Milovan Dilas 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.
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.
This “New Class” is defined not by ownership of capital in the traditional sense, but by . They control access to resources, jobs, housing, and information. Their privilege is not a salary but nomenklatura —the right to occupy key positions. Đilas argues that this class is more ruthless than the old bourgeoisie because it masks its self-interest behind the sacred rhetoric of “social ownership” and “the common good.” milovan dilas novi razred
For all its brilliance, The New Class suffers from the very idealism it claims to reject. Đilas writes as a disappointed believer. His critique is essentially that the revolution failed to live up to its own ethical promise of freedom and equality.
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. However, the book is also a prisoner of its moment
The book’s undeniable power comes from Đilas’s credibility. This is not a Cold War tract written by a disillusioned exile from a safe distance. Đilas was the insider’s insider. He fought with Partisans, served in Tito’s highest councils, and personally helped build the system he later eviscerates.
Published: 1957 (written after Đilas’s break with Tito and subsequent imprisonment) Original language: Serbo-Croatian ( Novi razred ) History proved otherwise
Read The New Class not as a work of impartial political science, but as a tragic memoir of a revolution that ate its children. It is a flawed masterpiece—the first and most powerful insider account of how communism’s promise of equality curdled into a new, gray tyranny of the party card.
