The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System

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Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983 - Business & Economics - 214 pages
The New Class created a sensation when it was published in the United States in 1957, because it was the first time that a ranking Communist had publicly analyzed his disillusionment with the system. Djilas, a former associate of Tito's who had traveled from the lowest to the highest rung of the hierarchical ladder and who was imprisoned for his views, had found himself increasingly estranged from contemporary Communism and attracted to the idea of democratic socialism. Here, however, he puts aside the story of his personal evolution to write a detached, lucid, courageous critique of the Communist system: its roots, the character of its revolutions, the rise of its powerful political bureaucracy --"the new class"-- in what was intended to be a classless society, its one-party state, its economic policies, and its tyranny over minds. Finally, Djilas examines the essence of the conflict between the U.S.S.R. and the West that continues to this day. In the present atmosphere of intensifying confrontation, The New Class is more significant than ever.

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Contents

Origins
1
Character of the Revolution
15
The New Class
37
Copyright

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About the author (1983)

Milovan Djilas is known as an author of political writings about his experiences as a young communist before and during World War II, as a high functionary after the war, and, finally, as a renegade. His initial ambition, however, was to be a fiction writer, but because of the vicissitudes of his life, he has been able to fulfill that ambition only partly---the few short stories and three volumes of his autobiography, however, reveal all his artistic potential. Ironically, even those few works have been published only in translation into other languages, because he is not allowed to publish in Yugoslavia. In all his works, Djilas cannot get away from his basically political nature, seeing and interpreting everything through the Marxist prism. He has also written a perceptive book on Petar Petrovic Njegos.

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