Difference between revisions of "Contribution:20260929085227"

From The Dictionary of Radical Alternatives
(Summary (duža verzija, jedan pasus): Moba (моба) is a centuries-old practice of collective labour from the Balkans, in which a village gathers to work intensively and without payment for one household)
 
(Samoupravljanje u Jugoslaviji / Self-management in Yugoslavia)
 
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{{Contribution
 
{{Contribution
 
|contribution:type=New Concept
 
|contribution:type=New Concept
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|contribution:newconcept=Moba (Serbian cyrilics: Моба)
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|contribution:newconcept=Self-management (Samoupravljanje)
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|contribution:name=Milica kocovic Kočović De Santo
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|contribution:name=Milica Kočović De Santo
 
|contribution:email=mickocovic@gmail.com
 
|contribution:email=mickocovic@gmail.com
 
}}
 
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Language / region: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin (South Slavic, former Yugoslav); Balkans / Southeast Europe
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Concept: Samoupravljanje (Cyrillic: самоуправљање)
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Category: Praxis (also Common Term)
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English: Self-management
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Suggested location for the map and contemporary example: Topli Do, Stara Planina, Serbia
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Language / region: Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin); Slovenian (samoupravljanje); Macedonian (самоуправување). Former Yugoslavia, Southeast Europe.
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Etymology: Commonly linked to molba ("request, plea"), from moliti ("to ask, to pray"). A household asks its community neighbours for help, and the help is given without payment. In most of the cases this is understood as a favour that will be returned.  
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Category: Worldview (also Praxis)
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Short definition: Moba is a practice of intensive collective labour, freely given by a village comunity to a single household. It takes two forms. In reciprocal moba, the household that receives help takes on a social debt: an obligation to return the same labour and goodwill when another household issues the same call. In milosrdna moba (merciful moba), the village comes together for a household that has lost a family member, and nothing is expected in return. In both forms, moba binds the community together and keeps any single household from falling too far behind the others.
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Suggested location for the map and contemporary example: Sava Blocks (Blocks 44, 45, 70, 70a), New Belgrade, Serbia, Topli Do, Serbia (as new forms of liminal commons).
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It is a practice of reciprocal, unpaid collective labour.  
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Etymology: From samo- ("self") and upravljanje ("governing, managing", from upraviti, "to direct, to steer").  
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Literally: governing by ourselves, collectively, without an owner or a state standing above.
  
