Insisting on the Radicality and Heterogeneity of Partisan Rupture in Yugoslavia

Branislav Jakovljević’s review “The Relay of Radicalism” (2024) takes two of my works and one by Marko Ilić, each of them very different, as his main objects of criticism. I wish to thank Jakovljević for this opportunity to address some of the productive misreadings he engages in and the shortcomings he alleges. The main point of misunderstanding lies with the first epistemic question: how are we to return productively to the project of partisan and socialist Yugoslavia, a project that was broken and that was symbolically buried in the neoliberal transition and ethnic wars? My return to Yugoslav past does not treat this as an academic curiosity or to fill the positivist mantra to produce knowledge of specific area studies (see Buden Reference Buden2020), but as a part of engaged reading of the emancipatory project that is unfinished and can be recovered as the “tradition of the oppressed.”^{Footnote 1} Jakovljević argues—despite recognizing the wealth of material I delve into—that my approach in two books is marked by methodological and conceptual unclarity that might contribute to certain “idealization” of the Yugoslav past. First of all, let me make it totally clear that these two mentioned books are heterogenous and thus not both structured around the idea of “partisan rupture,” as he argues. Introductory chapters of each book will demonstrate that readers need to take into account very different methodological approaches and research objects. In the case of Partisan Ruptures, I deal with the political, ideological, and socioeconomic history of the rise and demise of socialist Yugoslavia. The work is inspired by Althusser’s philosophical intervention into the field of politics, and elaborates on his notion of rupture (1976). In Partisan Counter-Archive, by contrast, I deal essentially with artistic material using a counter-archival and emancipatory reading of the past that connects the fields of politics, art, and memory that goes beyond nostalgia or liberal antitotalitarian and nationalist readings of that past. This approach is very much indebted to the methodology of Enzo Traverso (Reference Traverso2017) and Susan Buck-Morss (Reference Buck-Morss2002), who both in their way reconstruct potential and revolutionary histories from below. These approaches are critical not only towards the existing state of capitalist realism, but also to how we read and reaffirm (neo)colonial and (neo)imperial linear continuity. What both my books do share is a specific, engaged reading of the partisan and socialist past. Nevertheless, since both intervene in a variety of different conceptual and methodological discussions, they cannot be read as a simple continuation that is deployed by Jakovljević’s generalist critique.

That said, what are the specific criticisms that Jakovljević makes? First, he argues that my return to partisan and socialist history is marked by an idealistic and diluted notion of rupture. To clarify, when one departs seriously from Althusserian tradition then one should be critical both of a linear and also of a Hegelian teleological understanding of history that allegedly entails a clear telos, subject, and idea. The Althusserian approach offers a counter-historical account that views history in terms of ruptures. In my critical reading of Althusser’s notion of rupture as a singular and irreversible event, I try, first, to provide an Althusserian account through the use of historical material, and to insist on reading rupture in a materialist sense: to review and critically evaluate both its lasting material effects (be it in new political bodies and economic practices, or artworks), and its gradual exhaustion. Partisan Counter-Archive does not posit rupture as a “sacred” origin or simply idealize the heroic times of the People’s Liberation Struggle; instead, it points out how specific artworks and politics continued the partisan struggle by other means, being able to deal with the conundrum of never-ending revolution. This conundrum intensively occupied the minds of artists and especially those who aimed to create a “monument to revolution.” These heterogenous analytical frames are part of the larger field of New Yugoslav studies that contributes to the plurality of interventions that affirm and criticize the Yugoslav project and its emancipatory potentials.

This Althusserian approach that in certain respect goes beyond Althusser also already replies to Jakovljević’s second plea for more “historicism” and more encompassing historical material. As stated above, my criticism of Althusser lies precisely in providing his theoretical concepts with concrete historical material, that is, thinking in conjunction and elaborating on concepts through working on historical matter. Rather than the purity of a rupture that would be irreversible, my aim in Partisan Ruptures was to zoom in on the various effects and impacts of revolutionary rupture—on the way that socialism was built in Yugoslavia, in all its contradictory historical reality. Jakovljević claims that I present a “diluted” concept of “rupture,” particularly so, if taking into account the “impurity” of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and self-management, which he alleges were only normatively radical. In my book I evidently embrace the position that during the war the Partisan liberation struggle was not merely a negative struggle—a fight against the fascist occupation—but a revolutionary movement of major consequence. In this respect, it did produce profound echoes, which included the Yugoslav split from Stalin in 1948. I acknowledge the inherent contradictions that took place after the split with Stalin, and the ways in which the Yugoslav communists attempted to reinvent their political independence. Both the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and self-management I conceptualized as attempts to “continue partisan politics by other means,” and designated as “new departures” that challenged the existing coordinates of world bloc politics and socialism of the Soviet type. The process was undoubtedly contradictory: Yugoslavia became isolated on the world stage, and while it was to begin the experiment of self-management—workers councils’ infrastructure—it was, at least at that time, launched from above, and not from some sort of genuine workerist desire. Nonetheless, in chapters 4–6, I provide a detailed argument to demonstrate that this early sequence of historical events of Yugoslavia offered a renewal of, and experimentation with, socialist and communist thought, and constituted a break within the international workers’ movement. This more nuanced understanding of rupture as an ongoing, complex, and contested process, rather than as a monolithic, perfect event, is central to my analytical framework and my assessment of Yugoslavia’s uniqueness.

