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Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

Recent Sengupta Content

Zblogpost_icon Blog Posts

Self Management in Yugoslava: Time to take a re-look

By Niloy Sengupta at Apr 29, 2008


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Lately, I have been doing some research on Yugoslavia. My wife has authored a recent paper on the centrifugal and centripetal forces which led to the making and unmaking of Yugoslavia. She brought home a few books and articles on the subject, and I happened to browse through them and also look up a few articles on the web. Now Rumela and I mostly differ on our interpretations of political events--she thinks I'm too partisan in my beliefs --and while I respect her assessment I am fiercely proud of own ideas. I don't need to eke out a living researching politics and providing political commentary, so I can afford to take sides--esp. the side I think is right. Anyways, let's get straight to the point.


One of the less studied areas of communism is Tito's self management policies. Probably the existing communist parties in India owing to their Stalinist subservience, find no merit in studying Tito. But once you read the 1963 and 1974 constitutions of Yugoslavia, you would be amazed to see how Tito's policies came close to be truly socialist, giving real political power to the man on the street. Tito breathed and dreamed decentralization, de-partyization, de-bureaucratization and de-etatization. The country was much more federal than both USSR and USA, and unlike these two countries (and for that matter any democratic country in the world), the people had power to re-call their delegates to the "commune assembly" (read provincial assembly) and with the help of self interest mangement communities wielded enoumous power over the bureaucracy. In fact the people would decide the policy direction and the bureaucracy only implemented it. Now how better can it get?


I would reflect more on it in my later blog posts.


Here are some suggested readings:

(1) Leonardson, Gene S and Mir?ev, Dimitar (1979), A Structure for Participatory Democracy in the Local Community: The Yugoslav Constitution of 1974, Comparative Politics, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Jan., 1979), pp. 189-203.

(2) Tito, Josip B. (1950), Workers Manage Factories in Yugoslavia, Marxists Internet Archive at http://www.marxists.org/archive/tito/1950/06/26.htm

(3) Dunn, W.N. (1975), Communal Federalism: Dialectics of Decentralization in Socialist Yugoslavia, Publius, Vol. 5, No. 2

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