Splendour, misery, and possibilities : an X-ray of socialist Yugoslavia / by Darko Suvin ; with a foreword by Fredric Jameson.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on July 14, 2016).

Front Matter -- Introduction: Pro Domo Sua -- Radical Emancipation and Yugoslavia: On the Founding Singularities of SFRY -- Accumulation and Its Discontents -- On Class Relationships in Yugoslavia -- On a Hidden Ruling Class and Central Conflict -- What Has Been and What Could Have Been -- 15 Theses about Communism and Yugoslavia, or the Two-Headed Janus of Emancipation through the State (Metamorphoses and Anamorphoses of 'On the Jewish Question' by Marx) -- The Communist Party of Yugoslavia -- Anatomy: Macro-Political Economics, or the View from Above -- Anatomy: Micro-Political Economics, or the View from the Workers -- Physiology: The Interests and Stakes behind the Macro-Events -- On the Politics of Disalienation, Inside and Outside Economic Production -- In Production: Rise and Fall of Self-Management -- In Civic Life: Dis/Alienation and Oligarchy Monolithism -- Conclusion: On Failures and Potentialities -- Bureaucracy: A Term and Concept in the Socialist Discourse about State Power (Upstream of Yugoslavia) -- The Discourse about Bureaucracy and State Power in Post-Revolutionary Yugoslavia 1945-72 -- References -- Index of Proper Names of Historical Persons.

Suvin's 'X-Ray' of Socialist Yugoslavia offers an indispensable overview of a unique and often overlooked twentieth-century socialism. It shows that the plebeian surge of revolutionary self-determination was halted in SFR Yugoslavia by 1965; that between 1965- 72 there was a confused and hidden but still open-ended clash; and that by 1972 the oligarchy in power was closed and static, leading to failure. The underlying reasons of this failure are analysed in a melding of semiotics and political history, which points beyond Yugoslavia - including its achievements and degeneration - to show how political and economic democracy fail when pursued in isolation. The emphasis on socialist Yugoslavia is at various points embedded into a wider historical and theoretical frame, including Left debates about the party, sociological debates about classes, and Marx's great foray against a religious State doctrine in The Jewish Question .

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