Next Jakovljević suggests that I “lose[…my] grasp on Althusser” when I claim that “the emerging political form should never become completely consolidated into an institutional form” (Jakovljević Reference Jakovljević2024:212; Kirn Reference Kirn2019:16). His criticism implies an apparent failure to see that the partisan ruptures did integrally consolidate into an institutional form. This failure is supposedly demonstrated by my ignorance of the role played by the “homemade elites” from the League of Communists. But to understand history only in terms of the history of elites reflects a liberal epistemic positioning. Instead, I advance structural reading and trace socioeconomic reasons about how the political elites carried out “market reforms” in the 1960s. These reforms uncritically embraced the market as a carrier of democratization, but also created commercial banks; instead of minimizing economic inequalities, they boosted processes of undevelopment (e.g., in the case of Kosovo); market criteria unleashed competition between enterprises, and also between workers and nonworkers (rise of unemployment, the neoliberal experiment with guest workers). This specific economic policy, devised to empower workers, ultimately resulted—despite some advances in the social and cultural field—in the strengthening of a new class alliance between technocrats (managers and banks) and the republican socialist elites. The latter sought to oppose federal power (deemed as Stalinist) on the one hand, and workers, on the other hand, and constituted an ideological force that articulated nationalist and liberal sentiments.

In this respect Jakovljević claims I “disqualify” Milovan Djilas’s critique of bureaucracy as a “new class” (Djilas Reference Djilas1957). Rather than a blanket “disqualification,” however, I offer a specific historical and theoretical assessment of Djilas and indirectly also of Jakovljević, and argue that their approach tends to reduce the whole of history to the plans and intentions of a “bureaucracy.” Not only does this view lack any theorization of the new class relations, which in the early stage were nonantagonistic, but it remains blind to the power struggles that were taking place on other levels of political, economic, and ideological life. Furthermore, and crucially, it ignores the more constructive part of socialist industrialization, which successfully rebuilt society, redistributed wealth, and, up until market reform, was actually closing the gaps between the very unequal parts of the federation. Also, in the second part of Partisan Ruptures, I not only discuss struggles among the ruling class, but also the “class struggle from below,” which ranged from workers’ strikes during the 1960s to the student movements of 1968 and their criticism of socialism based on communist ideas.

Jakovljević’s critique of the socialist transition, which asserts that communism brought violence to property holders and that the subsequent “privatization” was merely a “primitive accumulation of capital” by the socialist state, overlooks crucial distinctions that I make (Jakovljević Reference Jakovljević2024:214n3). I frame the postwar changes as a continuation of partisan rupture that entailed an egalitarian politics. Far from arbitrary violence and a way for the elite alone to get rich, it was a revolutionary effort to redistribute wealth and build a new society for the masses. The “nationalization of land, property, and private capital” did not take place during the war, but after 1946. It started with the key industrial sectors as part of the building of the new socialist state. Furthermore, I frame the subsequent transformation of state property into social property not in terms of an accumulation of inequality but as a distribution of wealth and collective management of the means of production that went a step further than the Soviet model. Yugoslav self-management implemented social ownership, which can be described as transferring property from the state to society, and was akin to a “third way” beyond state and private property “that was part of a broader anticapitalist project aiming at the abolition of private property” (Kirn Reference Kirn2019:104). This step was intended to allow for collective participation in the use and organization of the cultural and social infrastructure. The idea of social property being solely a part of a “primitive accumulation of capital” for the new elites, as Jakovljević suggests, is thus completely refuted (Kirn Reference Kirn2019; 2020). Rather it was one of the world’s most productive experiments—on a state level—that would institute something that more recent theorists called “commons” and that in historical reality “brought major material improvements to the everyday life of the majority of people” (2019:4).

