Milovan Djilas

Milovan Đilas or Djilas (Serbian Cyrillic: Милован Ђилас) (4 June 1911 - 20 April 1995) was a Montenegrin Serb Communist politician, theorist and author in Yugoslavia. He was a key figure in the Partisan movement during the World War II as well as in the post war government, and became one of the best known and most determined critics of the system, domestically and internationally.

Revolutionary

Born in Podbišće village near Kolašin in Kingdom of Montenegro, he joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia as a Belgrade University student in 1932. He was a political prisoner from 1933 to 1936. In 1938 he was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and became a member of its Politburo in 1940.

In April 1941, as Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and their allies defeated the Royal Yugoslav army and dismembered the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Đilas helped Tito found the Partisan resistance, and was a resistance commander during the war. Following Germany's attack on the Soviet Union on June 22 (Operation Barbarossa), the Communist Party of Yugoslavia's (KPJ) Central Committee decided that conditions had been created for armed struggle and on July 4 passed the resolution to begin the uprising.

Đilas was sent to Montenegro to organise and raise the struggle against the Italian occupying force, which on July 12, 1941 proclaimed the fascist puppet entity: "Independent State of Montenegro" run by figurehead Sekule Drljević, but in actuality closely controlled by Italian authority led by Mussolini's confidant Alessandro Birolli. The July 13th uprising which Đilas had an important role in was a national one, spaning ideological lines, and large parts of Montenegro were quickly liberated. Đilas remained in Montenegro until November, when he left for the liberated town of Užice in Serbia, where he took up work on the paper Borba, the Party's main propaganda organ. Following the withdrawal of the Supreme Commander Tito and other Party leaders to Bosnia, Đilas stayed in Nova Varoš in the Sandžak (on the border between Serbia and Montenegro); from there he retreated with the units under his command in the middle of winter and in difficult conditions to join the Supreme Staff. There were no serious divisions or conflicts between communists and non-communists among the insurgents.

It was only in March of next year that he went back again to Montenegro, where in the meantime a civil war between Partisans and Chetniks had broken out. Momčilo Cemović, who has dealt mostly with this period of Đilas' war activities, believed that the CPY Central Committee and the Supreme Staff had sent Đilas to ascertain the actual state of affairs and to dismiss the communist leaders responsible. This, in fact, he did.

File:LekaTitoDjido.jpg

Ranković, Tito and Đilas

In 1944 he was sent to the Soviet Union to meet with Joseph Stalin.

He fought among the Partisans to liberate Belgrade from the Wehrmacht. With the establishment of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Đilas became Vice-president in Tito's government. It is generally agreed that Đilas was not directly or indirectly involved in the Bleiburg massacre.

Đilas was sent to Moscow to meet Stalin again in 1948 to try and bridge the gap between Moscow and Belgrade. He became one of the leading critics of attempts by Stalin to bring Yugoslavia under greater control from Moscow. Later that year, Yugoslavia broke with the Soviet Union and left the Cominform, ushering in the Informbiro period.

Initially the Yugoslav communists, despite the break with Stalin, remained as hard line as before but soon began to pursue a policy of independent socialism that experimented with self-management of workers in state-run enterprises. Đilas was very much part of that, but he began to take things further. Having responsibility for propaganda, he had a platform for new ideas and he launched a new journal, Nova Misao ("New Thought"), in which he published a series of articles that were increasingly freethinking.

Dissident

He was widely regarded as Tito's eventual successor, and was about to become President of Yugoslavia in 1954. However, from October 1953 to January 1954 he wrote 19 articles for the Borba journal, where he demanded more democracy in the party and in the country. Tito and the other leading Yugoslav communists saw his arguments as a threat for their positions, and in January 1954 Đilas was expelled from the government and stripped of all party positions for his criticism. He resigned from the Communist Party soon afterwards. In December 1954 he gave an interview to the New York Times in which he said that Yugoslavia was now ruled by "reactionaries". For this he was brought to trial and convicted.

In 1955 Đilas published The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, in which he argued that communism in Eastern Europe was not egalitarian, and that it was establishing a new class of privileged party bureaucracy - who enjoyed material benefits from their positions. In 1956, Đilas was arrested for his writings and for his support of the Hungarian Revolution and sentenced to nine years in prison. While jailed, Đilas remarkably translated John Milton's Paradise Lost into Serbo-Croatian.

In 1958 he also wrote a memoir entitled Land Without Justice and was imprisoned again in April 1962 for publishing Conversations with Stalin. During his previous internment 1961 Đilas also completed a massive and scholarly biography of the great Montenegrin prince-poet-priest Njegos.

Đilas was redeemed in the eyes of the West despite his communist leanings, and remained a dissident - almost hero in the eyes of many western powers. He was also opposed to the breakup of Yugoslavia and the descent into nationalist conflict in the 1990s.

