In order to carry out our historical role in creating a socialist society in our country, we must spare no pains to that end, we must remain critical of ourselves and our work, be uncompromising towards all kinds of dogmatism, and stay faithful to the revolutionary creative spirit of Marxism. Nothing that has been created can be so sacred to us that it cannot be transcended and superseded by something still freer, more progressive, and more human.

—Closing passage of the 1958 Program of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia: The Arrested Revolution

No study of political and cultural life in modern Yugoslavia can afford to overlook the unique nature of the Yugoslav revolutionary experience. The Yugoslav revolution in fact consisted of three phases—the War of National Liberation, the Cominform break, and the complex of internal structural changes including the introduction of workers' self-management, Party reform, and political and economic decentralization—which were mutually reinforcing and could not but leave their imprint deeply engraved on Yugoslav social structure and political consciousness. This transformational experience, to be sure, is far from complete even today, for Yugoslavia must resolve in one manner or another several crucial problems that face it in the immediate future, such as the nature of political leadership, political integration, economic viability, growing social and regional inequalities, and not least of all the cultural vitality of the Yugoslav community and the fate of the quarter century of socialist experiment and reform that has hitherto distinguished Yugoslavia from her East European neighbors.

What set the Yugoslav experience apart at the very outset from the appearance of communist power in the rest of Eastern Europe was that the Yugoslav revolution was the result of a genuine social upheaval. Interwar Yugoslavia was a society held together by extremely brittle bonds; its collapse was only hastened by external aggressive pressures from the Fascist powers. During the Partisan War of Liberation, Tito's forces made it an integral part of their strategy to lay the groundwork for the new society, beginning with local Anti-Fascist Councils and People's Committees and culminating in the proclamation of a new governmental structure in November 1943. Indeed, Tito's dramatic success can be attributed to the fact that his was a popular as well as a truly national revolution.¹ The liberation of Yugoslavia by Tito's Partisans was an independent effort accomplished with very little assistance (and often only discouragement and even sharp criticism) from the Soviet Union, the land of the October Revolution; and in the postwar period, Tito was beholden to no power save the Yugoslav people.

It is in this context that we must view the famous “Cominform break” of 1948. Much has already been written about the ultimate and proximate factors leading up to the Resolution of June 28, 1948 expelling Yugoslavia from the Cominform and we need not dwell on the details of these events in this space.² What is of importance for this study is the massive reorientation in Yugoslav theory and practice that resulted from this traumatic experience. Even these consequences, however, were not immediately forthcoming in 1948. The first reaction of the Yugoslav Communists after the initial shock of excommunication was, as Hoffman and Neal point out, not to nail their heretical theses to the door of the cathedral, but to seek to demonstrate their adherence to Stalinist policies at the same time as they cleansed their ranks of all those who dared to voice explicit support of Stalin himself or of the charges in the Resolution.³ In a conscious effort to refute some of the charges of the Cominform Resolution, the Yugoslavs undertook in 1948 a crash program of forced collectivization which they would have to reverse less than five years later. The reigning atmosphere, Dedijer writes, was represented by the motto, “Refute the accusations by our deeds.” Recalling New Year's Eve of 1949, he confesses that “we were still dogmatic, despite the six months of struggle behind us.”⁴

At this crucial turning point in the second phase of the Yugoslav revolution, the movement was left floundering in want of a theory. The lack of an indigenous body of thought that could give a convincing explanation of the shock of 1948 was reflected in the tragic conflict between Tito's loyalists and the so-called Cominformists, who persisted in their loyalty to Stalin and the USSR. This disorientation and confusion among dedicated participants in the revolution, some of whom had been among Tito's closest associates in the days of the Partisan War, culminated in a massive, traumatic purge of Cominformists from the Party of such proportions and brutality that it remains a political issue in Yugoslavia to this day. This was the first instance of what might best be described as an “arrested revolution” in postwar Yugoslavia—in this case, a situation in which a revolution in practice, unexpectedly thrust upon the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) from outside but conditioned by the entire history of the Partisan movement, was for a time unaccompanied by a revolution in thought. A new way had to be found.

By late 1949, there were signs that serious reconsideration of long-accepted Soviet doctrines about state and society had been taking place in the highest councils of the Party. In September, Milovan Djilas published a long essay in the official Party journal Komunist indicting Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy for deviating from the Leninist principles of equality between socialist states in the manner of an imperialist power.⁵ A month later Moša Pijade, the Party's most venerable theorist, boldly declared that it was Stalin rather than the Yugoslavs who was guilty of the charge of “revisionism.”⁶ Finally, Edvard Kardelj issued a long statement in Komunist⁷ that contained the basic parameters of the official Yugoslav critique of the Soviet Union for many years to come, which was given its final form in the 1958 Program of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (the “Ljubljana Program”).⁸

Some Yugoslav writers recall the 1948-49 period as the time of the “Back to Marx” movement.⁹ But it is perhaps more accurate to say, as Johnson points out, that the real slogan was rather “Back to Marx and Lenin.” “Even this exegesis,” Johnson writes, “was very fundamentalist and unsophisticated, resting primarily on . . . Lenin's State and Revolution” and Marx's comments on the Paris Commune. “Only much later did Yugoslav theoreticians turn to the ‘young Marx' as a main source of legitimacy for their system of ‘self-government,' “ while “the writings of earlier heretics held little attraction” for them.¹⁰ Indeed it was to be the philosophers, not the regime's reluctant ideologists, who would eventually pave the way back to the young Marx's writings. From the beginning, however, this particular “heresy” against Stalinism was entirely spontaneous and original to the Yugoslavs. They saw their “deviation” not as a deviation at all, but rather as a faithful interpretation of the founders of Marxism themselves.

The “official” Yugoslav critique of Soviet Stalinism had a great impact on the consciousness of an entire generation of Yugoslav thinkers, including a group of young philosophers who would later gather around the journal Praxis.¹¹ It would therefore seem useful to summarize briefly the critique's broad outlines. The first and most immediate concern of the Yugoslav leaders in 1948-49 was the Soviet Union's motivation in the conduct of its policy toward Yugoslavia. Not long after the June 1948 Cominform Resolution, once it had become clear that no mere “misunderstanding” was at issue, Yugoslav charges of “hegemonism” and “imperialism” began to make themselves heard. Djilas's 1949 statement in Komunist was among the first that explicitly referred to the USSR's “imperialist denial of equality between socialist states.”¹² The positive corollary to this accusation was the principle of separate paths to socialism, entailing recognition of the diverse economic and cultural conditions among different countries and of the impossibility of a single country maintaining a monopoly over the policies and ideologies of worldwide socialist development.¹³ Almost immediately, however, the Yugoslav critique of what was seen as an aggressive Soviet foreign policy became linked with a new understanding of the internal structure of the USSR. “Hegemonism”¹⁴ in foreign affairs was seen as the external continuation of an internal bureaucratic, statist structure of power. As Kardelj wrote in his 1960 attempt to extrapolate the earlier analysis of Soviet foreign policy behavior to the Chinese, the consciousness of “bureaucratic étatiste conservatism” sees only the dimension of centralization and coordination, while it is blind to concurrent processes of individuation and increasing autonomy among nations.¹⁵

While a general consensus may have existed with regard to bureaucracy as the dominant feature of Soviet society, a fundamental disagreement over the proper classification of the Soviet political system was evident from the very early stages of the critique.¹⁶ The dominant view associated with Kardelj was that the Soviet Union was politically a “bureaucratic despotism” in which the state bureaucracy had emancipated itself from the control of the working class and imposed its will on society as a whole. Kardelj, however, saw this change as a “degeneration” or a “deformation,” not as an irreversible social change of global proportions that could not be remedied by the subsequent peaceful development of the forces of production.¹⁷ Djilas was more outspoken, insisting that the Soviet system was “state capitalist” in nature. In his view, this implied that state and economic interests had become so deeply intertwined that they were virtually identical; and the “state capitalist” label certainly suggested much more strongly than Kardelj's version that there was something radically unsocialist and exploitive about this new social formation.

The difference between these two approaches, subtle as it may have seemed, nevertheless had clear political overtones which became fully evident only with Djilas's quite unofficial New Class. At first, however, there was a generally shared reluctance to apply traditional Marxian class analysis to Soviet social structure. Both Kardelj and Djilas, in the early stages of the debate, agreed that the Soviet bureaucracy constituted a caste rather than a class (in a manner rather like that of Trotsky when he rejected the notion that the bureaucracy could be thought of as a class in its own right, insisting that it was instead a “stratum” or a “caste” on the grounds that neither private ownership of the means of production nor inheritance existed in the Soviet Union¹⁸). Even as late as 1952, virtually the only Yugoslav theorist to claim that the USSR was a class society was Boris Ziherl,¹⁹ Director of the Institute of Social Sciences in Belgrade and, curiously, a formidable dogmatist in matters of philosophy, later to become one of the staunchest Yugoslav defenders of “diamat” and one of the most ardent foes of Praxis and its class analysis of Yugoslav society. Thus an important question for any Marxian social analysis was left unsatisfactorily resolved by the early official critique. Whenever the “class” issue would be taken up in subsequent years, it would continue to have important political, as well as sociological, implications.

Perhaps the most difficult and sensitive problem in the Yugoslav reevaluation of the USSR was that of the Party. On the one hand, without the Party, the revolution would have been impossible; as Djilas put it, “the flame of the Revolution not only burned within them, but they were the Revolution.”²⁰ But it was also the Party and its massive administrative structure that constituted the core of the bureaucracy that had been responsible for the corruption of the Bolshevik Revolution, a fact that could hardly have been ignored. Although few of the Yugoslav Party ideologists agreed with Djilas's later analysis linking the Party with “the beginning of a new class of owners and exploiters,”²¹ and while it is also possible to dispute on factual grounds the dominance of the Party apparatus itself under Stalin, still it was felt that the Party's structure was at least partially responsible, if only in a genetic-historical sense, for the bureaucratic degeneration of the Revolution of 1917.²² And when critical Yugoslav Marxists eventually turned their attention inward to Yugoslav society itself, it was impossible for them to forget this important lesson.

