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The paper explores experiences of temporary labor migration that entailed Yugoslav export of know-how (highly skilled knowledge and expertise) between 1980 and 1991, a result of industrial collaboration between Mining and Smelting Combine Bor, a state-owned copper-processing 'giant' in former Yugoslavia, and the biggest copper company in Iran, National Iranian Copper Industries Company. Based on interviews with individuals engaged in the Yugoslav project, supplemented by analysis of documents and historic newspapers from that period, the paper analyzes everyday practices of managerial bureaucratic improvisations and improvisations at work. The article shows how such improvisations helped overcome excessive and rigid Yugoslav socialist bureaucracy and made Yugoslav entrepreneurial capitalist ventures possible. Moreover, it argues that the export of know-how was constitutive of silent acceptances of reproduction of capitalist relations, which helped consolidate the process of liberalization of the socialist market in the late 1980s. We argue that such temporary labor migration and the often improvised work carried out by the Yugoslav workers cannot be seen as a resistance or alternative to the Western/Northern hegemonies. Rather, we argue that such practices were facilitators of the capitalist ventures at semi-peripheries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Goli Otok (Barren Island) was a site of the master political prison and forced labor camp of the socialist Yugoslavia between 1949 and 1956. The imprisoned, accused of siding with Stalin in the Tito-Stalin political rift, were sent to undergo 'self-managed re-education' through 'socially beneficial labor' in the island's limestone quarries. The inmates were forced to build their own prison out of that very limestone - the first known human dwellings on the previously uninhabited island. They were also often forced to break, crumble and to carry massive stone loads from one place to another and back, with no constructive or productive purpose. However, the labor camp authorities also operated a lucrative business, oriented towards country-wide distribution, and sometimes towards international export of the island's limestone. The quarried stone of the island therefore travelled more widely than its excavators, whose movements were limited to their island-prison. Set at the intersection of labor history and environmental history and drawing on the archival materials of the Yugoslav State Security Service, oral history interviews with the former prisoners, and their published and unpublished written memoirs, this paper examines the interrelations of the prison-island, its stone material, and the prisoners' laboring bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]