Moving the focus away from the epicenters of the antibureaucratic revolution, this article looks at the echoes of this movement in the provincial, multinational, working-class community of Priboj, Serbia. A microstudy of Fabrika automobila Priboj, the town’s largest employer, and its surrounding community through records of self-management and party meetings and through the local press reveals some of the less-researched aspects of the social mobilizations in Serbia in the late 1980s. Without downplaying the spread of national grievances, this study highlights parallel phenomena taking place on the ground, such as labor solidarity, growing socioeconomic grievances, and the participation of non-Serb (in this case, Muslim) populations. The argument is that the presence of a large factory with a multinational workforce in the center of the municipality as the organizational core of the mobilizations and their focus on local problems helped Priboj’s antibureaucratic bevolution resemble the proletarian, pro-Yugoslav image that the leadership of the Serbian party often hoped to project.