To summarize, for a moment, the tremendous scope of the Yugoslav reexamination of socialism in the Soviet Union, a “socialism” which the Yugoslav leaders had always been convinced was the model for all future socialist societies, and to understand the jarring impact these revelations must have had on their sense of direction, it is well to turn to the words of the Praxis Marxist Predrag Vranicki:

It was necessary to reject directly an entire dogmatic heritage which had been carefully and relentlessly forged and imposed in the second period of the Third International by Stalin and his apologists. A clear demand was felt, in both theory and practice, for a genuine reconsideration of all the Stalinist values which had been propagated in the name of Marxism. Analysis of the tendencies of modern capitalism, the paths of socialist revolution, the theory of the state, the meaning of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the party, and of man in socialism and his intellectual endeavors—all this, in the context of this struggle, was posed in a new light.²³

The Yugoslav critique of the Soviet system, however, was not restricted to the “negative” criticisms outlined above. In an important sense, the critique was a positive critique, involving elements of departure in practice as well. In the first five years after their expulsion from the Cominform, the Yugoslavs initiated two highly significant structural reforms, the introduction of workers' self-management ( 1950) and a far-reaching revision of the organization and tasks of the Party itself (1952). While these reforms will be examined at greater length in the pages that follow, it suffices to note here that each was in itself a revolutionary innovation designed to strike at the roots of the problems associated with the degeneration of the revolution in the USSR. In the case of these reforms, a revolution in thought went hand in hand with the revolution in practice.

Yet for this crucial “third stage” of the Yugoslav revolution, what was needed in the realm of theory was not simply a superficial critique of the more grotesque aspects of the Soviet experience, but a clear and complete alternative to the Stalinist philosophical system which at least formally provided the rationale for the entire structure. This was a task for which the new regime's ideologists—bound by specific policies, often limited in their intellectual horizons, and wedded organically to the corpus of “dialectical materialism” no matter how bitter their attacks against Soviet practice—were not prepared. Thus it fell to a small but dynamic group of young university philosophers to return to the Marxist classics in search of a new theoretical framework, to which they found the key in the only recently discovered writings of the young Marx. But in so doing, they laid the foundations for a conflict between politics and philosophy that would erupt into the open only a decade later.

For while the sociopolitical critique of the Soviet system was grounded in a firm organizational base with its roots in the dominant power structure of the new society, the critique of philosophy—which quickly embraced all areas of consciousness under the general rubric of “culture”—had no such institutional support at the outset. The right to creativity in the sphere of culture had to be earned by writers and philosophers after the war. As one Praxis writer recalls, it was something which “the state did not offer voluntarily to cultural workers; rather, it was they who imposed it on the state.”²⁴ It is significant, moreover, that many of these “cultural workers” did not seek their autonomy as isolated individuals, but instead shared from the outset an awareness of their social importance as the core of a critical intelligentsia. In the early 1950s they would attempt for a brief time to formulate their concerns through the mouthpiece of a “thick journal” with only limited success, while from time to time they would engage their opponents in debates over Marxist philosophy at various symposia and discussions organized by regional and federal professional associations. Throughout this period, however, they grew and developed as a group until Finally, in the early 1960s, they founded the journal Praxis, which was to be the culmination and most lasting achievement of this group's search for an institution best suited to the need for a relentless “critique of all existing conditions” in the post-revolutionary society.

The “Struggle of Opinions”

One of the most significant political departures of the early 1950s issued from the Sixth Party Congress of 1952, when the CPY was redesignated the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. More than a change of name was involved here, however. The final Resolution of the Congress indicated what promised to be a major reorientation in the functions of the Party itself. Rejecting the traditional concept of the leading role of the Party, the Congress declared:

The League of Communists in its work is not and cannot be the immediate operational leader and commander in economic or in state or social life. Instead it acts in all organizations, organs, and institutions to have its line and positions, or the positions of its members, accepted, by means of its political and ideological activity, primarily through persuasion.²⁵

Along with this redefinition of the Party's role from one of direct political control to one of education and persuasion went a large-scale reorganization and decentralization of Party activities designed to parallel the already initiated reforms establishing workers' self-management in the economic sphere.²⁶ The Congress complemented its new view of the Party with a new conception of ideological struggle, declaring that without a democratic “struggle of opinions” the development of science and culture would be seriously impeded. The Party Resolution guaranteed that “every opinion having as its point of departure the struggle for socialism and socialist democracy . . . [would] have the right to fulfill itself and to develop.”²⁷

But the call for a “struggle of opinions” was not, on closer examination, without its problems. From the very beginning there was a fundamental tension in the nature of the League's tasks: on the one hand, it had been charged with primary responsibility for ideological education and persuasion, and it had a definite “line” to propagate among the masses; at the same time, it seemed to welcome a truly open confrontation of views as the most effective means of developing socialist culture. This tension would later be reflected in the famous 1958 Program of the LCY. There it was stated that “tendencies towards ideological monopoly have always been an obstacle to the development of socialist thought, and a source of dogmatism and opportunist- revisionist reaction” and that in the spheres of Marxism and culture in general the “Yugoslav Communists make no pretensions to possessing any kind of monopoly.” Still it was insisted that

unity of outlook on fundamental internal and foreign policy problems, on essential questions in the struggle for socialism, is an indispensable condition for unity of will and action on the part of the Communists.²⁸

This tension between diversity and uniformity, between the new (the “struggle of opinions”) and remnants of the Stalinist past (the “unity of will and action”) had perplexing implications. In fact, in the balance which the League tried to establish in the sphere of ideology there was much that was reminiscent of the CPY'S dilemma in the 1930s in the “conflict on the Left,” and indeed of the problems encountered by the Soviet Communist Party in the 1920s. A “struggle of opinions” was to be tolerated and encouraged throughout Yugoslav society, but not within the League's ranks, where unity was to prevail. The “struggle of opinions” was presented as the sole path toward the creation of a truly socialist culture, but at the same time it was felt that dissension within the League itself would render it incapable of promoting that very cultural consciousness. In short, having formally relinquished the role of direct control, the League was still in many ways a party in the traditional Bolshevik sense, and it has remained so to this day. But in 1952, talk of more modest tasks for Yugoslav Communists and even of the “withering away of the Party” went largely unheeded or misunderstood by the bulk of “responsible” League members. In the words of Hoffman and Neal:

Some—particularly among the middle-level functionaries—met the new situation by ignoring it, continuing to act as before and to buck both Party and government reforms. Some read into the new line more than was there and actually came out against Party positions. Others just threw up their hands.²⁹

Whatever the reactions of Party functionaries, the call for a struggle of opinions was welcomed by intellectuals who quickly proceeded to put it into action. The way in which many of these “cultural workers” interpreted the very concept of “culture” contributed to the latent tension between themselves and the Party. They refused to let the cultural sphere be neatly defined and restricted by the Party to suit its own convenience. Instead, the term “culture” was taken to have the broadest possible meaning, encompassing all aspects of conscious human social activity. Culture, as Rudi Supek defined it in a key essay in 1953, is universal, having as its subject man as a social being who creates and transforms the reality in which he lives. Paraphrasing Marx's famous dictum on communism, Supek wrote that socialist culture in particular

is neither a state of affairs that we will realize in the distant future, nor some abstract ideal which we oppose to concrete social development in the present, but the real movement through which we transcend class society. . . .

The creation of a socialist culture, moreover, was seen by Supek not as an automatic process of reflection of the base in the ideological superstructure as heretofore portrayed in “orthodox” Marxist theory, but as a “conscious, critical effort of raising human consciousness and sentiment to a higher level in the sense of emancipation from various forms of the alienation of man in class society.” Not only, then, does this concept of culture study man as an active, creative social being—it both presupposes man as such a being and sees it as its mission to contribute to the development of the free, creative personality.³⁰ Instead of serving the function of preserving social values which perpetuate the existing order, this was a view of culture in which the cultural act is an historical act, one which prepares the way for substantively new ways of acting and seeing the world.

One of the sources for this new stress on the transformative aspect of culture was doubtless to be found in the ambiguous situation of Yugoslav intellectuals themselves after the Second World War. Most members of the prewar generation of communist intellectuals had actively participated in the Partisan struggle. They gave themselves completely to the Revolution, but afterward found that they had to define a new role for themselves:

The intellectuals had previously been the principal agitators and vehicles of the idea to the masses; now, for better or for worse, they found themselves in a situation where the ideological dimension of their activity became their lot. . . . Despite sporadic hesitations, they had participated for the most part in the revolution and proved that they had no social and political interest save that of the working class. . . . But the situation in which they found themselves after the revolution was noteworthy insofar as the event that had been the most important [for them] had already taken place.³¹

In order to avoid being trapped permanently in this tragic position, many of these intellectuals came to conceive of their task as one of continuing the revolution which had taken place in the political and social spheres, extending it to the sphere of consciousness. But the transformation of consciousness is never a process which has any such inherent, clearly defined boundaries as does the transformation of political structure. It was therefore possible for the cultural revolution to run far ahead of the political (and social) revolution, with uncomfortable consequences for the self-ordained cultural revolutionaries themselves.

This situation was in many respects reminiscent of that of the writer after the bourgeois revolution as described by Sartre. The essence of the writer's activity before the revolution was criticism and the appeal to freedom; in Sartre's words, “his books were free appeals to the freedom of his readers.” But after the revolution,

the miraculous harmony which united the essential demands of literature with that of the oppressed bourgeoisie was broken as soon as both were realized. . . . Once freedom of thought and confession and equality of political rights were gained, the defense of literature became a purely formal game which no longer amused anyone; something else had to be found.

In Yugoslavia, this “something else” was to be philosophy, although this too was fraught with danger. For to take a Final look at Sartre's account, postrevolutionary culture, it seems, is always in a very delicate position: as with bourgeois art in its early period, “it would forbid itself to lay hands on principles, for fear they might collapse.”³²

It was precisely such principles which many young Yugoslav philosophers wished to reexamine in the early 1950s. For by doing so, they felt they could discover what made Stalinism work by discovering and identifying the principles which informed the behavior of actors in the Stalinist political system. These principles were, they thought, to be found most clearly formulated in the philosophical system known as “dialectical and historical materialism,” the Soviet regime's reigning ideology, the validity of which the Yugoslav Communists did nothing to question during the early postwar years despite their profound political rupture with Stalin.³³ And it was precisely in the struggle of opinions in philosophy that the conflict between the Party and the intellectuals within Yugoslavia was to have its most lasting impact.

