Equality, Participation, Transition: Essays in Honour of Branko Horvat

Milica Uvalić and Vojmir Franicaević xxv
been highly critical of the social and political environment in which
he has been living. While supportive of the general trust of the
Yugoslav system of self-management, he often criticized it for falling
short of providing a truly efficient economic and politically democratic
system. Similarly, today he is one of the harshest critics of various
aspects of emerging capitalism in Croatia. Such a generally critical attitude
has, on a number of occasions, brought him to the margin of
being a dissident, though he never really became one.
Horvat has been a convinced advocate of the system of selfmanagement
and other forms of economic and industrial democracy.
For him, socialism as practiced in ‘real socialism’ countries, in reality,
was equivalent to ‘etatism’ because of the lack of political and economic
democracy. This is the main reason why he strongly supported
the Yugoslav way to socialism, namely self-managed market socialism.
He has been convinced of the desirability of workers’ control through
self-management, and of the superiority and necessity of a more diffused
application of this social form. Although he built his theories in
a rigorous way, he also always tried to put them in the function of real
life problems and relate them to reality, with the objective of changing
and improving the existing political, economic and social system he
lived in. That is why he has also been very critical, on various occasions,
of the actual institutional set-up in former Yugoslavia, as well as
specific economic policies applied by the Yugoslav government which,
in his view, fell short of both the ideas of economic rationality and efficiency,
and the ideals of equality and justice. Thus, for example, he
strongly criticized the breaking-up of enterprises into ‘organizations of
associated labor’, whereby the market was introduced into enterprises,
while the outside market was left intact, functioning in a poor and
unsatisfactory way.
Another important facet of Branko Horvat concerns his work as pedagogue.
He has educated whole generations of economists in former
Yugoslavia, many of whom are today professors at universities, or occupying
top positions in government in countries of former Yugoslavia or
in international organizations and institutions all over the world.
Being well aware of the importance of discussion and criticism, in the
1980s he established a forum of mostly younger scholars from universities
and research institutes from all over Yugoslavia, the so-called
‘JUNASET’ group, which met regularly to present their work and discuss
both the newest economic theories and current economic problems.
Horvat has also had students from many countries around the world.
We believe all his students have benefited from his frequently severe,