Milovan Djilas Nova Klasa.pdf 2021 Link

The book Nova Klasa: Analiza Komunističkog Sistema (The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System) was written in 1955, after Djilas had been expelled from the party and imprisoned. It was published in English in 1957 by Frederick A. Praeger, but the original Serbo-Croatian manuscript was smuggled out of Yugoslavia.

Djilas begins by accepting the Marxist premise that history is a series of class struggles. However, he decisively breaks from Lenin and Stalin by arguing that a party-led revolution cannot abolish class per se . “The idea of a classless society,” writes Djilas (1957, p. 37), “has proved to be an illusion. The communists have not succeeded in creating a society without classes, but only in creating a new class of bureaucratic exploiters.” Milovan Djilas Nova Klasa.pdf

Djilas argued that in every communist revolution, the proletariat does not liberate itself. Instead, a specific group—the Communist Party—organizes the revolution. After the revolution succeeds, this party does not dissolve the state (as Marx predicted). Instead, they become the state. The book Nova Klasa: Analiza Komunističkog Sistema (The