Even before Yugoslavia's rupture with the Cominform, there were already signs that young philosophy students in the universities were beginning to have their doubts about the Party's policy of leaving the basic structure of dialectical materialism intact. Mihailo Marković, at the time a 25-year-old ex-Partisan army officer studying philosophy at the University of Belgrade, recalls that many Yugoslav students, disturbed by the postwar attempts of Zhdanovism to regiment and systematize Soviet philosophy, began to question the coherence and viability of “diamat” in seminar discussions as early as 1947.³⁴ The dynamism of these students and their views is attested to by Gajo Petrović, who at the time of the Cominform break, at the age of 21, found himself in Moscow where (as well as in Leningrad) he had been pursuing graduate studies in philosophy. Upon returning to Yugoslavia, Petrović observed that philosophy was attracting many students who found the appeal of conventional youth organizations to be generally unstimulating, breeding apathy rather than enthusiasm. These students, Petrović speculates, may therefore have directed their energies to the newly emerging struggle of opinions in philosophy, which promised to provide a great deal of intellectual stimulation and opportunity for social involvement.³⁵ And it was from this generation—men and women who had been born in the mid-1920s and who matured both politically and intellectually during the days of the Partisan War—that many of the leading Praxis Marxists were to come.

What were only private doubts of philosophy students in the late 1940s became articulated publicly in the early 1950s when these students began to complete their formal studies and were able to formulate and articulate their doubts in published essays, often to the displeasure of their mentors and Party officials. Petrović was one of the first to experience such pressures. As the official representative of Zagreb University's Philosophy Faculty on the University's Party Committee, Petrović heard that body's Central Committee criticize the Faculty for its unorthodox tendencies and independence; Petrović himself came under harsh condemnation and threats of expulsion when he refused to accept the Party's criticism.³⁶ Such incidents occurred with increasing regularity as young philosophers such as Petrović came of age and began to speak their minds in public.

By 1952, the year of the CPY Sixth Congress and the formal announcement of the “struggle of opinions,” it was already evident that there existed a sizeable number of people who were prepared to meet the Party's challenge in the field of philosophy. In March 1951 Mihailo Marković had spoken to the First Congress of the Serbian Philosophical Society about the Soviet “revision” of the foundations of Marxist philosophy, while in 1952 Predrag Vranicki published a book dealing with the Soviet treatment of the philosophical problem of the universal, the particular, and the individual. Also in 1952, the First issues of the journal Pogledi appeared, containing an unusual account by Petrović of the development of Marxist philosophy in the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1938. In 1953, Vranicki published an important study of Marx's intellectual development and the first edition of Marx's and Engels' early works, including large excerpts from the 1844 manuscripts.³⁷ These were all major events in Yugoslav philosophical and cultural life. In the following pages I shall attempt to review briefly the major features of some of these seminal works while giving the reader some idea of the climate in which they appeared.

The revitalization of Marxist philosophy in Yugoslavia began, and has continued to be characterized by, the resurrection of the subjective, human aspect of Marx's thought and its contraposition to the traditional doctrines of the Third International as revealed by Stalin and accepted by the world communist movement. Marković's 1951 critique of current Soviet philosophy was infused throughout by a critique of the “false objectivism” not only of the Stalinist metaphysics which ascribed historical change to the independent operation of dialectical “laws,” but also implicitly of those Yugoslav critics (Djilas and Kardelj) who supposed that the degeneration of the Soviet system and the decadence of its theory and practice could be attributed solely to “objective conditions.” Marković wished to emphasize that a “subjective” factor—theory—may have been equally responsible for this state of affairs, especially a theory which was dogmatically held to be the unquestionable frame of reference and guide to action for all responsible communists. He indicted Stalinist dialectical and historical materialism for its “revisionist” theory of the strengthening of the state in socialism, its underestimation of the danger of bureaucracy, its reification of the dialectic into abstract formal method and ultimately into a gross form of pragmatism, and its growing fetishism of formal logic.³⁸ At the same time, he stressed that the false “scientific” objectivism of Soviet philosophy was, from a social standpoint, actually a radical form of subjectivist idealism. As evidence for the latter charge he cited the following remarkable passage from the authoritative Soviet philosopher M. B. Mitin:

It is necessary to purge brains fundamentally. . . . It is necessary to organize the true conversion of our cadres to the practice of socialist society. . . . If slave society, feudal society, and the bourgeoisie at the height of its flowering could point to their scientists and philosophers, who in numerous books glorified the exploitative state and the social structure of the epoch, so much the more appropriate is it for us to give our scientific cadres the task of singing the glories of our state, to celebrate it in serious research, the state of a new type, our society, which knows of no antagonistic classes, of no social and national oppression, our great Bolshevik party—the vanguard of the Soviet people, leader and inspirer of our entire development.³⁹

The brunt of Marković's rebuttal of Soviet philosophy, however, rested on the charge that it factored out of the dialectic the active role of man that so thoroughly permeated the works of Marx. In the rigidly formalized dialectic of Soviet Marxism, he claimed, it was the dialectic, not man, that thinks, knows, and acts. History, Marković urged, is made neither by objective forces nor dialectical laws; it is made instead by people, who act to transform their world within the limits of historically defined possibilities.⁴⁰ With this observation, which he claimed was completely consistent with the spirit and letter of Marx's writings, he turned the charge of “revisionism” back against Soviet doctrine itself. And it was above all this humanist perspective on Marxian theory that was to be the hallmark of Praxis theory as it developed throughout the years.

Petrović's critique of Soviet philosophy concentrated on the historical perspective. In this, he had two concerns: to illustrate the increasing use of authoritarian methods in philosophy paralleling the rise of Stalinism in the USSR, and to plead for a subject-matter for philosophy distinct from those of other fields of intellectual inquiry, particularly science. Petrović skillfully traced the development of the debate between the so-called Mechanists and Dialecticians, and while expressing disagreement with both schools of thought (albeit with a certain preference for Deborin and his colleagues), he still condemned the manner in which both were suppressed. Especially in the case of the 1930 offensive against the “Deborinists” by Mitin, Yudin, and Stalin himself, Petrović found particularly repulsive the invocation of partiinost (“party-mindedness”) and the sinister accusations of “Menshevizing idealism,” which he condemned as a gross incursion of political expediency into philosophical discussion. In substantive philosophical terms, Petrović indicated that a false polarity had been drawn between the Mechanists, whose object had been to liquidate philosophy and to forge an identity between Marxist dialectics and the laws of natural science, and the Deborinists, who Petrović concedes were prone to “abstract, scholastic ‘philosophizing',” resulting in an overly sharp distinction in their writings between philosophy and science.⁴¹ In retrospect, however, it almost seems that despite his detailed discussions of the issues which agitated these two parties, Petrović's chief concern in publishing this critical essay was to direct public attention to the general problem of authoritarianism in philosophy and to the still larger issue of the freedom of cultural creativity. This concern would in turn form the context of the struggles of the 1950s as the young theoretical critics began to grasp with increasing clarity the scope of the issues that were at stake.

For all the controversy they aroused, the philosophical bases of both Marković's and Petrović's critiques—the return to the humanistic conceptions of the “authentic Marx”—were probably only imperfectly understood by most of the “diamat”-trained philosophers who tried to come to grips with them in early 1952. But almost simultaneously in Zagreb, the 30-year-old Predrag Vranicki, whose intellectual background and involvement in the Partisan War gave him much in common with his contemporaries, published the first of three works that quickly earned him the reputation of being one of a new breed of unorthodox interpreters of Marx, On the Problem of the Universal, the Particular, and the Individual. Then in 1953 his Intellectual Development of Karl Marx reached the public, and together with the Early Works of Marx and Engels which he edited and published in the same year, these works furnished the conceptual foundations for a new and vital Marxism in Yugoslavia. Indeed, Vranicki's study of Marx's intellectual development was a noteworthy event in its own right. Although little known outside of Yugoslavia, this was among the first studies of Marx that argued for the fundamental unity of his thought, claiming that Marx had consistently carried over the humanist philosophical principles developed in his early writings (especially the Paris manuscripts of 1844) into his later work. While the term “socialist humanism” apparently came into use in Yugoslavia as early as 1948, Vranicki's 1953 work was the first solid theoretical exposition of the foundations of this doctrine in Marx himself.

Vranicki's works and those of his colleagues seem to have coincided with, if not in fact introduced, a new wave of interest in the question of human alienation within the Yugoslav philosophical community. Looking back over the journals of this period, one cannot fail to be impressed by the sudden explosion of attention devoted to the concept of alienation and its centrality to Marx's thought as a whole, prompted in part by an awareness of the efforts of Western European existentialists such as Sartre to reinterpret Marxism in light of current philosophical trends. Not only philosophers were preoccupied with this theme; one of the first sparks, in fact, seems to have come from the pen of Rudi Supek, a psychologist by training who had recently published a major work in literary history, Psychology of the Bourgeois Lyric. Shortly thereafter, Miladin ivo- tic, a 22-year-old philosopher from Belgrade, published an essay dealing with Marx's early philosophical development and the place of the concept of alienation in it, while another young philosopher-sociologist from Belgrade, Zagorka Pešic, wrote an enthusiastic review of Vranicki's new edition of the Marx-Engels Early Works in which she focused explicitly on the alienation question.⁴² This apparently obscure review of the literature on alienation in 1952-53 might be meaningless but for one important fact: the individuals mentioned here—Petrovic, Marković, Vranicki, Supek, Životi, Pesic—were among those who constituted the core of a movement throughout the 1950s to bring philosophy back to Marx and Marx back to philosophy. They, along with a few other colleagues, some of whom were already quite active along similar lines, would later be the motive force behind Praxis and the movement for radical criticism in socialist Yugoslavia in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The rediscovery of the young Marx in the early 1950s was thus the accomplishment of a small group of young theorists, infused with the defiant spirit of the Yugoslav Revolution, whose First major steps in their profession were bold and significant departures from the path of accepted truth. The importance of their individual contributions to this process of reevaluation should certainly not be discounted. But they were also products of a time of transformation in all areas of social life, when reevaluation and criticism were the order of the day. It would indeed be difficult to imagine the development of critical Marxism in Yugoslavia without the impetus provided by the experience of the Cominform break and the subsequent political and social reforms which promised to be a source of continuing social innovation for many years to come. As Petrovic has observed of the revitalization of Marxist philosophy in Yugoslavia, “it would be incorrect to give philosophers all the credit for this. In the struggle to restore a right relationship between philosophy and politics, politicians were equally active, and today we all agree: philosophy is its own judge.”⁴³

The Pogledi Experience

The struggle of opinions in the realm of philosophy was not without its characteristic structure, one which developed very soon after it had become apparent to the young philosophical critics that they held in common a number of views that set them apart from the mainstream “official” interpretation of Marxist philosophy in Yugoslavia. Just as the thick journal, largely under the writer Miroslav Krleža's influence, was the chief vehicle of creative thought and criticism in the communist movement of the 1930s in the absence of any other suitable institutional base for such activity, so in the early 1950s the thick journal emerged once again, but this time in a different cultural context.