In this regard Jakovljević’s point about the “homemade elites” under communism developing into “princes of privatization” and seizing “prime loot” should be sharpened (Jakovljević Reference Jakovljević2024:214n3). If anything destroyed what the society had accumulated under the “social wealth and social ownership” model, then it was, as I argue in the book Partisan Ruptures, the post-1989 counterrevolutionary and capitalist transition that was led by nationalist cultural and political elites. The social wealth and ownership were first nationalized and then privatized. In the post-Yugoslav context, the 1990s bore witness not only to nationalism and ethnic wars, but also to a major “dispossession of the productive means and social infrastructure” (Kirn Reference Kirn2019:4). This was part of a dominant “national-liberalism,” victory of liberal capitalism on ethnically cleansed ideological pillars. This dominant doxa enshrined in new constitutions of the post-Yugoslav context resulted, among other things, in the complete “exhaustion,” and even eradication, of partisan ruptures; the destruction of partisan and socialist legacy, as I mostly discuss in the concluding chapters of Partisan Counter-Archive. In this respect, we can systematically differentiate between the original emancipatory/partisan aims and material achievements of the partisan rupture and socialist construction, and the more recent dismantling and plunder of this legacy during the transition to capitalism that offers the “alternative” of ethnically cleansed states and dispossessed populations. It is here that we have to make a crucial distinction between socialist and capitalist transition and accumulation: the first transition benefited the many, while the most recent one benefited only the few.

Jakovljević’s main criticism of my second book, The Partisan Counter-Archive, is that I use primarily Slovenian examples despite claiming a Yugoslavia-wide scope. In a second step, he then calls into question precisely the non-Slovene examples given: for example, the pairing of Black Wave films and socialist modernist monumental sculpture is allegedly “odd” (Jakovljević Reference Jakovljević2024:213). Since my book employs a nonpositivist epistemology, it argues that this is only the start of a longer and collective project and is aware of its limits. This is why I explain that the counter-archive is built on a selection of case studies and artworks “scattered across the post-Yugoslav space” (2020:131). It does not offer an all-encompassing and exhaustive list of engaged Partisan artworks. These artworks share a specific aesthetic experimentation with form and revolutionary temporality that relates to radicality in form and content.

Furthermore, what this “odd pairing” highlights is “aesthetic ruptures,” ruptures found in films and monuments that were successful in “openly dissenting from the mythologising representation” (2020:175) of the Partisan struggle and thus were greatly contested sites of ideological struggle. Contrary to the retrospective lens of the dissident, I claim that even under socialism the spaces and bodies of works existed that were able to engage in “counter-hegemonic struggle on the protocols of how the people of Yugoslavia and beyond perceived, appropriated, but also negotiated and confronted, images and narratives of the Partisan past.” Instead of what Jakovljević claims to be a merely “idiosyncratic cabinet of curiosities” (214), I define partisan counter-archive as a “construction site,” where “semi-forgotten artworks and political acts enter into a more palpable—and, I hope, lasting—relationship” (2020:18). Their shared features are “based on a certain notion of excess/surplus that revolves around an emancipatory core that could not and cannot be made to easily fit into the dominant political order and archive,” whether in socialist, or perhaps even less so, in postsocialist times and their institutions.

Finally, Jakovljević claims that I skirt the issue of revolutionary violence and “venerate” Tito while minimizing the Party’s ties to Moscow. Regarding Tito, instead of venturing a nostalgic and populist notion of Tito, I first portray him as a central figure in the Partisan movement’s success. The chapter “Tito’s No to Schmitt” contextualizes Tito’s strategic political decisions, and particularly the way he was able to “defeat” both Stalinism and fascism, which was crucial to the independent path that Yugoslavia took and that would then crystalize in the Non-Aligned Movement. His political strategizing does not absolve Tito of the specific political disease of wanting to cling to power (until his death), nor of the internal strategic mistakes that failed to reinvigorate partisan ruptures and to empower the working class and the progressive youth in the 1960s, among other things.

These books then attempt to navigate the complex history of Yugoslavia, affirming its emancipatory potentials while acknowledging its contradictions, violence, and historical failures. If my first book offers a novel way to move forward from Althusser’s conceptualization of “rupture” by seeing it as a dynamic, multilayered, and reversible process, then my second book provides the attempt to build a counter-archive and invites all those interested in cultural and art history and in memory to help assemble emancipatory pieces and traces in the current nationalist societies solar miles away from any sort of social distribution, collective ownership, and nonidentitarian solidarity. Critical theory does not seek to advance a conservative view of cultural history that simply accumulates facts in the manner of vulgar historicism (how Benjamin criticized historicism) but rather offers ways to intervene in historical material through engaging the various, enduring traces of emancipation.