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Extended definition:
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Short definition:
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For centuries, moba organised life in Balkan mountain and rural communities. Pastoralism, smallholder farming and forest foraging depended on it, and it left a material heritage of shepherds' shelters and common livestock common structures. These village cultures were never individualistic. It was common knowledge that a family could not survive alone. Harvesting, haymaking, building a house or preparing for winter required more hands than any single household had. Moba answered this need: the village gathered and worked intensively, without payment, for one household at a time.
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Samoupravljanje (самоуправљање) Self-management was the system of economic and political democracy practised in socialist Yugoslavia (1950–1991), grounded in social ownership and connecting economic democracy (OOUR), territorial democracy (mesne zajednice) and social reproduction (SIZ) through encounter planning, beyond both market and state command.
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In reciprocal moba, a household calls on its neighbours for help. The work is freely given, but it creates a social debt (društveni dug): the household is obliged to answer the next call from another household, returning the help in the same measure, through labour and kindness. This debt is not settled in money and cannot be bought off. It is repaid only by showing up as a support to others. In this way, moba circulates labour through the whole village and continually renews the ties between households.
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It grew out of the anti-fascist liberation struggle and from the conviction that abolishing private ownership would not by itself free people if control simply passed to a centralised state. Grounded in social (collective) ownership (društvena svojina), where the means of production belonged to the workers and society as a whole rather than to private owners or the state, samoupravljanje was both an ideology and a practice of commoning at the scale of an entire society.
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Milosrdna moba (merciful moba, Cyrillic: милосрдна моба) follows a different logic. When a household lost a family member, and with it hands for work and often a breadwinner, the village first completed all the essential work for that household, and only then turned to the work of others. Nothing was expected in return. This was not charity allocation from the strong to the weak, but a way for the village itself to survive: a community that lets one of its households collapse weakens itself.
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Three institutions carried it into everyday life:
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Together, the two forms show that moba is not simply a technique for getting work done. It is a way of community social reproduction. Moba levelled inequalities, shared the burdens of loss, and made interdependence visible and practised. Labour, body, rhythm and celebration were woven together, as the work usually ended with shared food and song, and the work itself renewed bonds between people, land and water.
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- Basic Organisations of Associated Labour (OOUR) secured economic democracy: workers decided on production and on how the surplus they created would be shared between personal income, reinvestment and serving common and social needs.
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Moba is not a "cultural residue" of a pre-modern past. It is a living epistemology, an ontological survival that resists what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls epistemicide. Through moba, knowledge about land, seasons and care is transmitted across generations as embodied practice. Its roots reach into pre-Christian Slavic cosmologies (Mokosh, Perun, Veles), where earth, body and community were not separated.
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- Local sub-municipal units (communities) (mesne zajednice) secured territorial democracy and autonomy: residents decided together on housing, spatial planning, communal services, culture and the environment in their neighbourhoods and villages (workers could decide beyond the workplace context, towards the place of residence).
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Today, moba re-emerges in struggles to defend the public goods and commons. In the village of Topli Do on Stara Planina, residents held barricades for 120 days in 2019 against small hydropower plants that threatened to divert their rivers into pipes. After the investor withdrew, villagers re-introduced moba tradition to rebuild some houses, repair small bridges, renovate the church, and upgrade shared septic systems, and they reactivated the village cooperative (zadruga) and sub-municipal local community (mesna zajednica). Here, moba turned defensive resistance into everyday commoning: the reproduction of life and territory rather than a one-time protest.
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- Self-management interest communities (SIZ) organised social reproduction: users and providers jointly governed education, healthcare, culture, childcare and social protection, financed from the surplus of associated labour as universal basic services. Actors of the economic sphere (OOUR), would finance the actors from the non-economic sphere (social reproduction sphere cultural, educational, health, communal institutions), to meet the higher quality of life.
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Moba also lives on beyond its village origins. In its original meaning, as freely given collective labour that binds people together, it reappears in nowtopias, permaculture communities and other contemporary initiatives, where people gather to build, plant and harvest together as a conscious alternative to wage labour and market exchange. These new forms do not replace the tradition. In villages, moba has never stopped: it continues to be called, answered and returned, as it has been for generations.
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These spheres were brought into relation through recurring negotiation (relying on the instruments: social negotiation and bargaining)  known as encounter planning (susretno planiranje), which connected bottom-up local needs with wider social priorities - top-down- without relying on either the market or state command. Mentioned institutional architecture enabled encounter planning by offering a meso (horizontal) level of institutions, which is essentially important to enable the radical democratic planning system as a whole.
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Like mycorrhizal networks beneath the soil, moba as prefigurative pedagogy connects struggles across geographies. It resonates with sumud (steadfastness) in Palestine, where planting an olive tree after its destruction is at once labour, care and resistance, and with collective work traditions elsewhere (buen vivir, ubuntu, sharmadana etc.). Moba shows that alternatives to capitalist individualism and extraction are not only imagined for the future. They are already practised, remembered and reactivated in the present.
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Relation to existing concepts, and why it deserves its own entry:
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References:
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Samoupravljanje resonates closely with Autogestión, but differs in scale and in its organising problem. It was not the self-management of individual cooperatives or recovered enterprises under a hostile state, but the organising principle of an entire society for four decades, written into the constitution and extended from production to territory and social reproduction. Its central question was not only how to democratise a workplace, but how to democratically coordinate the relations among many autonomous self-managing actors. It also resonates with Democratic Confederalism, Radical Ecological Democracy, Swaraj, Ujamaa (another self-reliant socialism of the Non-Aligned world), Comunalidad and Degrowth.
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Kočović De Santo, M. (2026). Ya Falastin: Networks of Resistance Against the Economy of Genocide. Capitalism Nature Socialism. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2025.2607978
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Connection to struggles today:
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Kočović De Santo, M., Karazarifi, L., & Kuźma, I. (2026). Radical Relationality from the Periphery: Water Movements and Liminal Commons in Southeast and Central Europe. International Journal of the Commons, 20(1), 333–346. https://doi.org/10.5334/ijc.1672
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Although the system ended with the dissolution of Yugoslavia, its institutions and spaces persist as territorial memory. Mesne zajednice still exist in law and are being reactivated by communities defending public and common goods. In the Sava Blocks of New Belgrade, neighbourhoods planned under self-management around schools, childcare, green spaces and the riverfront, residents have defended their riverside and green areas against privatisation through assemblies. In Topli Do on Stara Planina, villagers who defended their rivers against small hydropower plants revived their mesna zajednica and village cooperative. The privatisation of socially owned property after 1990 has also made samoupravljanje a reference point for workers' and commons struggles across the region.
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Kočović De Santo, M. et al. (2025). Participativne prakse u odbrani javnog dobra i stvaranju zajedničkog na području sela Topli Do, opština Pirot. FDU, Beograd.
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Key references:
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de Sousa Santos, B. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide.
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Kočović De Santo, M. (2024). Yugoslav self-management: The forgotten anti-capitalist seeds of degrowth. Cultura Económica, 42(108), 50–85. https://doi.org/10.46553/cecon.42.108.2024.p50-85
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Kočović De Santo, M. (2025). Yugoslav self-management: Forgotten seeds of post-growth democracy. Radical Ecological Democracy. https://radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/yugoslav-self-management-forgotten-seeds-of-post-growth-democracy/
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Kočović De Santo, M., Karazarifi, L., & Kuźma, I. (2026). Radical relationality from the periphery: Water movements and liminal commons in Southeast and Central Europe. International Journal of the Commons, 20(1), 333–346. https://doi.org/10.5334/ijc.1672