As in other spheres of Yugoslav life in the late 1940s, so too in culture the Yugoslavs made an effort to outdo the Soviet Union itself in their adherence to Stalinist doctrine, in substance if not in name. This zeal manifested itself in a brief but intense ascendancy of socialist realist doctrine, associated with the name of the Party hack writer Radovan Zogović, who to this day is remembered by his compatriots as the “Yugoslav Zhdanov.” It soon became apparent, however, that this type of cultural dogmatism was fundamentally inconsistent with the wave of profound reexamination and reassessment that swept over Yugoslavia in the early 1950s. The turning point for Yugoslav culture came at the Third Congress of the Union of Writers of Yugoslavia, held in Ljubljana in 1952. Here, it fell to Krleža, who had isolated himself from the Party (in fear of retaliation for his earlier independence, some thought) ever since the beginning of the war, to deliver the major speech laying to rest once and for all the specter of socialist realism—and with it, his old enemy Zogović. No longer was the Party to rule cultural life by decree. Cultural workers, in consonance with the call for a “struggle of opinions,” were free to explore and utilize new forms of self-expression. Diversity and open discussion, rather than uniformity and enforced consensus, it was felt, were the surest ingredients for the development of a truly strong, dynamic socialist culture in Yugoslavia.

The first reaction of the Yugoslav cultural community to the new state of affairs was not, however, an immediate and spontaneous flowering of a vigorous new socialist literature, but instead a retreat into the doctrine of art for art's sake, an attempt to insulate culture from other areas of social activity, and a general privatization of views. In response to the sudden absence of crude political pressure, the humanist intelligentsia's ideal of social activity now turned inward, from a “bad reality” to a pure, good, impenetrable, and hence unchallengeable, inner subjective reality. The Slovenian philosopher Taras Kermauner writes: “One who before the war knew how to change a bad atmosphere now became a victim, a passive reflection of the atmosphere, a helpless pawn in the hands of fate.”⁴⁴ While intellectuals, to be sure, were still victims of the bureaucracy and its meddling in cultural affairs, many were also victims of their own apathy, bred partly by the bureaucracy itself but also, paradoxically, by the very fact of its absence. And Krleža himself, isolated and in disgrace only ten years before, was now catapulted into prominence, exercising an enormous amount of influence (especially in Zagreb) over Yugoslav cultural affairs.

The most significant attempt to inject a new sense of purpose into this cultural vacuum and to challenge Krleža's influence was the journal Pogledi (Views), founded in Zagreb by Rudi Supek in 1952. Supek's background, to which we have alluded earlier, was quite different from that of the bulk of the theorists engaged in the “struggle of opinions” in philosophy. He was, first of all, older than his colleagues by about ten years, having been born in 1913. Partially by virtue of his age, he brought to the nascent group a wealth of experience which many of its younger members lacked. Unlike them, he was never a member of the Yugoslav Communist Party and did not experience at first hand the dramas of the Partisan War. Instead, having found himself in Paris at the outbreak of World War II, he enrolled in the French Communist Party and played an active role in the French Resistance, helping to relocate refugees from the Spanish Civil War to their native countries. With the Nazi occupation he was arrested and interred in Buchenwald, where he collaborated with Jozef Franck (later to be executed along with Slansky in 1952) in the leadership of a daring underground prisoners' organization.⁴⁵ After the war he returned to Paris, where he remained for a few years to complete his studies with Jean Piaget. He also familiarized himself with the intense debates in the French Communist movement about literature and culture, in which he seems to have been reservedly partial to Sartre's position. Thus, sensitized to the social importance of cultural activity, and a proved fighter for principle by virtue of his resistance background, Supek quickly grasped the situation upon returning to Yugoslavia and issued the first number of Pogledi in November 1952.

The scope of Pogledi, reminiscent of that of the many interwar “thick journals” edited by communist intellectuals, included questions of philosophy, literature and art, sociology and history, economics and law, and the natural sciences. Yet Supek wished to be selective about the type of material published in Pogledi, avoiding the dull scholasticism of “cabinet pieces” and orienting the journal instead toward open advocacy of the position of socialist humanism. In the statement of purpose prefacing the first issue of Pogledi, Supek declared that the journal's attention would be directed toward the “focal” problems of social and natural science, “but especially those problems that directly encroach upon the creation of a total scientific world-view and the construction of socialist culture.”⁴⁶ Stimulating contributions were made to Pogledi by young philosophers such as Vranicki, Petrović, Marković, Vanja Sutlić, Vladimir Filipović, Milan Kangrga, Danilo Pejović, Danko Grlić, and Svetozar Stojanović, as well as by sociologists and literary critics such as Supek, Grgo Gamulin, Ante Fiamengo, Oleg Mandić, and Eugen Pusić. An enthusiastic but properly critical interest was manifested toward Western European thought and especially the vigorous development of existentialism and Marxism in France, while an important debate on formal logic and the dialectic was carried on in the pages of Pogledi in 1953-54.

As already noted, Supek's main personal concern and primary motivation for launching Pogledi was the development of a vigorous socialist culture in Yugoslavia. In December 1953 he wrote a highly provocative essay for Pogledi denouncing the state of Yugoslav cultural life, a piece designed to sharpen the field of discussion and to bring into better focus the mission of the journal itself. From the extreme of “socio-dogmatic conformism,” he saw Yugoslav culture moving toward the opposite pole of “petty-bourgeois or anarcho-individualistic nonconformism” and wondered why cultural workers had suddenly stopped talking about “decadence” as if the phenomenon had ceased to exist altogether. The problem, Supek thought, lay as much in the impersonal institutionalization of cultural creativity, the privatization of cultural concerns, and the immaturity of cultural workers (as evidenced by their unwillingness to assume an autonomous public stance) as in the direct intervention of the political hierarchy in cultural life, which he condemned in the sharpest terms. To the question, “Why is there no struggle of opinions?” he answered that those responsible for publicizing view-points of social significance and provoking confrontation—in his view, essential elements of all true cultural activity—were avoiding their responsibility by retreating into their cabinets in continuing fear of the political and personal consequences of behaving otherwise.⁴⁷ Supek, for one, was not about to yield to the threats of the bureaucracy nor to the temptation to remain silent. To do either would have been, in his view, to be false to the calling of the cultural worker, which is to stir controversy and to arouse the critical faculty of each individual member of society. Thus Supek's aim, and that of Pogledi, was to extend the principle of criticism from philosophy to culture in general and to free that criticism from the strictures of political authority.

While Supek may have roundly condemned what he perceived as the cultural vacuum of the early 1950s, Pogledi did not, of course, appear in a political vacuum. It was overshadowed in late 1953 and early 1954 by the sensational “Djilas affair,” culminating in the expulsion of the prominent Party ideologist and activist from the Central Committee for his public essays advocating the radical democratization of the Party and criticizing the increasingly decadent morality of the ruling stratum. While the Djilas affair has become a cause cèlèbre in the history of communist heresy, one aspect of it seems to have been virtually lost in the wake of its sensation: the role of the thick journal. Djilas's critical articles at first appeared in the Party's daily organ Borba, which was an appropriate enough forum considering that Djilas was after all one of the Party's chief ideological spokesmen. But Djilas soon became aware of the growing uncertainty of the relationship between himself and the Party and in late 1953 founded a new journal, Nova misao (New Thought), to serve as an independent mouthpiece for the growing wave of criticism for which he personally was in no small way responsible. It was in fact the appearance of what was to be the next-to-last issue of Nova misao, containing Djilas's famous “Anatomy of a Moral,” that directly precipitated the Central Committee meeting of January 17, 1954 at which he was denounced by his colleagues and deprived of all his Party positions. A month before, the prominent politician Petar Stambolić (a political friend of police chief Aleksandar Ranković) was reported to have complained that Djilas intended to organize Yugoslav political life, or at least a segment of it, around this new journal. In any event it is clear that the January 1954 issue of Nova misao constituted at least a partial basis for Kardelj's charges of intra-Party factionalism against Djilas.⁴⁸

Even before the appearance of “Anatomy of a Moral,” Djilas had strongly hinted at his design to establish a new ideological tendency. At the end of 1953 he used a Nova misao article in an attempt to discredit Supek's Pogledi—clearly his chief rival at the time—by charging that Pogledi represented the ideological “right” in Yugoslav cultural life, thus implying that Nova misao and its editor were to be identified with the “left.”⁴⁹ To a certain extent, moreover, Djilas's attack on Pogledi could be read—and was read by many at the time—as an attempt to gain Krleža's support for what Djilas perceived as an imminent showdown within the Party. Djilas himself, to be sure, was shortly thereafter publicly discredited and his journal suppressed, but the ramifications of these events for Pogledi were not what might have been expected. Instead of finding itself vindicated by the Djilas affair, Pogledi now found itself the object of intensified pressure and criticism, for Krleža, who had refrained from taking sides with Djilas, now apparently felt that he had a free hand to dispense with Pogledi. For its part, the government gladly went along with Krleža, evidently being motivated by a desire to smooth over all the rough edges revealed by the recent turmoil and to restore tranquility and at least the appearance of unity to the ideological sphere.

