Few political dissidents have had the unique vantage point of Milovan Djilas. He was not a capitalist critic looking in from the outside, nor a disillusioned writer observing from a distance. He was the "Prince of Montenegro"—the chief propagandist and the heir apparent to Josip Broz Tito in communist Yugoslavia.
He was a true believer. In the immediate post-war years, he was a staunch Stalinist, advocating for the ruthless suppression of opposition and the collectivization of agriculture. However, the 1948 Tito-Stalin split was a watershed moment for Djilas. As Yugoslavia broke away from the Soviet bloc, Djilas was tasked with analyzing the conflict. In doing so, he began to see that the Soviet system was not a distortion of Marxism, but perhaps a logical conclusion of its centralized power structure. Milovan Djilas Nova Klasa.pdf
One of the most devastating sections of the PDF deals with privilege. Djilas describes how the revolution promised the abolition of hierarchy, only to create a more rigid one. The New Class justified its perks (villas, special hospitals, Western goods) as "necessary for the efficiency of the revolution." Few political dissidents have had the unique vantage
Milovan Djilas was not a Western critic observing the Soviet bloc through a telescope. He was a architect. He was a Partisan. He was the Vice-President of Yugoslavia under Tito. And when he wrote The New Class (originally Nova Klasa ), he committed the ultimate act of political heresy: he exposed the ruling class of Communism not as the vanguard of the proletariat, but as its new exploiters. He was a true believer
Go to archive.org and type "The New Class Milovan Djilas." Download the PDF. Read the first two paragraphs of the introduction. You will immediately understand why Tito threw him in jail—and why the world is still reading him 70 years later.
Djilas called this bluff. He noted that as soon as the revolution secured power, the "withering away of the state" (Marx’s promise) stopped entirely. Instead, the state expanded to serve the appetites of its new masters.
