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Historical Materialism #117
Splendour, Misery, and Possibilities: An X-Ray of Socialist Yugoslavia
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was created in a surge of revolutionary self-determination that rejected both the free-market-Capitalism of Europe, and the bureaucratic-Socialism of the Soviet Union. Yet this early experimentation and dynamism ultimately gave way to the same sclerotic state-system its creators were trying to avoid. In this engaging treatise, Suvin seeks out the source of this failure.
428 pages, Paperback
Published February 20, 2018
3 people are currently reading
274 people want to read
About the author
Darko Suvin
54 books19 followersDarko Ronald Suvin (born Darko Šlesinger) is a Canadian academic, writer and critic who became a professor at McGill University in Montreal. He was born in Zagreb, which at the time was in Kingdom of Yugoslavia, now the capital of Croatia. After teaching at the Department for Comparative Literature at the Zagreb University, and writing his first books and poems in his native language (i.e., in the standardized Croatian variety of Serbo-Croatian), he left Yugoslavia in 1967, and started teaching at McGill University in 1968.
He is best known for several major works of criticism and literary history devoted to science fiction. He was editor of Science-Fiction Studies from 1973 to 1980. Since his retirement from McGill in 1999, he has lived in Lucca, Italy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences).
In 2009, he received Croatian SFera Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction. He is also a member of the Croatian Writers Society (HDP)
In 2016, Suvin published a series of memoirs in the Croatian cultural journal Gordogan on his youth as a member of the Young Communist League of Yugoslavia during the Nazi occupation of Croatia and Yugoslavia and the first years of Josip Tito's Yugoslavia.
His 2016 book Splendour, Misery, and Potentialities: An X-ray of Socialist Yugoslavia (published in translation as Samo jednom se ljubi: radiografija SFR Jugoslavije in Belgrade in 2014, in two printings), an attempt at a dialectical history of socialist Yugoslavia, is widely quoted in most recent books and articles in the emerging field of "post-Yugoslav studies"
He is best known for several major works of criticism and literary history devoted to science fiction. He was editor of Science-Fiction Studies from 1973 to 1980. Since his retirement from McGill in 1999, he has lived in Lucca, Italy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences).
In 2009, he received Croatian SFera Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction. He is also a member of the Croatian Writers Society (HDP)
In 2016, Suvin published a series of memoirs in the Croatian cultural journal Gordogan on his youth as a member of the Young Communist League of Yugoslavia during the Nazi occupation of Croatia and Yugoslavia and the first years of Josip Tito's Yugoslavia.
His 2016 book Splendour, Misery, and Potentialities: An X-ray of Socialist Yugoslavia (published in translation as Samo jednom se ljubi: radiografija SFR Jugoslavije in Belgrade in 2014, in two printings), an attempt at a dialectical history of socialist Yugoslavia, is widely quoted in most recent books and articles in the emerging field of "post-Yugoslav studies"
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 16, 2022
Darko Suvin has an idiosyncratic style that is both strength and weakness. A strength, because he brings decades of experience and deep philosophical understandings to his examination of Yugoslavia's unique system of workers' self-management. A weakness because the book is not as focused as it should be with a non-linear style in which some of the most important material is left for a second appendix rather than being integrated with the main text.
Idiosyncrasies aside, this is a valuable book well worth reading for any student of Yugoslavia. The author examines the question of why the system of workers' self-management ultimately collapsed from a domestic perspective. There are no more than a handful of passing mentions of external factors, such as the country's increasing integration into the world capitalist system and mounting external debt, nor the austerity the International Monetary Fund would ultimately impose on the country. This is an omission that matters because these external factors are a significant portion of this story.
Nonetheless, the author's mastery of internal affairs, how what he terms a "class" arose within the top layers of the communist party, integrated with the top managerial layers, that came to see its interests as more inequality and more authoritarianism. This process was greatly accelerated by the fragmentation of party and economy into a collection of republic fiefdoms, helping unravel the economy as each republic leadership created its own separate ruling structure, consolidating the rule of these local leaders and perpetrating inequalities among the republics. And the dichotomy of workers' self-management with an original goal of allowing everybody to take part in decision-making on the one hand, and a party that consistently maintained a monopoly of political power on the other hand, could never be solved and couldn't be solved.
Splendour, Misery, and Possibilities argues persuasively that what Yugoslavia needed was a full turn to self-management as part of a full democratization of politics and economics, and skillfully explicates the thinking of leading party officials and prominent philosophers, including critical voices advocating a dismantling of political monopoly, in presenting a learned and readable history of Yugoslav self-management up to the early 1970s.
