Milovan Djilas Nova Klasa.pdf Access
The New Class: Milovan Djilas's Definitive Critique of Communist Bureaucracy
His realization was apocalyptic: The revolution had not created a classless society. It had merely replaced the old capitalist exploiters with a new, more voracious political elite. Milovan Djilas Nova Klasa.pdf
Characteristics of the New Class
- Empirical narrowness: Critics (e.g., Lévesque, 1975) argue that Djilas over-generalized from Yugoslavia’s decentralized model to all communist states. China’s market communism, for instance, has produced a hybrid class of party-business elites that does not fully match his description.
- Economic determinism persist: Though Djilas breaks from Marx, he still leans heavily on economic base analysis, underplaying nationalism, ethnicity, and religion as independent sources of stratification.
- Solution deficit: The book is brilliant at diagnosis but impoverished in therapy. Djilas’s proposed solution—democratic socialism—is vague, and he offers no transitional mechanism from new class rule to workers’ self-management.
After World War II, Djilas rose to the pinnacle of power as Vice President of Yugoslavia. He was the heir apparent to Tito. Yet, unlike the sclerotic bureaucrats of the Eastern Bloc, Djilas began asking dangerous questions. He traveled to the Soviet Union and saw the privileged lives of the nomenklatura. He returned to Yugoslavia and looked at his own party officials. The New Class: Milovan Djilas's Definitive Critique of
Đilas argued that instead of creating a "classless society," Communist revolutions merely replaced the old ruling class with a new class of political bureaucrats Administrative Monopoly Empirical narrowness: Critics (e
Key points of his analysis include:
2. University Course Load
Political science courses on "Totalitarianism," "Comparative Politics," and "The History of Communism" frequently assign excerpts. Searching for the PDF allows students to bypass expensive anthologies that often only reprint two chapters.