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Splendour, Misery, and Possibilities

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Published Jul 2016
ISBN: 9789004306943

An X-Ray of Socialist Yugoslavia

Darko Suvin, McGill University. With a Foreword by Fredric Jameson

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; that 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.

Biographical note

Darko Suvin, Ph.D. (1970) Zagreb University, is Professor Emeritus of McGill University. He has published 21 books on Literature, Dramaturgy, Culture, and Political Epistemology; also poetry. Major publications: Metamorphoses of Science Fiction; To Brecht and Beyond; Defined by a Hollow.

Readership

All those interested in SFR Yugoslavia, its economics and politics, planning and ideology, rise and fall, also in self-management, Marxism, as well as socialist potentialities, achievements, and failures.

Table of contents

List of Tables and Figures
Acknowledgements
Preface: Pro Doma SuaPART 1: FUNDAMENTS: FREEDOM AND ACCUMULATION

1: Radical Emancipation and Yugoslavia: On the Founding Singularities of SFRY
2: Accumulation and Its Discontents

PART 2: CLASS INTERESTS AND POLITICS AS SFRY DOMINANTS

3: On Class Relationships in Yugoslavia
4: On a Hidden Ruling Class and Central Conflict
5: What Has Been and What Could Have Been
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)
7: The Communist Party of Yugoslavia

PART 3: SELF-GOVERNMENT VS. ALIENATION: A TRACTATE ON YUGOSLAV ECONOMICS AND POLITICS

Part 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
9: Anatomy: Micro-Political Economics, Or the View from the Workers
10: Physiology: The Interests and Stakes behind the Macro-Events

Part 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
12: In Production: Rise and Fall of Self-management
13: In Civic Life: Dis/Alienation and Oligarchy Monolithism
14: Conclusion: On Failures and Potentialities

APPENDICES
Appendix 1: Bureaucracy: A Term and Concept in the Socialist Discourse about State Power (Upstream of Yugoslavia)
Appendix 2: The Discourse about Bureaucracy and State Power in Post-Revolutionary Yugoslavia 1945–72

References