Some will, as I do, disagree with the author's strong insistence that the elites who benefited from political monopoly and the usurpation of managerial decision-making constitute a class. The assessment of the elites as a separate, exploiting class originally arose with Milovan Djilas in the 1950s, but the historian Isaac Deutscher thoroughly dismantled that argument. To be fair, Darko Suvin's argument for calling the elites a class is much more sophisticated than Djilas', and he does make his case well. Whether "class" or "strata" is your preference, this in no way detracts from the very high level of sophistication and analysis that pervades the book.
If you are interested in understanding how Yugoslavia first flourished but ultimately collapsed, you will want to read this book.
Idiosyncrasies aside, this is a valuable book well worth reading for any student of Yugoslavia. The author examines the question of why the system of workers' self-management ultimately collapsed from a domestic perspective. There are no more than a handful of passing mentions of external factors, such as the country's increasing integration into the world capitalist system and mounting external debt, nor the austerity the International Monetary Fund would ultimately impose on the country. This is an omission that matters because these external factors are a significant portion of this story.
Nonetheless, the author's mastery of internal affairs, how what he terms a "class" arose within the top layers of the communist party, integrated with the top managerial layers, that came to see its interests as more inequality and more authoritarianism. This process was greatly accelerated by the fragmentation of party and economy into a collection of republic fiefdoms, helping unravel the economy as each republic leadership created its own separate ruling structure, consolidating the rule of these local leaders and perpetrating inequalities among the republics. And the dichotomy of workers' self-management with an original goal of allowing everybody to take part in decision-making on the one hand, and a party that consistently maintained a monopoly of political power on the other hand, could never be solved and couldn't be solved.
Splendour, Misery, and Possibilities argues persuasively that what Yugoslavia needed was a full turn to self-management as part of a full democratization of politics and economics, and skillfully explicates the thinking of leading party officials and prominent philosophers, including critical voices advocating a dismantling of political monopoly, in presenting a learned and readable history of Yugoslav self-management up to the early 1970s.
Some will, as I do, disagree with the author's strong insistence that the elites who benefited from political monopoly and the usurpation of managerial decision-making constitute a class. The assessment of the elites as a separate, exploiting class originally arose with Milovan Djilas in the 1950s, but the historian Isaac Deutscher thoroughly dismantled that argument. To be fair, Darko Suvin's argument for calling the elites a class is much more sophisticated than Djilas', and he does make his case well. Whether "class" or "strata" is your preference, this in no way detracts from the very high level of sophistication and analysis that pervades the book.
If you are interested in understanding how Yugoslavia first flourished but ultimately collapsed, you will want to read this book.
October 19, 2023
Utopian science in the truest sense. Darko Suvin is a romantic, and he is desperately grasping at the opportunity, an opportunity for a radically different world. Between the barrage of quotes, the onslaught of cultural references and french loan words, there huddles a small face. It says 'I want to go back'. I suppose we all would. Nothing more human than a good counterfactual. It's just that in this case the counterfactual hides behind infinite layers of enthusiastic delusion, constant name calling, simplistic black and white views, idealist pronouncements and many other follies. Yet that's precisely what utopian science is, is it not? It's the fine line between Dühring and Engels. Yugoslavia is a motive haunted by the ghost of possibility and the spectre of damning actuality. One can hardly fault Suvin for imagining a different Yugoslavia, for summoning a different spirit. His ritual then, must be considered a success, even ignoring some critical failures. This work oscillates between hardcore empirical Marxist study and the novelized version of an eastern block sci fi movie. Its tightrope walk is commendable if a bit pretentious. Suvin is more Bulgakov than Tolstoy, and he plays the role of "the Master" exceptionally well. It's no coincidence that he is then haunted by the ghost of Stalin, with whom he seems to be in constant dialogue. There is no god up here. But a few good ideas.
May 18, 2021
It did a good job of giving us a concrete impression of the extent of transformation and stagnation in Yugoslavia but it was a bit unnecessarily heavy on the academic theory which didnt contribute much, the concluding chapter had 4 pages of epigraphs lol. Suvin seems like a fascinating guy with a lot of heart, a true comrade l, and I respect him for writing this as his last book. 4 for soul.
July 26, 2024
This is a decent attempt at examining the political causes of the fall of socialist Yugoslavia. The marxology is weak, mostly focusing on Young Marx and alienation at certain times even arguing Marx was in perfect agreement with the anarchists about direct democracy. The appendix on bureaucracy was nice, and Suvin being conscious of Lars Lih's work helps.
January 1, 2021
one of the best books of history I've encountered yet
August 18, 2024
some interesting stuff in here but there is also a lot of really annoying leftcom/trotskyite inflected whining about 'stalinism'.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews