Skip to main content
Boris Kidric, visionary architect of Yugoslavia's socialist alternative
Tito's famous split with the USSR to walk the path of a mixed economy and the 'self-management' of production was the work of a former partisan hero whose transformative economic project's success still has much to teach us today, argues JOHN CALLOW
It fell to Kidric, as the chief economic thinker within the new socialist government, to go far beyond the reconstruction of pre-war industry in order to create an entirely different form of society, whereby capital was subordinated to labour, exploitation would be ended and productive capacity would rise hand-in-hand with the living standards of the working class

SOME monuments endure. Tucked away behind the parliament building in Ljubljana, an oversized and strangely hectoring statue memorialises Boris Kidric, one-time prime minister of Slovenia and architect of self-management in Yugoslavia.

He is hardly a household name in the West. A tragically early death from cancer; being written-out of Milovan Djilas’s self-serving memoirs; eclipse on account of his friend and comrade Edvard Kardelj’s longevity at the heart of government and overshadowing by the personality cult surrounding Marshal Tito, are more than enough reasons to explain his omission from the socialist pantheon or from considerations of alternative economic strategies.

Yet, we ignore him and, by extension, engagement with transformative socialist economics, at our peril.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
Tom Mooney Company from the Lincoln Battalion, during the Spanish Civil War, Jarama, Spain, 1937
History / 24 February 2026
24 February 2026

CJ ATKINS commemorates one of the most dramatic moments in working-class history

heavens
Book Review / 3 December 2025
3 December 2025

BEN CHACKO welcomes a masterful analysis that puts class struggle back at the heart of our understanding of China’s revolution

Jeremy Corbyn (second left) and Zarah Sultana, MP for Coventry South (second right) on the picket line outside London Euston train station, August 18, 2022
Features / 20 August 2025
20 August 2025

Corbyn and Sultana’s ‘Your Party’ represents the first attempt at mass socialist organisation since the CPGB’s formation in 1921, argues DYLAN MURPHY