Tito late era — Associated Labour Law, peak self-management model

Doctrine — stated goals and content

The final years of Tito's 35-year rule, coinciding with the 1976 Associated Labour Law codifying the most elaborate self-management architecture any socialist state attempted. School: Kardeljist market-socialist self-management (samoupravljanje) — workers' councils in BOALs (Basic Organisations of Associated Labour), a quasi-market allocation, decentralised investment decisions, and non-aligned foreign policy combining trade with West, East, and Non-Aligned Movement. Left-right axis: far-left in formal terms (one-party communist) but with distinctive market-socialist mechanisms differentiating it sharply from Soviet-bloc planning; within the Yugoslav system the pivotal axis was centre-versus- republics. Core policy content: (i) 1974 Constitution (the longest in the world at the time) and 1976 Associated Labour Law (Zakon o udruženom radu) fragmenting enterprises into BOALs, 900+ pages of self-management procedural rules; (ii) 1977 consumer-price and wage stabilisation attempt; (iii) continued Western borrowing — external debt grew from $4bn (1973) to $14bn (1979); (iv) Non-Aligned Movement 6th Summit in Havana 1979 — Tito's final major foreign-policy role; (v) Kardelj's death February 1979 and Tito's death 4 May 1980 removed both architect and unifying authority within 15 months. Popularity signals (one-party): SKJ ~2M members (one in 10 adults); single-slate elections typical; protest incidence very low in this period outside the 1971 Croatian Spring aftermath; Tito's funeral drew 128 foreign delegations — the high-water mark of Yugoslav international standing. Coherence: high in form but low in function — the 1974-76 constitutional architecture was ideologically the purest self-management model ever implemented, but economically it was already generating rising unemployment, hyperinflationary pressure, and inter-republican fiscal conflict by the late 1970s, all of which compounded after Tito's death.