Despite his decades of dissident activity he continued to think of himself as a communist and continued to believe in communism. His ideas about how Socialist Yugoslavia should be organised was the root of his split with Tito.

Bibliography

• Djilas, Milovan, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, 1957
• Djilas, Milovan, Land without Justice, 1958
• Djilas, Milovan, Conversations with Stalin, 1962
• Djilas, Milovan, Montenegro, 1963
• Djilas, Milovan, The Leper and Other Stories, 1964
• Djilas, Milovan, Njegoš: Poet-Prince-Bishop, 1966
• Djilas, Milovan, The Unperfect Society: Beyond the New Class, 1969
• Djilas, Milovan, Lost Battles, 1970
• Djilas, Milovan, The Stone and the Violets, 1970
• Djilas, Milovan, Wartime, 1977
• Djilas, Milovan, Memoir of a Revolutionary
• Djilas, Milovan, Of Prisons and Ideas
• Djilas, Milovan, Parts of a Lifetime
• Djilas, Milovan, Rise and Fall
• Djilas, Milovan, Tito: The Story from Inside

Translations

• Milton, John, Paradise Lost (from the original English to Serbo-Croatian), 1969

Further reading

• Zinaic, Rade. "Crucified Wilderness: The Tension Between Tradition and Modernity in the Djilasian Void." East Central Europe. 29. 2002. 1-2, 27-44.

See also

• Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
• Partisans

Key Partisans

• Josip Broz Tito
• Aleksandar Ranković
• Moše Pijade

Literary Subjects

• Communism
• John Milton
• Petar II Petrović-Njegoš
• Joseph Stalin
• Stalinism

External links

• Remembering Milovan Djilas by David Pryce-Jones
• Nije bio ideološki pisac by Matija Bećković, NIN, March 30, 2006

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

The new class is a term to describe the privileged ruling class of bureaucrats and Communist party functionaries which typically arises in a Stalinist communist state. Generally, the group known in the Soviet Union as the Nomenklatura conforms to the theory of the new class. Earlier the term was applied to other emerging strata of the society. Trotskyists argue that the bureaucratic elite is not technically a class (since they do not directly own productive property), but a caste. They sometimes refer to Stalinist states ruled by such a caste as deformed or degenerated workers states.

Djilas' New Class theory has also been used extensively by classical liberal and conservative commenters within the West, in their criticism of the technocratic socialist welfare state.

Technocracy

Prior to 1917 theories of a new stratum of managers, engineers and other technocrats were highly popular within the broad Socialist movement. In particular, managers, engineers and other technocrats used the idea that they were an "intellectual proletariat" to argue that they could be a motive force for revolution separate to the mass of wage earning labourers. At the time, as these technocrats did not work for wages, their claim lies outside of standard Marxist understandings of the proletariat.

In his 1948 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, however, George Orwell would note that "The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians."

This technocratic meaning has continued to be associated with the term "new class" throughout the twentieth century.

See also: Proletarianisation, Public Choice Theory.

Early theories

Theories describing the elite in the Soviet Union as a new class initially emerged in 1917. These theories were pursued most strongly by anarchist theorists and occasionally by syndicalists, left communists and council communists. This strand of analysis has remained one of the major positions within anarchism on the role of the elite in the Soviet-style societies.

see also: Solidarity (UK)

Djilas' New Class

A theory of the new class was developed by Milovan Djilas, who participated with Tito in the Yugoslavian Revolution, but was later purged by him as Djilas began to advocate democratic and egalitarian ideals (which he believed were more in line with the way socialism and communism should look like). The theory of the new class is in contradiction to the claims of certain ruling communists, such as Stalin, who argued that their revolutions and/or social reforms had resulted in the extinction of any ruling class as such. It was Djilas' observation as a member of a communist government that party members stepped into the role of ruling class - a problem which he believed should be corrected through revolution. Djilas' completed his primary work on his new class theory in the mid 1950s.

Djilas claimed that the new class' specific relationship to the means of production was one of collective political control, and that the new class' property form was political control. Thus for Djilas the new class not only seeks expanded material reproduction to politically justify its existence to the working class, but it also seeks expanded reproduction of political control as a form of property in itself. This can be compared to the capitalist who seeks expanded value through increased sharemarket values, even though the sharemarket itself does not necessarily reflect an increase in the value of commodities produced. Djilas uses this argument about property forms to indicate why the new class sought parades, marches and spectacles despite this activity lowering the levels of material productivity.

Djilas proposed that the new class only slowly came to self-consciousness of itself as a class. On arriving at a full self-consciousness the initial project undertaken would be massive industrialisation in order to cement the external security of the new class' rule against foreign or alternative ruling classes. In Djilas' schema this approximated the 1930s and 1940s in the Soviet Union. As the new class suborns all other interests to its own security during this period, it freely executes and purges its own members in order to achieve its major goal of security as a ruling class.