But the attacks on Pogledi, from both Djilas and other quarters as well, seemed only to hearten Supek rather than to discourage him. At the very least, he argued in Pogledi, they demonstrated that he had “touched on something that corresponds to a definite cultural-social practice and a definite popular mentality.”⁵⁰ In response to official pressure, however, Supek was forced to tone down the stridency of Pogledi articles; the issues of Pogledi published in late 1954 and 1955 contained relatively innocuous discussions in the theory of literature and esthetics. Public interest in the journal waned and in 1955 it was Finally abandoned.

Even the demise of Pogledi, however, had its instructive aspects. First, it was revealed that bureaucratic repression was still very much a force to be reckoned with in Yugoslav cultural life; and second, that a journal with a social mission, even one written in a predominantly theoretical manner (as was Pogledi, and after it, Praxis) must sustain its tempo of criticism and radicalization, even at the risk of death by suppression, or else suffer the costs of losing its identity entirely and dying a slow and inglorious death of quiescence. These lessons were not to be lost on the future participants in the Praxis undertaking, many of whom, significantly, were among the major contributors to Pogledi. And the Pogledi experience was certainly deeply engraved in Supek's mind when in 1966 he was called upon to help guide Praxis along with Gajo Petrović in the capacity of Coeditor-in-Chief, a position which Supek held for seven turbulent years. While the Pogledi experience may have had little lasting impact on the public at large, it did serve the important function of bringing together for the first time a group of young Yugoslav theoretical critics in the context of a true thick journal; and in several senses, Praxis must therefore be viewed as the legitimate heir of this initial venture. By the same token, the Pogledi and Djilas affairs only heightened the sensitivity of Party leaders to overly zealous journals and their editors. During the next few years of ideological vigilance, it would be impossible to resume the enterprise which Supek had so inauspiciously but boldly begun.

1955_ 1960: Years of Reconsolidation

The subsequent period, characterized by relative inactivity in terms of overt and organized (or semi-organized) intellectual criticism, was nevertheless not one of total cultural dormancy. After the Pogledi and Djilas episodes, as Kermauner has observed, criticism reoriented itself to new conditions, for

insofar as this activity was public and clear, the bureaucracy would be able to designate it on the spot as a deviation in world-view and political heresy. . . . The manner of struggle had to be sly, underground, private, in small circles: the intellectual perspectives of this or that bureaucrat were undermined with small blows, now here, now there. . . . It was precisely this private quality that the bureaucratic dogmatist could not take by surprise.⁵¹

The Party's Executive Committee was in fact deeply troubled by this state of affairs. In its important Circular Letter of February 1958 it complained that

individual Communists . . . [are sometimes] irresponsible in their behavior, yielding to negative, non-constructive, and criticizing gestures which are fashionable. Very often Communists, cultural workers in particular, hold discussions which are not based on principles and thus form groups and make intrigues.⁵²

The veterans of the Pogledi venture, from both Zagreb and Belgrade, continued to meet at professional gatherings and to collaborate with each other in their teaching and research capacities, pursuing old themes as well as developing new ones in their writings.⁵³ Particular attention was devoted to the role of Hegel and his dialectic in Marx's intellectual development, thus further enlarging on the theme of alienation and the interest in the young Marx which had been generated in the early 1950s. By the very openness and diversity of their work, these thinkers continued to chip away at the monolith of “diamat,” whose proponents had by no means conceded defeat in their struggle to impose the traditional orthodoxy on Yugoslav philosophy.⁵⁴ But while in the mid-fifties the “diamat” school was still far from being totally discredited in the eyes of the Yugoslav public, this state of affairs soon came to an end as a result of two important factors: the appearance of yet another unorthodox journal, and the Bled Conference of 1960 on the theory of reflection.

When Naše teme (Our Themes) first appeared in 1957 under the editorship of Vjekoslav Mikecin, the country was still in the grip of the reign of Party discipline that had been imposed shortly after the Sixth Party Congress and the Djilas affair.⁵⁵ But by early 1958 it was already becoming apparent that an ideological change was in the air, for the League of Communists, in preparation for its Seventh Party Congress to be held in Ljubljana later that year, published its provisional theses for the new Party Program, an event which stirred controversy and widespread criticism of Yugoslavia throughout the communist world.⁵⁶ Thus with Naše teme, the thick journal made its reappearance at a propitious time. The goal of Naše teme, whose young Editorial Board included most of those who had been active in Pogledi and who would later be actively involved in Praxis, was similar to that of Pogledi—to stimulate open public discussion of focal questions of society and theory. Although many of the essays in Naše teme were no less provocative than those in Pogledi, they were now in step with the political mood of the country and its leadership, which seemed to have recovered much of the ideological dynamism that it had lost in the mid- 1950s as a result of the Djilas affair. The themes of humanism, alienation, self-management, and ideology were once again openly articulated from a critical perspective. Now, when the Editor of the journal addressed himself to “our critics,” he had in mind the Soviet and Chinese communist parties and their attitudes toward Yugoslavia rather than any domestic foes of the journal itself. Something of the old solidarity of the days of 1948-52 had been regained in the flush of enthusiasm generated by the 1958 Party Program. Mikecin could now speak without too much exaggeration of the identity of interests between intellectuals and the political sphere, which had once again become infused with a revolutionary and experimental élan.⁵⁷

Armed with a new sense of confidence, the group of philosophers who had originally collaborated on Pogledi now gathered their strength for what they foresaw as the final offensive against dogmatism in Yugoslav Marxist philosophy. Some preliminary skirmishes took place in two discussions in 1959, one in Sarajevo on contemporary problems in Marxist philosophy organized by the Yugoslav Association for Philosophy and Sociology, and the second in Zagreb, organized by the Croatian Philosophical Society, on the “young” and the “old” Marx.⁵⁸ Both discussions were primarily concerned with a question which since that time has become one of the most widely debated issues among students of Marxism: is there an essential continuity in Marx's thought from his early manuscripts to Capital? Or should a distinction be drawn between a “young Marx” who was preoccupied with Hegel and humanism, and in particular with human alienation, and a “mature Marx” whose concern was to elaborate a strictly scientific view of social life comparable in method to that of the natural sciences, a Marx who abandoned his “immature” passion for humanism and vague “philosophizing”? The division between dogmatists and proponents of “creative Marxism” in these discussions coincided with disagreements over this central issue, with the former group insisting that the “mature Marx” was the only authentic Marx. The indecisive conclusion of these debates, perhaps a consequence of the very breadth of the issues themselves, was disappointing to the contenders from both sides.

Thus for the major confrontation, set for November 1960 at Bled, it was agreed that the central theme should be the so-called theory of reflection, which had been touched upon by both sides in the earlier discussions. The Bled conference,⁵⁹ organized by the Yugoslav Association for Philosophy and Sociology, was in fact the most dramatic—and final—direct confrontation of the “innovators” (so the core of the future Praxis group was designated at this conference by their opponents) and the proponents of dialectical materialism in postwar Yugoslavia. Here the vital and most sensitive nerve of “diamat” was probed in the open— the theory of reflection itself, as well as its underlying assumption of the existence of a totally objective world of matter with a structure of its own, prior to and independent of man and human activity. While this ontological assumption and the epistemological position growing out of it will be examined more closely in the context of a broader discussion of the theory of praxis and alienation in the next chapter, there are nevertheless a few noteworthy features of the Bled conference that should be recorded here.

This conference, First, was not simply a polar opposition of two internally homogeneous “camps” of Marxian thought. Among the defenders of the theory of reflection there were those who seriously attempted to modify it by emphasizing the role of an active, human, knowing subject, or who at the very least attempted to engage in serious dialogue (Veljko Ribar, Dragan Jeremić, Andrija Stojković, Bogdan Šešić); some of their colleagues, on the other hand, were apparently unable to bring their remarks above the level of empty sloganeering, name-calling, phrase-mongering, disgraceful conduct, and poor philosophy at best.⁶⁰ By the same token, even the “innovators” disagreed seriously among themselves in terms of substantive matters regarding the scope and validity of the theory of reflection, and perhaps more importantly, in terms of the diversity of philosophical approaches they applied to the problem at hand. While Marković, for instance, criticized the theory of reflection from an epistemological standpoint, pointing out that all statements about reality have only tenuous truth value at best, Kangrga strongly objected to the epistemological position itself and made this objection the basis of his critique of the theory and its assumptions. This apparently subtle difference in approach between Marković and Kangrga in turn suggested a fundamental, underlying disagreement between the two and the intellectual traditions under which each matured. It is therefore all the more significant that both thinkers found it possible to agree in their rejection of the theory of reflection, a coincidence which derived from their common vision of a nondogmatic Marxism critically incorporating the most valuable insights of all major intellectual traditions, both “positivist” and “idealist.”

Indeed the differences among individual members of the two major parties to the discussion paled in significance before the principal theoretical issue of the Bled conference, which was whether a Marxian revolutionary theorist could hold that matter and its objective, autonomous structure is “primary” and that consciousness is “secondary,” merely reflecting material reality without simultaneously transforming it and creating new forms of reality.⁶¹ The defenders of “diamat” clung rigidly to Engels' formulation in “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy” that “the paramount question of the whole of philosophy” is that of the relationship between existence and consciousness and the primacy of one with respect to the other.⁶² The “innovators,” in contrast, were unified in suggesting that as posed this question was overly simplistic. The real concern of philosophy, they insisted, is (or should be) with human praxis as world-transforming and self-transforming activity, embracing both the subjective and objective aspects of human existence.

