Scientific Practice in Yugoslavia: From Marxism-Leninism to Self-Managed Socialism

Abstract

As a result of acknowledging the social importance of science, inherent to the Marxist-Leninist ideology, in the aftermath of the WWII the process of accelerated scientific development was initiated in Yugoslavia with the assistance of the USSR. The Yugoslav communists relied on the USSR, and therefore the Soviet science model was one they opted for. However, in 1948. Yugoslavia broke away from the Eastern bloc led by the Soviet Union. The Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) was excluded from the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers' Parties (Cominform), charged with reintroducing capitalism and displaying nationalist tendencies. Prior to this, and in line with the practice in the USSR, the scientific discourse in Yugoslavia was critical of the scientific practice in the West, which was labeled idealist, positivist, historicist, bourgeois, etc. The scientific practice in Yugoslavia was placed in the framework of historical and dialectical materialism, Marxism-Leninism, which postulated that the science should grow from and be as close as possible to the concrete realities of the Yugoslav society. The basic feature of this practice was "partisanship", which meant that science, as all other spheres of human activities, is also a field of ideological struggle. Edvard Kardelj, one of the main ideologists of the CPY, delivered a speech in 1949, at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which stood as the first explicit critique of the Soviet model of science by the Yugoslav communists. In this speech, the USSR was accused of anti-scientific tendencies, of making the science an "unprincipled layman of practical bureaucracy" (which is how he saw the partisanship in science); instead, the science, according to the new Yugoslav ideology, should serve the "truth" and "prosperity", while the scientists in Yugoslavia should be "free in their creation." The promotion of the sovereignty of science and the criticism of "partisanship" by the Yugoslav communists runs counter to the Marxist-Leninist understanding of the role of science. That speech clarified ideological shift that was taking off, and laid the ideological foundations for the new scientific practice in Yugoslavia. One which will encompass liberal elements and would, thus, correspond more to the new political system in Yugoslavia – the so-called self-managed socialism. It is my intention to examine the line of argument in social sciences that emerged as a result of this ideological shift, and which provided the new system in Yugoslavia with the ideological framework for new practices, including the ones in the field of the organization of science. I will analyze the nature of the evidence present in the official ideology discourse of the direction that Yugoslav society has taken in the period before and after the split with the USSR, as well as try to examine, in that context, the issues of the relationship between political ideology and (social) science.