Suvin’s ‘X-Ray’ of Socialist Yugoslavia offers an indispensable overview of a unique and often overlooked twentieth-century socialism. It shows that the plebeian surge of revolutionary self-determination was halted in SFR Yugoslavia by 1965; hat between 1965– 72 there was a confused and hidden but still open-ended clash; and that by 1972 the oligarchy in power was closed and static, leading to failure. The underlying reasons of this failure are analysed in a melding of semiotics and political history, which points beyond Yugoslavia – including its achievements and degeneration – to show how political and economic democracy fail when pursued in isolation. The emphasis on socialist Yugoslavia is at various points embedded into a wider historical and theoretical frame, including Left debates about the party, sociological debates about classes, and Marx’s great foray against a religious State doctrine in The Jewish Question.
Author(s): Darko Suvin
Series: Historical Materialism Book Series
Publisher: Brill
Year: 2016
Language: English
Commentary: With a Foreword by Fredric Jameson
Pages: 451
City: Leiden, Boston
Tags: Yugoslavia, politics, history, Socialism, Communism, Tito, Party, society
Contents
List of Figures and Tables xiii
Acknowledgements and Thanks xvi
Foreword to Darko Suvin, Splendour, Misery, and Potentialities: An
X-ray of Socialist Yugoslavia xix
Fredric Jameson
Introduction: Pro Domo Sua 1
part 1
Fundaments: Freedom and Accumulation
1 Radical Emancipation and Yugoslavia: On the Founding Singularities
of sfry 23
2 Accumulation and Its Discontents 36
part 2
Class Interests and Politics as sfry Dominants
3 On Class Relationships in Yugoslavia 43
4 On a Hidden Ruling Class and Central Conflict 72
5 What Has Been and What Could Have Been 81
6 15 Theses about Communism and Yugoslavia, or the Two-Headed
Janus of Emancipation through the State (Metamorphoses and
Anamorphoses of ‘On the Jewish Question’ by Marx) 105
7 The Communist Party of Yugoslavia 128
part 3
Self-Government vs. Alienation: A Tractate on Yugoslav
Economics and Politics
section 3.1
On Self-management in s.f.r. Yugoslavia: A Critical Stock-Taking
(1945–72)
8 Anatomy: Macro-Political Economics, or the View from Above 162
9 Anatomy: Micro-Political Economics, or the View from the
Workers 180
10 Physiology: The Interests and Stakes behind the Macro-Events 206
section 3.2
On the Horizon of Disalienation in s.f.r. Yugoslavia:
Self-Government and Plebeian Democracy
11 On the Politics of Disalienation, Inside and Outside Economic
Production 247
12 In Production: Rise and Fall of Self-Management 253
13 In Civic Life: Dis/Alienation and Oligarchy Monolithism 264
14 Conclusion: On Failures and Potentialities 279
appendices
The Socialist/Communist Discourse about Bureaucracy
Appendix 1: Bureaucracy: A Term and Concept in the Socialist
Discourse about State Power (Upstream of Yugoslavia) 323
Appendix 2: The Discourse about Bureaucracy and State Power in
Post-Revolutionary Yugoslavia 1945–72 345
References 388
Index of Proper Names of Historical Persons 421