The absence of agreement over these issues, however, was only the surface expression of an even more far-reaching divergence. Part of the task of all social institutions, it may be argued, lies in the need to claim that the existing social order is based on the common acceptance of a set of norms and assumptions about social existence that have objective and universal validity. Especially in a social system where philosophy is traditionally seen as a handmaiden to politics, philosophy is given the special task of constructing an ontological and epistemological picture of reality conforming to the dominant institutions' need to impose their norms on society in this way. While by i960 most Yugoslav philosophers had outgrown the Stalinist view articulated by Mitin⁶³ that the immediate task of philosophy was that of “singing the glories of our state,” there were still those who felt compelled to defend the doctrine of dialectical materialism lest the movement's unity of thought be allowed to crumble and fall prey to “bourgeois deviation” and “revisionism.” Deprived of its claim upon exclusive knowledge of the truth, these philosophers feared, the movement's very legitimacy would be cast into doubt. When Bogdan Šešić asked at Bled, “Why is the theory of reflection fundamental?” he echoed the convictions of his colleagues when he answered, “Because only on the basis of it can we solve the problem of the true cognition of reality.”⁶⁴ And it is precisely this “true cognition of reality” which communist parties have traditionally invoked since the time of the Second International, and with increasing vigor as they have assumed the role of ruling parties, in affirming their historical justification.

For this reason, the theory of reflection was seen by its Yugoslav skeptics as having crucial ideological implications. As Supek wrote twelve years after the Bled conference, the theory of reflection “leads to a positivist, passive, conservative, and apologetic stance toward one's own social reality, while the introduction of the category of praxis means the establishment of a critical and creative dimension in the socialist world.” The apologetic element in the theory of reflection becomes evident, Supek claimed, when it is pragmatically assumed that by creating “material conditions” and an “institutional base” for socialism, an emancipatory socialist consciousness will automatically follow as a direct outgrowth of these “objective” factors, while all contrary ideological manifestations are seen as evidence of subversion or the importation of “alien conceptions.”⁶⁵ The implications of this mode of thinking are readily apparent. Since it is allegedly only the Party that possesses anything approximating “objective” knowledge about the social world, it is only within the Party that the individual can hope to attain such knowledge and to employ it in the service of the working class and the new social order. When individuals, on the contrary, seek to liberate social consciousness from this institutional base, they are portrayed by defenders of the ruling institutions as promulgators of heresy and advocates of social anarchy.

The traditionalists at the Bled conference were unsuccessful in their endeavor to salvage the theory of reflection.⁶⁶ Indeed, the Praxis Marxists look back on the Bled conference as the moment of their victory over dogmatic Marxism in Yugoslav philosophy,⁶⁷ and rightly so—not so much because of anything specific that happened at Bled, but because in a very real sense Bled and 1960 marked the end of one era of postwar Yugoslav philosophy and the beginning of another. Before 1960 dialectical materialism was still an extremely influential school in Yugoslav philosophy, even though its hegemony gradually came under challenge by a loosely defined group of “innovators.” After the Bled conference, however, orthodox philosophers refused to participate in the same conferences and symposia as their critics and assumed an increasingly defensive and reactive posture which was to remain characteristic in subsequent years. It rapidly became obvious that their grip on the Yugoslav philosophical establishment was yielding to that of the group of upstart insurgents, and that what was once a philosophical and ideological heresy was on its way to becoming something of a new orthodoxy. By 1964, for instance, it came as no surprise to read that Gajo Petrović had been elected to succeed Andrija Kresic, himself one of the sharpest critics of philosophical dogmatism, as President of the Yugoslav Philosophical Association (Krešić, in turn, had succeeded Mihailo Marković, who had been President of the Association since 1960), with Petrović carrying along with him into office a slate largely composed of many of his long-time colleagues.⁶⁸ In delayed reaction to the founding of Praxis in 1964 and its unexpected popularity, the “diamatists” two years later established their own journal, Dijalektika (under the editorship of Siniša Stanković and Andrija Stojković), which would from time to time earn the praise of Soviet philosophers citing it as the exception in a sea of revisionism and de- viationism.⁶⁹ But in the wake of the Bled discussions, dialectical materialism ceased to occupy the dominant position in Yugoslav philosophy, certainly an unusual state of affairs for a country that in 1960, despite the reforms of the previous decade, still retained many of the features of the traditional communist one-party state. With this provisional resolution of the debate over the nature of Marxian philosophy, the philosophical struggle of opinions moved into new areas of social life in the heightened political atmosphere of the early 1960s, as the “innovators” further attempted to define themselves and the implications of their theoretical victories.

1960-1964: The Birth of an Institution of Criticism

After the demise of Pogledi in 1955, the Young Turks of Yugoslav Marxist philosophy had found themselves lacking both a coherent structure in which to articulate their own position and a well-defined audience receptive to their critical orientation. Throughout the latter part of the 1950s, they were continually reminded of the importance of such structures of dissent by the Polish journal Po prostu and the Hungarian Petöfi Circle, both of which played significant roles in the rebellions of 1956, as well as by the French dissident communist journal, Arguments.⁷⁰ Naše teme, by now a very successful and widely read journal, had its original critical edge somewhat blunted (although not completely) by its commitment to represent a broad diversity of standpoints without advocating any single theoretical, ideological, or methodological approach. The Belgrade Filosofija, which had generated considerable interest by publishing the proceedings of philosophical debates organized by professional societies since 1957, was also unsuitable as a vehicle for the “innovators” for much the same reasons as Naše teme. A Ljubljana journal, Perspektive, briefly attempted in 1961 to devote its major attention to critical Marxian theory but was promptly banned by governmental authorities; for their efforts, both of Perspektive's chief editors, Veljko Rus and Dušan Pirjevec, lost their chairs in sociology at the University of Ljubljana.⁷¹ The repercussions of the Perspektive affair did little to encourage the critical intellectuals of Zagreb and Belgrade, increasingly doubtful about the inadequacy of Nose teme and Filosofija to their purposes, in their hopes of acquiring funding and a sponsor for a journal of their own.⁷²

The need for such a journal was only underscored in their minds by the magnitude of the task which they had set for themselves. They sought more than a place to publish—this they were not denied; what they desired was a journal under their own control that would represent a more permanent and structured way of reaching a large sector of the general public and of articulating a position which over the course of the 1950s had grown to embrace virtually all areas of inquiry in the humanistic disciplines. In 1963 and 1964 these intellectuals—the veterans of the Pogledi experience and of the Bled conference—published two provocative collections of essays that were well received by a broad readership. They attended three more important conferences at which they rapidly became the center of attention⁷³ and in the summer of 1963 organized their own small conference, the first of what was to be a series of “Korɩula Summer Schools.” Still, painfully aware of Marx's dicta that “material force can only be overthrown by material force,” but also that “theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses,”⁷⁴ they knew that neither published collections nor conferences were capable of developing into genuine vehicles of cultural change. What both of these forms lacked above all were the crucial elements of continuity over time and access to the broad public consciousness, transcending their own narrowly professional domain. Mindful of the role which journals had played in the cultural sphere both before and after the war, they felt that a new journal could satisfy these requirements of continuity and access while adding a new dimension to Yugoslav cultural life in general.

But by 1963 journals of various sorts were proliferating at a formidable rate in Yugoslavia. Ivan Babić, writing in a special issue of Naše teme dedicated to Krleza about “the journal as an instrument of cultural action,” referred to a “journal crisis” that had been developing for some time in Yugoslav cultural life.⁷⁵ While the volume of printed matter was certainly impressive, the confusing variety of orientations represented within each journal was felt to be debilitating precisely from the standpoint of the journal as an instrument of socially oriented cultural activity. Surely these considerations weighed heavily in the minds of critical Marxist intellectuals such as Petrović, Supek, and others when they surveyed the cultural landscape in search of a journal with which they could unqualifiedly identify.

A second set of pressures impelling these critical intellectuals to find a vehicle through which they could clearly express their identity was imposed by the political climate of the early 1960s. 1963 and 1964 were years of intense public debate in anticipation of the Eighth Congress of the LCY, which had been assigned the task of developing a new set of Party statutes. One of the most vital issues in this context was whether the principle of “democratic centralism,” which had been directly incorporated into the theory and practice of the Yugoslav Communist Party in the days of the Third International and had remained virtually intact since that time, was in need of revision in view of the Party's new tasks as defined over the past decade. Svetozar Stojanović, a young (born 1931) colleague of Mihailo Marković from the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Belgrade with experience in Party ideological work in the 1950s, contributed to the work of a Party commission examining the statutes and attempted to argue for a relaxation of the principle through provisions for open debate and criticism at all levels, and between all levels, of the Party hierarchy.⁷⁶ At the heart of the matter was the question of whether the Stalinist view of the “unity of will” as the necessary precondition for the “unity of action” retained equal validity for Yugoslavia, where the Party had undergone significant changes since 1952. Formally, more liberal conditions were ultimately incorporated into the Party statutes. But subsequent events were to show that the real intent of the Party leadership pointed in other directions—to silence and isolate a growing movement of disaffection from within the Party's own ranks.

The true feelings of the Party summit about democratic centralism became particularly evident at a symposium held in June 1964 in Novi Sad, organized by the Institute for the Study of the Workers' Movement.⁷⁷ In a controversial presentation, Stojanović called for a thorough democratization of the entire Party apparatus, involving not only the rotation of cadres and open discussion, but also use of the referendum, respect for the rights and opinions of the minority, democratic nomination and election of all Party officials, and full accessibility of the work of Party organs to public scrutiny. Stojanović's colleague Ljubomir Tadic (also from the Belgrade Philosophy Faculty), who had just a year earlier been involved in the preparation of the new Constitution, argued similarly that in a society espousing workers' self-management as its basic structural principle, the Party itself must be structured as a paradigm of democracy. In even stronger terms, Tadic spoke of the necessity of a thorough purge of all careerists and opportunists from the Party and active recruitment from the working class and the “socialist intelligentsia.”⁷⁸

These remarks did not sit well with the chief Party representative at the symposium, Veljko Vlahović, Chairman of the LCY

Central Committee's Commission on Ideological Work. Vlahović characterized the demand of Stojanović (and by clear implication, that of Tadic as well) for “self-management within the Party” as “a serious mistake,” and even went so far as to liken Stojanović's criticism of the existing structure of self-management in Yugoslavia to that of the Chinese—in the conditions of the early 1960s, a serious indictment indeed. The conclusion drawn by Vlahović from this confrontation was unambiguous, setting the Party's tone in its relations with that “socialist intelligentsia” of which Tadic had spoken for many years to come:

Our society will not benefit if within the League of Communists and in the name of communist thought individuals appear who do not stand on scientific ground and who will be blown by the winds in all directions like a weathervane. The League of Communists has no need of this kind of intellectual.⁷⁹

The Party's attitude was further confirmed a few months later in the context of a symposium of the Yugoslav Philosophical Association on the theme “Socialism and Ethics,” held in Vrnjaɩka Banja. Preliminary drafts of papers presented here by Stojanović and Marković on moral aspects of the revolution and revolutionary culture so horrified Party observers that the rapporteurs received ominous warnings before the symposium about the possible consequences of their actions—indeed, at one point the Party summit tried unsuccessfully to call off the symposium entirely.⁸⁰ Clearly, the Party leadership was not prepared to leave any room for such ideological “deviation” within its own institutional domain.

