So I've come into contact with my unit's expat community of Croats, Serbs, Makedonijans ect. And I've found that they kinda share a weird form of Yugoslav nationalism, or atleast identify with Yugoslavia on a cultural level. Note these are people who were born after its collapse and they are from Yugoslav countries, not people born in the UK. I thought it might just be nothing, but then I did some digging.
Yugoslavstalgie is a pretty strong thing with thousand strong pilgrimages across the former countries, and all the Yugoslav countries have pretty strong disengagement rates. Add to that Žižek's article in newsanon's post today about the rediscovery of panethnic solidarity in Bosnia and it makes me think: is there a hope for Yugoslavism? Could it be used to create or restore a social patriot yugoslav identity and work towards reunification? Would just like some thoughts from Yugobros here.
Inb4 ☭TANKIE☭s reeeing.
Yugoslavism today
Not surprising at all, I mean they went from one of the best countries in Europe to live in to a bunch of failed piece of shit broken states.
Born in 1990. Can confirm, even though I was born at the breakup, and never got to live in Yugoslavia I miss it so goddamn much.
youtube.com
youtube.com
youtube.com
youtube.com
youtube.com
youtube.com
youtube.com
It was a world superpower, and now it's 6-7 shit countries.
yugoslavia is such a weird thing because there are even anti-communists who hail at is "the only form of socialism that works" and lots of people on Zig Forums for example seem to really like tito.
it's like the only socialist country that doesn't get shat on for "muh starvation" or "muh secret police" or any of the slander thrown towards other states like the USSR of the DDR.
i think yugoslavia can be useful as a gateway to not only unite the balkans but to act as a gateway for normies to get invested in socialism.
Yugoslav communism was unique for the few amount of jews involved in it, Moshe piade petitioned Tito to allow all of the Yugoslav jews to leave for israel in 1949 and he obliged
Can confirm. I went from socdem to MarkSoc to Leninist.
wow such insightful commentary with so many sources to back it up
Yeah but is it just nostalgia or a legitimate form of unificatory nationalism: could a new national front be founded to run for election across South salvia?
*slavia, feck.
Was talking to an older Croatian guy who lived in Yugoslavia and is old enough to have remembered Tito and served in the army. He was a communist but he didn't like Leninism. Basically he said if you had democratic socialist Yugoslavia instead of a Leninist-style one, and people really believed in communism, it would have been fucking awesome. Actually, it was pretty cool and overall pleasant but he said but he didn't like the lack of freedom of speech, which he felt was humiliating.
He also said most of his family (parents, grandparents) joined the communist resistance during World War II, but after a time people were kinda going through the motions and you couldn't trust whether the leaders really believed in it anymore. He was also a big fan of Milovan Djilas, who he thought was brilliant morally and intellectually. Djilas was at one point going to be Tito's successor but had a falling out and went into exile. Anyways, I noticed a local bookstore where I live (in the U.S., oddly) has Djilas' partisan memoir Wartime which I've been meaning to go pick up.
pottery
There's also this. It's about the three times Djilas went to Moscow and met with Stalin. He was sent back to prison for this book.
Thanks for the answers. To be honest I've always had a thing for Tito, but to know that Yugoslavism is still a thing is kinda cool. Honestly I've been brain-storming some ideas on a political stratagem to bring around reunification if anyone is interested.
I met an ethnic yugoslav girl a while back. Appearantly there is a whole load of people who are ethnically pan-yugoslav (multi ethic lineage and culture) and who moved abroad before the collapse and balkanization of yugoslavia, so they choose to identify as yugoslavian instead of one of the subethnicity.
What even does "democratic socialism" mean? Structurally speaking socialism is always more democratic than capitalism. The problem in the 20th-century socialist states was the censorship and repression of any dissent, which should have been avoided, but I don't see how a structural difference would be the solution here.
You would definitely need some structural changes to the internal functioning of the party, if not abolishing the single party system itself. Certain elements of democratic centralism, and the relative rarity of party congresses were major contributors to the undemocratic way in which most ML states operated. Imo the party congress should sit continuously and act more like a state legislature, since under a single party system the actual legislature is basically a rubber stamp.
thanks for posting that. wanted to read that book for a long time!
There should be a two-party system with two communist parties.
We need at least 21 communist parties, you fucking Stalinist.
I’d be fine with a multi-party system as long as they all swore allegiance to a socialist constitution, and that that constitution was extremely hard to change.
Well the main structural issues of Marxist-Leninist parties in the eastern bloc wasn't just repression, but the inflexibility of the oligarchy itself. The best example was Bulgaria, where Todor Zhivkov was in the executive position of power from 1954-1989: and towards the end of his rule he had effectively stripped the soft power of the legislature and even the central committee. The main result of this is stagnation, which we see in the rejection of programmes like OGAS in the eastern bloc.
Ironically the DDR had the closest thing that could have worked in the Volkskammer parties: if power had shifted from the SED party organs to the Volkskammer things would have been a lot better IMO.
Ah, the Nepal model
It’s also worth noting that the ML approach has basically never worked as a check on revisionism. On the contrary I would argue that it enabled it.
When so much power is in the hands of one official, all it takes is one bad apple to sink the thing.
Irony is that with pluralism, a system is more stable than with monopolarity. I guess Chomsky was right, to maintain a system you have to extend debate to an acceptable degree to make it look reasonable.
Its also important to note that political pluralism (of some extent) is better at preserving ideological coherence and purity for lack of a better word. With a single-party system you basically invite corruption and opportunism since when there's just a single road to power it attracts careerists, when the party rather than being in government is the government in all but name its bound to be filled with dreck sooner or later.
And once an opportunist careerist slips into a position of power and influence they will actively prevent genuine communists from ascending within the party because they're well aware that there would be nothing more dangerous to their position that a 'true believer' in a position of power. In the end you get a party machinery which is top to bottom stuffed with opportunists who would loyally obey the state no matter how revisionist and uncommunist it became.
Pluralism in a political system, among other things, provides dead-end outlets for political opponents.
Yugoslavia isn't coming back. Especially not with EU and NATO existing.
Basically my friend's point of view is that the Tito system, like other Leninist systems, was weak because it depended on this strong leader and fanatical core of intellectual communists to tie everything together. With him out of the picture things unraveled pretty fast. If you asked most people in Yugoslavia about things like surplus value, they wouldn't know much about it – they learned a bit in school but they were more concerned about day to day things.
And actually the economy was quite good. If you look at the rate of development, advances in human development, Yugoslavia was objectively better than the West compared to where it was starting from. A convinced communist looking at the matter objectively would see Yugoslavia doing a lot of things right. But it was not so dramatically good that it would attract non-communists into being communists. So over time the quality of the leadership declined as the system was not produced enough new committed communists to replace the original core as they got old, retired, or fell out with Tito. That is how opportunism crept in.
You knock Djilas he initially proposed the much-vaunted workers' self-management system.
I can't comment about the quality of political education in yugoslavia but i can imagine it suffered something similar to the Soviet education system so i'll just copy a post i made a while ago since i think it's relevant to the problem of socialist states being over reliant on party/revolutionary leadership for the security of socialism.
LOL no
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
the muslims just swindled the croats and elected their representative as well as their own, what panethnic solidarity do you imagine that kind of shit will engender, flowers and rainbows
this is like coastal liberals in america thinking they're representative of the country, these little pockets of yugonostalgia are exactly that - little pockets. there is no nostalgia in the general public, at least in croatia.
All changes to the Constitution must be done by referendum