Workshop-Brunch: Causes for War in Yugoslavia

Causes for War. Looting the physical, monetary and symbolic socially owned property of Yugoslavia:

As part of the exhibition and project Testimony - Truth or Politics the workshop will include a guided tour by the curator and a discussion on the role that socially owned property and self-management played in the constitution of the Yugoslav society and their destiny when it was destroyed. With the current discussions on commons, migration, nationalism, etc. we find this experience highly informative.

The generic political subject “working People” (radni narod) through its self-management and the socially owned property (društvena svojina) were the basis for the constituting and maintaining the Yugoslav society. The erosion of these political concepts can be traced back as far as the economic reforms of 1963 which some of the testimonies gathered in the project Naming IT war locate as the beginning of the war. The constitution of 1974 depoliticized concept of the working People by turning the self-management system into a system of cooperatives and adding the individualistic-atomized concept of citizen as a political subject. By changing the concept of society from a generic political concept to an ontological conglomerate of individuals the socially owned property was turned into a share-holding company that could be easily privatized and was only kept together by the authority of the Party. However, this same constitution weakened the federal power of both state and party and prepared the grounds for secession. The demand for a multi-party system first on a national (republic) level, was the last blow to these concepts since that meant on the one hand bringing people back to the concept of a nation state i.e. nationalism and on the other, the nationalization/privatization of the monetary and physical (industry and infrastructure) socially owned property in order to finance the newly established parties and the destruction the symbolic capital of Yugoslavia.

Die Veranstaltung findet in englischer Sprache statt.
Der Samstagmorgen-Hunger wird bedient.
Eintritt frei!

Eine Veranstaltung des Volkskundemuseum Wien und Verein Boem, Verein zur Förderung von Kunst, Kultur, Wissenschaft und Kommunikation.

Im Rahmen der Ausstellung
TESTIMONY – TRUTH OR POLITICS