The climax of this confrontation between the Party and the intellectuals took place at the LCY Eighth Congress in December 1964, where there occurred, in the succinct words of a Praxis editorial commentary some months later, a “lively discussion” about Yugoslav philosophy and its relation to the Party.⁸¹ The discussion was organized by the Party's Commission on Ideological Movements and was apparently an official part of the Congress agenda. A highlight of the debate was a defense of the radical philosophers by the veteran Party theorist Makso Baće, who-had himself been in the forefront of the Yugoslav reexamination of Soviet theory and practice over fifteen years before. While critical of the philosophers' alleged utopianism and their treatment of various philosophical problems, Baće pleaded for tolerance and debate in the place of suspicion and exclusion in terms that must have been as irritating to the politicians as they were gratifying to the philosophers:

On the one hand, the fact is that our philosophers have understood, maintained, and developed this point [that Yugoslavia's political system has shown itself capable of generating a more humane society—css], and are continuing to struggle for it. Their best intentions. . . ought not to be put into doubt. . . . A common language must be found. . . . Members of the League of Communists should . . . not be overly sensitive when philosophers say something new, or if philosophy refuses to be an “ancilla politicae,” for if philosophy becomes a handmaiden, it ceases to be philosophy. . . . Only free, creative philosophy can ensure development; only aspirations toward self-management, free discussion—in the press, at congresses, in the League of Communists—dialogue, and the struggle of opinions can make possible development in all spheres.⁸²

Among the philosophers themselves present at this discussion, there seems to have been a clear sense that a critical turning point was about to be reached in the opportunities offered for criticism within the Party's ranks. This issue had been made all the more urgent in view of their general impatience to move from narrow theoretical exegesis to concrete social criticism. Marković, while quite optimistic in tone, voiced the feelings of his colleagues:

Our League of Communists has a great opportunity in this respect, not only because it has found a path to guarantee a requisite degree of democratism in our entire social structure as well as in scientific life, but also because it has succeeded in creating a new, progressive, humanist intelligentsia which is rather independent in its work but which is prepared to commit itself most adequately and creatively to the fundamental values of socialist society. There are few countries in the world, including socialist countries, that can boast of such an achievement. Therefore it is possible to look on the future development of our social-scientific thought with a great deal of confidence and optimism, all of its temporary weaknesses notwithstanding.⁸³

That one of those weaknesses was a clear hostility on the part of upper levels of the Party hierarchy to a common understanding with this humanist intelligentsia seems to have gone without saying. Nor was it indeed likely that many Party leaders felt very happy with Marković's suggestion that the humanist intelligentsia was to some degree their own creation.

The results of the Congress were disappointing. The new Party Statute, while providing for the election of all Party officials, adhered to the principle of democratic centralism as traditionally understood. The Statute failed to mention the “rights of the minority” to articulate dissident views after a decision had been reached, nor did it define any framework to guarantee that Party decisions themselves would be arrived at in a truly democratic manner.⁸⁴ In major speeches, moreover, high Party leaders such as Ranković and Vlahović explicitly and emphatically rejected the thesis that the League of Communists should be structured according to the principle of self-management, emphasizing instead the need for ideological unity and strongly implying that those who were insisting on the right to criticism should not expect to remain welcome much longer within the Party.⁸⁵ The time had clearly arrived for intellectuals committed to criticism as a mode of social activity to make a painful choice: either to submit to Party discipline and to abandon any ideas of “permanent revolution” through intra-Party criticism, or to attempt to carry on their critical activity beyond the boundaries of the Party's institutional structure. The true dimensions of this difficult decision had been anticipated by Marković a few months earlier when he asserted that the “moral integrity of the individual has primacy over the demand for pure discipline or loyalty.”⁸⁶

It is in this immediate political context that we must view the appearance of the journal Praxis.⁸⁷ To be sure, the actual decision to publish Praxis was made in late 1963⁸⁸ with its first issue appearing in September 1964, while the final verdict on intra-Party criticism was delivered only in December of the same year. Yet a climate of hostility to this mode of criticism had been mounting steadily over the past two years. Sensing a serious challenge to the Party's hegemony in ideological affairs in 1963, the influential dogmatist Boris Ziherl had stated that “the bearer of such criticism . . . must be only the progressive forces of society”⁸⁹—i.e., the Party itself. The Party simply could not tolerate any source of criticism which did not view itself as accountable to the Party's own designated bodies for ideological affairs. From this time forward, this would be the position of the Party leadership toward social criticism—welcoming only that criticism which could be safely identified as being associated with “responsible” Party officials and organs. Tadic would later characterize this attitude in the following way:

All other forms of criticism are seen not only as incompetent but as illegitimate as well, insofar as they are not put into motion within the framework of parameters which have been affirmed, planned, and prescribed beforehand. . . . Every humanly spontaneous criticism is denounced as “fault-finding” [kritizerstvo]. Accordingly, any unofficial, non-institutional attempt to transcend a contemplative, passive stance toward social reality is qualified in principle as ideological diversion, if not as subversive activity as well.⁹⁰

Thus a variety of interrelated pressures, some of which had been generated by the internal logic of the development of Yugoslav postwar Marxian philosophy and yet others which had been externally imposed by the political system, combined in 1963 and 1964 to encourage the philosophers and sociologists committed to a critical Marxian social theory to define clearly their role vis-à-vis other schools of thought and society at large. They finally persuaded the Croatian Philosophical Society to sponsor a journal exclusively under their editorship, which in line with their chief “theoretical” preoccupation they named Praxis. The Society's role was to be almost purely ceremonial, designed to meet the requirements of Yugoslav law and to exempt the Editorial Board from the need to make a detailed accounting of its aims to governmental authorities. The two Editors-in-Chief and the Editorial Board were to have full control over editorial policy and discretion, while for its part the Society would not directly provide any operational funds. Financial support would derive instead from funds for culture administered by the government as well as from proceeds of sales and subscriptions. As subsequent experience would show, however, neither the required yearly affirmation of sponsorship by the Croatian Philosophical Society nor the procurement of operational funds would always be routine affairs when external political pressure was brought to bear.

The first issue of Praxis, appearing in September 1964, was prefaced by a four-page pronouncement describing the goals of the journal. It began by referring to the “journal crisis” of the early 196os discussed earlier in this chapter: “There are so many journals today, and so few people who read them!” Gajo Petrovic, who was responsible for this editorial statement, went on:

Because in all this overabundance, it seems that we do not have a single journal that corresponds to our desires: a philosophical journal that is not narrowly “specialized,” a philosophical journal that is not only philosophical but which also treats current problems of Yugoslav socialism, of the modern world and of man. What we desire is not a philosophical journal of the traditional character, nor do we desire a general theoretical journal deprived of a central idea and offering no defined physiognomy.

Instead, Praxis was conceived as the mouthpiece of a distinct orientation, simultaneously intellectual and social, which aspired to establish the cultural foundations for further revolutionary transformation in the profoundly humanist spirit of Marx's teachings. On behalf of his colleagues, Petrović set forth the following profession of faith:

Socialism is the sole humane outlet offered to mankind to the difficulties with which it is struggling, and Marx's thought is the theoretical basis of, and the most adequate inspiration for, revolutionary action. One of the principal causes of the lack of success and deformation of socialist theory and practice in the course of the past few decades is to be sought precisely in the lack of attention accorded to the “philosophical dimension” of Marx's thought, in the overt or dissimulated negation of its humanist essence. The development of an authentic, humanist socialism cannot be accomplished without the revitalization and development of the philosophical thought of Marx, without more profound study of the works of all important Marxists, and without an approach to the open question of our time that is truly Marxist, revolutionary, and undogmatic.⁹¹

The complex nature of the task of cultural revitalization which the Praxis Marxists had set for themselves was reflected in the distinctive, careful balance which the editors of the journal sought to strike between theory and practice—or more accurately, between the critique of theory and the critique of practice. Time and again, in editorial statements and in substantive essays, the Praxis Marxists sought refuge in the formulation that Praxis was “only” a philosophical journal, that its purpose was merely to discuss important issues and not to resolve them, and that the journal constituted in no way a platform of political opposition. Yet the term “philosophical” was employed by Praxis Marxists in a special sense. “What we desire,” it was stated in the editorial preface to the first issue, “is a philosophical journal in the sense in which philosophy is the thought of revolution: the merciless critique of all existing conditions, the humanist vision of a truly human world, and the force that inspires revolutionary action.”⁹²

To be sure, not all philosophy fits this description; and because an understanding of the specific meaning assigned to philosophy by the Praxis Marxists is so central to a full appreciation of Praxis itself, their attitude toward philosophy will be a recurring topic of discussion throughout this study. If for the moment, however, we draw a rough identity between philosophy and criticism, or more specifically posit that a consistently humanist philosophy may serve as a systematic basis for the critical evaluation of social reality, then it is possible to understand how the frequent Praxis recourse to the excuse that their discussions were “merely philosophical” often failed to satisfy their more astute critics. For when the principles of social practice are dictated authoritatively by political forums, then philosophy— which we can tentatively define with Sheldon Wolin as involving “truths publicly arrived at and publicly demonstrable”⁹³—and a format based on philosophical discussion can be one of the most effective weapons against dogmatism and all reified thinking based on relationships of domination and subordination. The experience of Praxis set forth in the following pages demonstrates that, without violating the requirements of rational and systematic thought, philosophy can indeed be a powerful instrument in “the merciless critique of all existing conditions” as well as a practical instrument in the struggle for socialism and a more humane society.

