Darko Suvin

Splendours and Miseries of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (1945–74)

This essay explores the trajectory of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (under its various names) in the 30 years from coming to power to settling into a sterile crisis. After c. 1974 no really new factors appear but the old ones get aggravated, and I do not delve into that phase, though no doubt it would be historically instructive, in a depressing way. I shall present here some main theses argued in the essay. Part 2 attempts to ground what follows in the statistics of Party membership and its evident turning from the initial peasant bulk, led by some radical workers and professionals or intellectuals, to an employee and white-collar bulk, presided over by a politocratic oligarchy. Self-management was slowly introduced between 1950 and 1961, but the politocracy’s conservative majority launched a counter-offensive (1966–74) which blocked self-management from being extended to the top. Instead the ruling monolith fragmented into a polyarchy of “republican” power-centers, which mostly slid into nationalism. I call the final period stagnation and ad-hoccery, Yugoslav Brezhnevism. Part 3 discusses main Party problems and achievements, which I group under the concepts of singularities and resistance to them.

Science Fiction and Utopian Fiction: Degrees of Kinship

What is utopia? A literary genre defined, first of all, by the setting up of a radically different location for the relationships of its figures. Similarly SF.

Communism Can Only Be Radical Plebeian Democracy: Remarks on the Experience of S. F. R. Yugoslavia and on Civil Society

ABSTRACT The essay is divided into approach and two parts plus a short summation. The approach poses the theme of nexus between communism and democracy as the only hope to oppose the present neo-fascist turn of capitalism. Part 1 discusses central political choices after the Yugoslav 1941–45 revolution, focusing on its popular revolutionary horizon as well as on disalienation of labour in workers’ self-management, and sketching the history of their achievements and then reflux after the 1960s. The three available politico-economic horizons were a Soviet-style police state, “market socialism,” and a fully associational plebeian democracy. Choosing the second solution meant, in the absence of central planning, a slide towards a market without democratic control and swayed by international centres of financial capital plus the six or seven regional centres of power in the “federal republics,” inevitably turning to nationalism. This led to economic and state disaster. Part 2 discusses plebeian democracy in a participatory mode, foregrounding the need for open politics in post-revolutionary societies and what might a real “civil society” be (Gramsci). The conclusion is not only that Marx’s horizon of communism can only be radical plebeian democracy, but also that only communism can be radical plebeian democracy.

The Prescience of Lucio Magri

Magri, born in 1932, was a leading member and, together with Rossana Rossanda, the most prominent theoretician of the Manifesto group which was kicked out of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1970. He rejoined the PCI with the small Left PdUP party in 1984 and fought against its harakiri in 1989. He was then a deputy in Parliament of the small Rifondazione Comunista party, and retired in 2004 to write this final book. Among his copious journalistic and analytical works, this is, as it were, his political testament. He committed assisted suicide in Switzerland in 2011. Il Manifesto still exists as the only general daily in Italy that can be read without revulsion. In the Introduction plus 21 chapters Magri weaves together three strands: a chronological history of “some decisive events” in and around the PCI from 1944 to its suicide; the world political and economic context; and theoretical analyses or at least doubts and questions, which culminate in the impressive 45-page Appendix, written in 1987 as the position paper of the Left at the final PCI congress. I must be brief about the well-known international context of the Cold War, USSR degeneration, and the constant US pressures which were especially virulent in Italy, ruled de facto by three forces: the Catholic Church, inner political forces, and the US ambassador who set the limits of what could be done (notably, not to let the too strong and dangerous communists into the government after 1948). No doubt, Magri has interesting views about the world context: he pins the blame for the Cold War squarely on the USA and stresses the real danger of nuclear holocaust say up to 1961; he singles out the major rigidities and stupidities first of the 3rd International, including Lenin’s attacking focus on the “centrist” Kautsky and Austromarxism, predicated on a non-existent revolutionary imminence in Europe, and then the much heavier ones of Stalin’s forced collectivisation, 1930s’ terror waves, and the permanent cultural deformation into apathetic Socialism and Democracy, 2015 Vol. 29, No. 2, 91–98, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2015.1039258

Death into Life: For a Poetics of Anti-Capitalist Alternative

1.2. On catastrophic capitalism today The present deep economic crisis has only brought to the surface some permanent trends of capitalism, largely occulted in the foregoing decades. There is no dearth of mortal sins to be laid at the door of capitalism. I shall suggest what I see as the most important ones. The capitalist mode of production is always centrally shaped by the irreconcilable conflict between the capitalist urge for profits and the

On Brecht's “the manifesto”: Comments for readers in english 1

This most rich poet scattered into all he created seeds of thought destined to spring into full life only later. He was persuaded that any living work grows and works on by immanent force, that it changes with each listener and reader reached. His poems are based on this presupposition, and only the future will make visible the full breadth and plenitude of his work. —Lion Feuchtwanger, Bertolt Brecht [1957]

The Arrested Moment in Benjamin's “Theses”: Epistemology vs. Politics, Image vs. Story