After security has been achieved, the new class pursues a policy of moderation towards its own members, effectively granting material rewards and freedom of thought and action within the new class — so long as this freedom is not used to undermine the rule of the new class. Djilas identified this period as the period of Khrushchev's government in the Soviet Union. Due to the emergence of conflicts of policy within the new class, the potential for palace coups, or populist revolutions is possible (as experienced in Poland and Hungary respectively).

Finally Djilas predicted a period of economic decline, as the political future of the new class was consolidated around a staid programme of corruption and self-interest at the expense of other social classes. This can be interpreted as a prediction of the Brezhnev era stagnation by Djilas.

While Djilas claimed that the new class was a social class with a distinct relationship to the means of production, he did not claim that this new class was associated with a self-sustaining mode of production. This claim, within Marxist theory, argues that the Soviet-style societies must eventually either collapse backwards towards capitalism, or experience a social revolution towards real socialism. This can be seen as a prediction of the downfall of the Soviet Union.

Robert Kaplan's 1993 book Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through history also contains a discussion with Djilas, who used his model to anticipate many of the events that subsequently came to pass in the former Yugoslavia.

Similarity to other analyses

Of course, the specific notions of Djilas are his own development, however the idea that bureaucrats in a typical Marxist-Leninist style state become a new class is not his original idea. Bakunin had made this point in his IWMA debates with Marx in the mid to late 19th century. This idea was repeated after the Russian revolution by anarchists like Kropotkin and Makhno, as well as some communists. It was later repeated by a leader of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky. Further on, Mao Zedong also had his own version of this idea. Of course, this wide range of people over the decades had different perspectives on the matter, but there was also a degree of core agreement on this idea.

From the other side of the fence, the work of Friedrich Hayek also anticipated many of Djilas' New Class criticisms, without placing them in a Marxist context. See esp. The Road to Serfdom. American paleoconservatives adapted New Class analysis in their theory of the managerial state.

John Kenneth Galbraith's "New Class"

Canadian-American liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith also advocated a technocratic "New Class." Galbreath believed that modern society had become too complex and required guidance by a technocratic, well educated elite.

See also

• bureaucratic collectivism
• coordinatorism
• degenerated workers state
• deformed workers state.
• partmaximum
• public choice theory
• state socialism
• state capitalism
• the road to serfdom

Further reading

• Đilas, Milovan (1983, 1957). The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, paperback, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 0-15-665489-X. 
• Đilas, Milovan (1969). The Unperfect Society: Beyond the New Class, trans. Dorian Cooke, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. ISBN 0-15-693125-7. 
• Đilas, Milovan (1998). Fall of the New Class: A History of Communism's Self-Destruction, hardcover, ???: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-679-43325-2. . See also the NY Times Books feature with Chapter One online, and also the May 10, 1998 NY Times book review.
• Trotsky, Leon (1991, 1937). The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going?, paperback, Detroit: Labor Publications. ISBN 0-929087-48-8.  Leon Trotsky's famous work considers the alleged betrayal and corruption of the Russian Revolution by Stalin and the new bureaucratic ruling caste.
• Sawer, Marian (ed.) (1978). Socialism and the New Class: Towards the Analysis of Structural Inequality Within Socialist Societies. Bedford Park, Australia: Australasian Political Studies Association. ISBN 0-7258-0074-7. 
• Hayek, F. A. (1994, 1944). The Road to Serfdom, paperback, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-32061-8. 
• Kaplan, Robert D. (1993). Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-08701-2. 

Technocratic new classes

• A meta-list of relevant publications. Related to Barbrook, Richard (2006). The Class of the New, paperback, London: OpenMute. 0-9550664-7-6. 
• Orwell, George (1984, 1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four, paperback, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 0-15-166038-7. 
• Gouldner, Alvin Ward (1979). The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class: A Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and an Historical Perspective on the Role of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era. New York: Seabury Press. ISBN 0-8164-9358-8. 
• Kellner, Hansfried and and Frank W. Heuberger (eds.) (1992). Hidden Technocrats: The New Class and New Capitalism. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0-88738-443-9. 
• Lasch, Christopher (1995). The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-03699-5. 
• Budrys, Grace (1997). When Doctors Join Unions. Ithaca: ILR Press/Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-8354-9. 

Articles

• Registan (Oct 1/06) - The "New Class": The Rise and Fall of NGOs in Central Asia. Quotes extensively from a presentation by Laurence Jarvik to the Central Eurasian Studies Society, held the University of Michigan. Founding editor Nathan Hamm was a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan.
• Mutualist.org - Liberalism & Social Control: The New Class' Will to Power. Most New Class criticism comes explicitly from either the Left or the Right. Rarely does one seem to come from both at once.
• The New Criterion (Oct 1999) - Remembering Milovan Djilas
• The New York Review of Books (Dec. 7/67) - Same Old New Class. A reply by Christopher Lasch

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