TEHRAN – The Persian translation of the book “The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System” written by the Yugoslav communist politician, theorist, and author Milovan Djilas has been made available in the bookstores across the country.

Translator, historian, and professor of philosophy Enayatollah Reza has translated the book into Persian and Now Publication has brought it out in 269 pages, Mehr reported.

It is a political theory book about the concept of the new class by the communist Yugoslav figure and intellectual Milovan Djilas. He proposed that the party-state officials formed a class which “uses, enjoys, and disposes of nationalized property”.

In the former Yugoslavia, the book was not legally published until 1990, when Narodna knjiga from Belgrade finally released it. Before that, both the Serbian manuscript and the English edition circulated on the black market. The manuscript was completed before 1956, the year of Djilas’s arrest, after which he spent nine years in prison, including 22 months in solitary confinement. The book has been translated into 50 languages and sold over 3 million copies.

“The New Class” created a sensation when published in the U.S. in 1957. It was the 1st 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, he examines the essence of the conflict between the USSR and the West.

In the book, Djilas discusses the roots of modern Communism, with the communists citing Marx, the “replacement of capitalism can take place only by revolutionary means”. Yet, he confesses that “almost nothing remains of original Marxism...only a residue of formalism and dogmatism remained of Marx's dialectics and materialism; this was used for the purpose of cementing power, justifying tyranny, and violating human conscience”. 

Revolutions only took place in Russia, China, and Yugoslavia. Communism was imposed on Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria by the Soviet Army, and made them identical to the Soviet system.

Djilas defines the new class in the book as the political bureaucracy, “a monopoly over the working class itself”. This “new class actually seized the lion's share of the economic and other progress earned by the sacrifices and efforts of the masses”. Djilas attributes the rise of this new class to Stalin.

Djilas foresaw the future independence movement in Eastern Europe. The Communist Eastern European countries did not become satellites of the USSR because they benefited from it, but because they were too weak to prevent it. As soon as they become stronger, or as favorable conditions are created, a yearning for independence and for protection of 'their own people' from Soviet hegemony will arise among them. 

Milovan Djilas (1911 – 1995) was a Yugoslav communist politician, theorist, and author. He was a key figure in the Partisan movement during World War II, as well as in the post-war government. A self-identified democratic socialist, Djilas became one of the best-known and most prominent dissidents in Yugoslavia and all of Eastern Europe.

SS/SAB