minister in Tito’s communist government at the time Tito was managing so
successfully to develop Yugoslavia’s independent positionvis-a`-visMoscow.
However, Djilas represented just too well the spirit of autonomy inside the
liberal communism of Tito’s Yugoslavia, and began to be a serious critic of
communist governments—and was imprisoned for most of the period 1956–
- His most important work by far is his book, published in 1953,The New
Class. Here he argues that the sort ofBolshevikrevolution carried out in the
name of the people by an authoritarian Leninist party, either that of Russia in
1917, or like the communist governments set up by the Soviet Union in
Eastern Europe after the Second World War, had a fatal flaw. Instead of
producing a classless society, the ultimate goal of communism, by abolishing
private property, they had instead developed anew classsystem, every bit as
exploitative and undemocratic as those of the past. The new class consisted of
the party officials, the managers of the nationalized industries, and those
bureaucrats whom the rapidly growing state planning and administrative
machinery had come to require. These people, and especially the ones near
the top of the tree, were the only ones in the communist states to have any
power. They used the repressive forces of the state, especially the secret police,
to ensure total obedience, and their control over education and media to secure
much more acquiescence to their version of a ruling ideology than had any
previous state. At the same time they enjoyed a standard of living vastly higher
than ordinary members of society, and were able to pass on this privilege to
their children. Even though they could not legally own much more than any
ordinary citizen, access to high quality education and easy entrance to prestige
jobs guaranteed their children the same status that they possessed themselves,
and denied it to others. Most of his analysis was entirely correct, and would be
accepted by modern Western analysts. It was the public perception of this that
fuelled much of the revolutionary fervour which brought down the East
European communist societies in 1989–91. Even then, for example in East
Germany, the public was shocked when the full extent of privilege enjoyed by
the party rulers became clear.
Djilas’ particular prescriptions for solving the problems, which involve a
great extension of participation anddirect democracy, which had been more
extensively practised in Yugoslavia then elsewhere may, however, be less easily
accepted. Orthodox Soviet communists, and some Western Marxists, have
refused to accept that these privileges, even if true, constitute a class, on the
largely definitional grounds that only outright ownership of the means of
production make a society class-based. It is arguable that there is a dangerous
loss of theoretical precision in treating any privileged stratum as a class. Djilas
did not give up being a Marxist, and should not be read as saying that a classless
communist society is impossible, nor, perhaps, even denying its ultimate
inevitability. Rather he was doing no more than extending with hindsight
Djilas