Walter Benjamins (WB) final important work, left untitled andusually called “[Theses] On the Concept of History” (CH) is an attempt ata philosophy of history, which is constituted by a refusal of systematicconceptuality and a great reliance on images such as the figural tableauxof the Angel of (catastrophic) History and the Chess-Player. Its foundingmove is to transfer the arrested epistemological moment to politics, whichis of a piece with the absence of any positive Subject, of the future, andof narrative. This article discusses then“1. Intellectuals and Politics, Images and Structure”, identifying WBs root experience of life underthe bourgeoisie as the Modernist topos of lay Hell. The dialectic of long-range understanding vs. short-range militancy of the anti-bourgeois intelligentsiaunderlies the strengths and gaps in CH. Its genre is seen as nearer to acompressed tractate than to theses. Its central method is the reliance onstriking images as architectonic bearers of meanings, in a Surrealist braidingwith some new or revalued concepts: WB is perhaps the Magritte of criticaltheory. CH focusses on the Chess-Player, the Angel, and the absent but necessaryMessiah, but the precise meaning and the figural status of these key mentionsare debatable. Based on this,“2. A Pointer Toward Analyzing ‘CH’”puts forth a counter-proposal to G. Kaisers analysis of its thematics(how is history to be understood as happening?) and its structure by meansof a new grouping of its 18 sections, arguing that the ending may be readas the place where the incompleteness emerges.“3. Time and History, Image and Story” focusses on WBs refusals of the future and of story-telling, which prefigure most attempts today to understand catastrophic history. They culminate in WBs privileging of the arrested moment. It seems to confuseepiste- mology of cognition with ontology of history: if so, the price ofWBs brilliant devices may prove too high.

Narrative Logic, Ideological Domination, and the Range of SF: A Hypothesis

A literary text has at least two strange groups of properties pertaining to its extension and to its intension (I am here appropriating terms from logic as metaphoric suggestions only). Extensively, the text can in any sufficiently small period still be thought of as objectifying the central element of a circuit at whose ends are the original sender and the original receiver. However, this objectification — the apparent constancy of the text - lends itself to the creation of other communication circuits, with new receivers and often also new senders: synchronically and (more often) diachronically, a text can have different intensions — that is, result in a number of different messages for different social addressees. As to the latter, it is clear that Marvell’s ode to Cromwell, for example, is read differently by monarchists, Puritans and Levellers, as well as by differing social addressees one, two or three centuries later; this also holds for, say, Dickens’s Hard Times read by a factory owner, a liberal reformer and a socialist, or for Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land read by Charles Manson and by you, gentle critical reader. Perhaps less evident but no less significant is the series of strange metamorphoses undergone by the image of the implied writer, which is the only aspect of authorship relevant in a communication circuit (the ‘everyday’, never mind the ‘true’, personality of the writer is not known even to the original readership).

Lessons from the Russian Revolution and Its Fallout: An Epistemological Approach*

Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it “the way it really was”. It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. ... The danger threatens both the content [Bestand] of tradition and those who inherit it. For both, it is the self-same thing: the danger of turning into a tool of the ruling classes. ( Walter Benjamin, Thesis VI in On the Concept of History)

What Is To Be Done? A First Step

∗ The decision that we must again talk about and work for a suitably updated communism arose from a lifelong commitment but was sparked by my recent work on an overview of SFR Yugoslavia, a version of which was published as Samo jednom se ljubi: Radiografija SFR Jugoslavije 1945–72. Belgrade: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2014 (http://www.rosalux.rs/bhs/samo-jednom-se-ljubi-drugo-izdanje); see also my article in S&D #61 (March 2013). The book’s original somewhat longer version, Splendour, Misery, and Potentialities: An X-ray of Socialist Yugoslavia, is forthcoming from Brill. Recent works that have encouraged me in pursuing these horizons prominently include those of W.F. Haug, David Harvey, Lucio Magri, and Alain Badiou. Further, I am happy to see that in the Left intellectual community there is growing consensus on a sufficiently flexible but finally rigorous party formation. However, this essay, written over the last three years, does not pretend to mention, much less exhaust, all the main points to be made either about communism or about a new party form.I acknowledge the stimulus from Francis Mulhern in section 1.1, Göran Therborn in 2 and Jean-Luc Nancy in 3.2, and from exchanges with the Novi Sad comrades Gordana Stojaković, Maja Solar, Andrea Jovanović, and Lazar Atanasković in 2 and 4.11, even where my categorisations might differ from theirs. My special thanks go to the critiques of Mladen Lazić and of my friend from university days Marcelline Krafchick (who allowed me to correct many imprecisions), and to Michael Stó́ppler.As to the “mass social forces” I envisage in 2, I see them as classes, or fractions and groupings thereof. We should heed Hennessy’s warning: “ . . . the retreat from class analysis . . . in the eighties and nineties [seems] one of neoliberalism’s most effective ideological weapons” (12). What I mean by “class” can be found in Suvin (2012) especially in its Introduction. In particular, for the stance that the great majority of women is a potential “class-like” ally of anti-capitalism I refer to the work of N. Hartsock, D. Smith, and E.M. Wood (all listed in Hennessy’s bibliography). This essay attempts to glance at the international situation, but in its proposal of remedies focuses mainly on European experiences. Socialism and Democracy, 2016 Vol. 30, No. 1, 105–127, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2015.1133099