11. – 22. March 2026
Published: 1957 (written after Đilas’s break with Tito and subsequent imprisonment) Original language: Serbo-Croatian ( Novi razred )
However, the book is also a prisoner of its moment. It is written with the fervor of a betrayed lover—angry, intimate, and at times, naive. It assumes that exposing the hypocrisy of the New Class would be enough to topple it. History proved otherwise. The New Class often simply rebrands itself (as “technocrats” or “national developers”) and continues. milovan dilas novi razred
Đilas’s core argument is deceptively simple. The revolution, he claims, was not led by the proletariat but by a small, disciplined core of intellectuals and professional revolutionaries (the Party). Once they seized power, they did not “wither away” as Marx predicted. Instead, they expropriated the means of production not to the people, but to the state—which they control absolutely. Published: 1957 (written after Đilas’s break with Tito
Furthermore, the book’s scope is limited. It is a brilliant anatomy of Stalinism and its Yugoslav variant, but it struggles to explain communist systems that adapted (like China’s market reforms) or collapsed (like the USSR). It predicts stagnation, which was largely correct for the USSR, but cannot account for the rapid industrialization of East Asia under similar party structures. History proved otherwise
Few books have landed with the geopolitical force of Milovan Đilas’s The New Class . Written from a prison cell by a man who was once the vice president of Yugoslavia and a devoted Stalinist, the book is an autopsy of the communist revolution performed by one of its most trusted surgeons. It is not merely a polemic; it is a political and sociological treatise that argues a radical and uncomfortable thesis: the communist revolution did not create a classless society. Instead, it created a new, brutal ruling class—the party bureaucracy.
Consequently, the book has almost nothing to say about a market economy or liberal democracy as alternatives. Đilas’s solution is vague: a return to a “democratic,” “self-governing” socialism (he admired the early workers’ councils). He cannot see—or refuses to see—that the centralization he criticizes might be a feature, not a bug, of state-controlled economies. He still believes in socialism without the party.