Class, Conflict, and Power between Hegemony and Critical Knowledge: A Journey through the Debates in Socialist Yugoslavia

This article opens by situating the Yugoslav academic perspectives on class and politics within the framework of recent studies dealing with class in post-socialist Europe. It then presents the ways in which the first Yugoslav dissidents understood the “new class” (the embourgeoisement of the party elite), followed by a review of a large number of studies on the disintegration of workers’ self-management project, students’ protests, and workers’ strikes. The diverse scope of research conducted between the 1960s and 1980s provided a corrective to the League of Communists’ hegemonic perceptions of the growing social inequalities, the causes of the economic crisis, and the stalemates of political decision-making, showing the deepening, while “invisible,” sense of powerlessness among workers and the opaqueness of the polycentric, increasingly fragmenting and clashing centers of political power. In the conclusions, changes in the perceptions of class in post-Yugoslav states are discussed.