck}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{workers
labor
percent
peasants
intelligentsia
employment
rural
early
elite
nearly}
$Date{1982}
$Log{Opera House, Zagreb*0413101.scf
}
Country:     Yugoslavia
Book:        Yugoslavia, A Country Study
Author:      Patricia A. Kluck
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1982

Chapter 2C.   Social Groups

     Society of the early 1980s was largely the creation of the post-World War
II communist regime. A legacy of socioeconomic and ethnic cleavages remained;
nonetheless the social scene would have been hard for an observer from the
interwar kingdom to recognize. The interwar society was overwhelmingly rural,
agricultural, impoverished, if not absolutely destitute; a small middle level
of professionals and government administrators were concentrated in a few
urban centers. In the early 1980s all this had been transformed. There was a
substantial nonagricultural labor force; peasants had become workers and had
created a new category to describe the process of leaving the family farm for
nonagricultural employment, the peasant-worker. The elite, still a privileged
stratum, expanded to include not just bureaucrats, professionals, and military
officers but a growing corps of technical experts and managers for the
changing economy.

     The mobility involved in the evolution of socialist Yugoslavia was
enormous. Peasants still remained a goodly portion of the populace, but the
sons and daughters of peasants were industrial workers, managers, teachers.
People who began World War II as subsistence farmers and ended it under arms
in the Partisans experienced almost unparalleled mobility. Tito, son of a
Slovenian-Croatian peasant family, was unusual in the measure of his success,
but not his career pattern.

Peasants

     Despite rapid industrialization throughout the post-World War II era,
peasant farmers remained a substantial portion of the population in the 1980s.
Some 2.2 to 2.9 million individuals owned the small plots associated with
private agriculture; peasants accounted for 95 percent of the agricultural
labor force, and their holdings represented roughly 85 percent of all arable
land. More than any other segment of society they inherited the legacy of
Ottoman misrule, interwar neglect, and extreme overpopulation.

     The impact of Ottoman rule on the agricultural south's social and
economic development can hardly be overstated. "The centuries do not follow
one another," an early twentieth-century traveler commented of the regions
under Turkish control, "they co-exist." Ottoman rule split the rural populace
into a dominant Muslim minority and a subservient Christian majority, but both
suffered alike in the chaos surrounding the empire's decline. The sale of
public offices (with tenure limited to a single year) and the erosion of
centralized authority took their toll of the peasantry. Brigandage was
widespread and contributed to the general instability of rural life. Prime
agricultural land went unoccupied as those who could fled Ottoman rule, while
those remaining behind clustered in villages; dispersed farmsteads invited
pillage of the worst kind. Taxation undermined farmers' incentives to improve
production. ("Why breed better horses?" a typical peasant replied to a
traveler's query. "If they were good for anything, the government would take
them....") The combined effects of banditry and poor transport hampered
commerce. Tariffs favored foreign imports, thus limiting local manufactures.
Graft and corruption were a pervasive part of public life.

     The rise of the Serbian kingdom, the switch from pastoralism to sedentary
crop production, and the adoption of New World cultigens rapidly led to
overpopulation. In Serbia, for example, the population tripled in the course
of the nineteenth century as families streamed into regions liberated from
Ottoman rule and chronic rural unrest. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century land
reforms distributed many large estates to peasants, and land reclamation
projects in the 1920s added roughly 20 percent to the cultivable land. Despite
this, and even allowing for the labor-intensive technology in use, over 40
percent of the agricultural population was surplus in the interwar kingdom.
In terms of overpopulation, Yugoslavia consistently outranked all other East
European countries.

     To rural overpopulation was added chronic indebtedness. In rural
Yugoslavia the merchant-moneylender replaced the Muslim landlord as the main
agent of peasant exploitation. In 1932 over one-third of all peasant
households were in debt to a sum of nearly half the previous season's gross
income. Periodic moratoriums on debt repayments and farm foreclosures gave
occasional relief but by no means solved the small farmer's problems in
obtaining reasonably priced credit. Taxation further impoverished the
peasantry, who regularly footed half the tax bill and got in return perhaps
1 percent of budget allocations.

     Small private holdings were the rule in agriculture in the 1970s. The
communist regime abandoned early efforts at collectivization in the economic
crises of the early 1950s. It was an effort, some observers suggest, to retain
the support of the rural populace who had made up the ranks of the Partisans.
Legislation in 1953 limited the amount of land private farmers could hold to
ten to fifteen hectares. Most families were in little danger of exceeding this
limit; farm size averaged 3.5 hectares per family in 1980. Added to this was
a degree of extreme land fragmentation. A sample of farms in Kosovo in the
1970s found that the average family's holdings included some six plots of 0.6
hectare each. Nearly four-fifths of all farms were five hectares or less (see
table 9, Appendix).

     In growth and earnings private farms lagged behind the socialized
agricultural sector. Private agricultural earnings were less than half (41
percent) the nonfarm sector in 1975. At the same time the private agricultural
labor force declined by nearly one-third (1954-71). As the young (particularly
men) left in search of industrial employment, the peasant labor force aged and
"feminized." In the 1970s women accounted for an estimated 60 percent of
private agriculture's labor.

     The rural populace made do under these apparently dire circumstances
because the family farm was less a means of livelihood than a base of
operations. The farm was the peasant family's patrimony, the keystone of
family resources, but hardly the sole support of the rural household. Balkan
peasants have a long history in the wage labor market. They ventured
everywhere from Anatolia to America as migrant workers while under Ottoman and
Austro-Hungarian rule. Temporary or permanent migrant labor was a critical
safety valve during the interwar era as well.

     Yugoslavia's post-World War II industrialization with its concomitant
improvement in transportation opened up new possibilities for off-farm
employment closer to home. Peasants became commuters as well as migrant
laborers. By 1970 nearly 1.5 million peasants (roughly one-quarter of the
economically active rural population) were employed outside of agriculture.
About half the rural population lived in households with at least one
"peasant-worker." By the mid-1960s nonagricultural earnings exceeded rural
families' farm income. Over time, peasants with larger and larger holdings
have become involved in wage labor; again by the late 1960s even families
with eight or more hectares earned one-third their income from nonagricultural
activities.

     The pattern of involvement in wage labor varied according to the
family's resources. Well-to-do peasants able to muster the ready cash for
travel expenses and work permits took advantage of the lucrative international
labor market. Those from relatively poorer families stayed closer to home. The
impact of occasional or semipermanent wage la