Latest revision as of 10:06, 29 September 2026

<- Go to the list of existing Contributions

Contribution type: New Concept

Concept: Self-management (Samoupravljanje)



Name of the contributor: Milica Kočović De Santo

E-mail of the contributor: mickocovic@gmail.com

Concept: Samoupravljanje (Cyrillic: самоуправљање) English: Self-management Language / region: Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin); Slovenian (samoupravljanje); Macedonian (самоуправување). Former Yugoslavia, Southeast Europe. Category: Worldview (also Praxis) Suggested location for the map and contemporary example: Sava Blocks (Blocks 44, 45, 70, 70a), New Belgrade, Serbia, Topli Do, Serbia (as new forms of liminal commons). Etymology: From samo- ("self") and upravljanje ("governing, managing", from upraviti, "to direct, to steer"). Literally: governing by ourselves, collectively, without an owner or a state standing above.

Short definition: Samoupravljanje (самоуправљање) Self-management was the system of economic and political democracy practised in socialist Yugoslavia (1950–1991), grounded in social ownership and connecting economic democracy (OOUR), territorial democracy (mesne zajednice) and social reproduction (SIZ) through encounter planning, beyond both market and state command. 

It grew out of the anti-fascist liberation struggle and from the conviction that abolishing private ownership would not by itself free people if control simply passed to a centralised state. Grounded in social (collective) ownership (društvena svojina), where the means of production belonged to the workers and society as a whole rather than to private owners or the state, samoupravljanje was both an ideology and a practice of commoning at the scale of an entire society.

Three institutions carried it into everyday life: - Basic Organisations of Associated Labour (OOUR) secured economic democracy: workers decided on production and on how the surplus they created would be shared between personal income, reinvestment and serving common and social needs. - Local sub-municipal units (communities) (mesne zajednice) secured territorial democracy and autonomy: residents decided together on housing, spatial planning, communal services, culture and the environment in their neighbourhoods and villages (workers could decide beyond the workplace context, towards the place of residence). - Self-management interest communities (SIZ) organised social reproduction: users and providers jointly governed education, healthcare, culture, childcare and social protection, financed from the surplus of associated labour as universal basic services. Actors of the economic sphere (OOUR), would finance the actors from the non-economic sphere (social reproduction sphere cultural, educational, health, communal institutions), to meet the higher quality of life. These spheres were brought into relation through recurring negotiation (relying on the instruments: social negotiation and bargaining) known as encounter planning (susretno planiranje), which connected bottom-up local needs with wider social priorities - top-down- without relying on either the market or state command. Mentioned institutional architecture enabled encounter planning by offering a meso (horizontal) level of institutions, which is essentially important to enable the radical democratic planning system as a whole. Relation to existing concepts, and why it deserves its own entry: Samoupravljanje resonates closely with Autogestión, but differs in scale and in its organising problem. It was not the self-management of individual cooperatives or recovered enterprises under a hostile state, but the organising principle of an entire society for four decades, written into the constitution and extended from production to territory and social reproduction. Its central question was not only how to democratise a workplace, but how to democratically coordinate the relations among many autonomous self-managing actors. It also resonates with Democratic Confederalism, Radical Ecological Democracy, Swaraj, Ujamaa (another self-reliant socialism of the Non-Aligned world), Comunalidad and Degrowth. Connection to struggles today: Although the system ended with the dissolution of Yugoslavia, its institutions and spaces persist as territorial memory. Mesne zajednice still exist in law and are being reactivated by communities defending public and common goods. In the Sava Blocks of New Belgrade, neighbourhoods planned under self-management around schools, childcare, green spaces and the riverfront, residents have defended their riverside and green areas against privatisation through assemblies. In Topli Do on Stara Planina, villagers who defended their rivers against small hydropower plants revived their mesna zajednica and village cooperative. The privatisation of socially owned property after 1990 has also made samoupravljanje a reference point for workers' and commons struggles across the region. Key references: Kočović De Santo, M. (2024). Yugoslav self-management: The forgotten anti-capitalist seeds of degrowth. Cultura Económica, 42(108), 50–85. https://doi.org/10.46553/cecon.42.108.2024.p50-85 Kočović De Santo, M. (2025). Yugoslav self-management: Forgotten seeds of post-growth democracy. Radical Ecological Democracy. https://radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/yugoslav-self-management-forgotten-seeds-of-post-growth-democracy/ Kočović De Santo, M., Karazarifi, L., & Kuźma, I. (2026). Radical relationality from the periphery: Water movements and liminal commons in Southeast and Central Europe. International Journal of the Commons, 20(1), 333–346. https://doi.org/10.5334/ijc.1672

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