In another more immediate sense, the insistence of the Praxis Marxists on the exclusively theoretical nature of their undertaking may be appreciated if we consider that the founding of the journal itself was in fact a symbolic act of a deeply political nature in a political culture that does not view such acts with indifference. The establishment of Praxis in the early 1960s was a step directly comparable to the establishment of other “thick journals” in Russia a century before and in Yugoslavia in more recent memory. It signified that an important step had been taken toward the institutionalization of ideological differences within the Yugoslav communist movement that had become increasingly irreconcilable with the passage of time. It is of course possible and even probable, judging from Tadic's above-quoted reference to “non-institutional” criticism, that in 1964 the Praxis Marxists did not actually perceive themselves as creating an institution of criticism to exist alongside of, if not in opposition to, the Party. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that the Praxis Marxists wished to compensate for the Party's apparent inability to absorb critical Marxian thought by providing a channel for such thought on the fringes of Party life. By stressing that their goal was theoretical clarification rather than political action, they hoped to be able to convey to the Party and the public at large that Praxis was not an organ of a nascent political opposition in the classical sense of the term. While it was clear to the Praxis Marxists that the Party needed to submit itself to intense reexamination and thorough democratization, they were far from challenging the basic parameters of the one-party political system, nor did they ever do so despite their total rejection by the Party. The Party and the country, they were convinced, could only be strengthened through the type of open criticism and debate among Marxists and communists which Praxis was designed to foster.⁹⁴

These subtleties of Praxis's self-image notwithstanding, it was not long before the Party, sensitized to serious attempts at dissent by the Djilas affair ten years before, began to suspect Praxis of being the basis of an outright oppositional movement. A relatively young but rising figure in the Croatian Party organization, Mika Tripalo (later identified as the leader of the Croatian nationalist movement and purged in 1971), stated a few months after the appearance of Praxis that positions taken in Praxis articles

create the objective conditions, regardless of the intentions of the individuals concerned, for Praxis to become the core of an oppositional group about which all the oppositional and dissatisfied elements of our society are gathering.⁹⁵

Certainly in this alarmist statement Tripalo may have been overestimating the capabilities of Praxis as well as totally misconstruing the goals of the journal's adherents. Yet if social institutions can be defined by a relatively fixed set of actors, a commonly accepted set of purposes, a distinct social identity, and a reasonably consistent mode of activity, then Praxis can be said without reservation to have constituted a social institution in its own right. And it was precisely this ambiguity about Praxis and its role in Yugoslav society that was responsible for Praxis's brilliant success as well as its ultimate demise.

Praxis: A Profile

Before proceeding to discuss the Praxis Marxists' critique of philosophy (Chapter II) and of politics (Chapters III and IV), it would be useful to give the reader some idea of the general features of the journal itself, its editorial policies and composition, and the various functions engaged in by the Editorial Board not directly connected with the actual publication of the journal. One of the more unusual features of Praxis is that it was issued in two editions, one in Serbo-Croatian and one directed primarily toward Western readers.⁹⁶ The International Edition, first published in 1965, appeared quarterly (often biannually in double-numbers), with articles in English, French, and German, the language determined by the particular audience which the author of a piece wished to address. The Yugoslav Edition had six numbers each year, and in both editions each number consisted of approximately 150 pages (double-numbers usually ran to about 300 pages). While articles by both Yugoslav and foreign authors appeared in both editions, the content of the two editions was not always identical, although considerable overlap did exist. It would appear that the editorship determined in which edition a given essay or review would appear on the basis of anticipated interest among the respective readership. With a few notable exceptions, the International Edition carried essays of general philosophical interest, while the Yugoslav Edition was supplemented with discussions and polemics more readily understandable to the domestic audience. Regrettably for the non-Yugoslav readership, however, it was the latter type of contribution which gave Praxis its distinctive tone and style, not to mention its political notoriety.

Each issue of Praxis featured a special theme to which six or more essays were usually devoted. These themes varied from very general problems of philosophy (e.g., “What is History?”, “Socialism and Ethics,” “Phenomenology and Marxism,” “Creativity and Reification,” “Hegel and Our Times”) to more topical questions of politics, society, and culture (“The Meaning and Perspectives of Socialism,” “Art in the Modern World,” “Yugoslav Culture,” “Bureaucracy, Technocracy and Liberty,” “Philosophy in Contemporary Society,” “Culture and Science,” “The National, International and Universal,” “Marx and Revolution,” “Power and Humanity,” “The Moment of Yugoslav Socialism”). From time to time issues would be oriented toward in-depth consideration of individual thinkers, such as Marx himself, Bloch, Lukács, Gramsci, or Trotsky. By establishing this thematic unity, the editors succeeded in endowing each issue with a dynamic and provocative character.

The same tension between the general and the particular was to be found in other rubrics of Praxis as well, and it was indeed the diversity of topics treated in Praxis that made it a vital center of intellectual life in Yugoslavia and abroad and literally a critique of all existing conditions. In “Portraits and Situations,” contributors critically discussed the ideas and experiences of major world thinkers, both Marxist and non-Marxist, such as Lukács, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Goldmann, Fromm (a self-portrait), Carnap, Nietzsche, Simmel, Heidegger, and Husserl. The heading “Thought and Reality” tended to be more topical and controversial, often including general essays on the problem of dogmatism and criticism in socialist society, while under “Discussion” were to be found for the most part extremely provocative essays and polemics on topics of particular political sensitivity (e.g., coexistence, the state of Yugoslav social theory, the gap between proclaimed ideals and social reality in Yugoslavia, the Party, bureaucracy, ideology). The desire of the editors of Praxis to make the journal a genuine focal point of intellectual and cultural life was further reflected in such regular features as “Philosophical Life” (reports of Yugoslav and international professional conferences), “Brief Announcements” of such meetings and small symposia, “Echoes” (in the Yugoslav Edition only, this section consisted of reactions lo Praxis in the foreign press), and “Chronicle” (a rather comprehensive report on reactions to Praxis within Yugoslavia and occasional editorial evaluations of the journal's activity and its current position on the Yugoslav scene).

Robert Maguire has written that literary criticism was the heart of the Russian thick journal,⁹⁷ and mutatis mutandis, Praxis was no exception. The Book Review section of Praxis, sometimes covering as much as ten to twenty pages, was a central point of interest in each issue. Often more could be learned about the orientation of the journal and its contributors from the reviews than from more extended essays. “Through the reviews,” Supek once reflected, “we come into contact with the most important intellectual achievements in the world, we can define ourselves toward them and interest our readers in them, i.e., lead them into an intellectual world.”⁹⁸ The reviews were generally oriented toward both domestic and foreign readers, and their scope and quality revealed a desire to consider and to appropriate critically from all significant intellectual currents to the extent that they coincided with or enriched the commitment of the journal to rational and universal Marxian criticism. In the first issue of Praxis alone, books by Alfred Schmidt, Ernst Bloch, Henri Lefebvre, Kostas Axelos, Robert C. Tucker, Sveta Lukić, and Eugen Fink were reviewed, covering Marxian thought, Yugoslav literature, the philosophy of Nietzsche, and current sociology. In subsequent issues the same breadth was maintained in reviews of works by Serge Mallet, André Gorz, Herbert Marcuse, Lucien Goldmann, Edgar Morin, Marek Fritzhand, Erich Fromm, Georg Lukács, José Ortega y Gasset, John Kenneth Galbraith, and in reprints of reviews originally published elsewhere of works by Praxis Marxists themselves. Thus through the reviews a constant interchange was established between foreign and Yugoslav authors and their opposite audiences. The content of the reviews—usually objective, but always critical and provocative—made this section one of the most stimulating and important for any reader who wished to get a feeling for the journal and its concerns, and certainly for the reader who simply desired a rich guide to some of the most important developments in contemporary Marxian philosophy and socialist thought.

The original Editorial Board of Praxis was composed of philosophers (with the possible exception of Rudi Supek, who views himself as a sociologist) from the University of Zagreb— part of the core group of “innovators” whose development we followed earlier in this chapter. The first Editors-in-Chief were Gajo Petrović and Danilo Pejovic (the latter replaced by Rudi Supek in 1966), while the original Editorial Board consisted of Branko Bosnjak, Danko Grlić, Milan Kangrga, Pejović, Petrović, Supek, and Predrag Vranicki.⁹⁹ Even though the editorship was composed exclusively of Zagreb intellectuals, however, Petrović emphasized in the very beginning that Praxis would have a strongly internationalist orientation. He asserted that

one cannot treat the problems of Croatia separately from those of Yugoslavia, nor can the problems of Yugoslavia today be isolated from the great problems of the modern world. Neither socialism nor self-management is something narrowly national, and Marxism cannot be Marxism, nor can socialism be socialism, if they are enclosed within narrow national frameworks.¹⁰⁰

In line with this commitment to internationalism and partly in response to domestic political pressures, an Advisory Council to Praxis was created in 1966 and announced in the first issue of 1967. The Advisory Council was without doubt one of the most impressive collection of significant Marxist and non-Marxist thinkers of the mid-twentieth century—including Yugoslavs such as Mihailo Djurić, Vladimir Filipović, Veljko Korać, Andrija Krešić, Mihailo Marković, Vojin Milić, Zagorka Pešić- Golubović, Veljko Rus, Svetozar Stojanović, Ljubomir Tadic, and Miladin Zivotić, as well as such internationally known figures as Kostas Axelos, A. J. Ayer, Zygmunt Baumann, Norman Birnbaum, Ernst Bloch, Thomas Bottomore, Erich Fromm, Lucien Goldmann, André Gorz, Jurgen Habermas, Agnes Heller, Leszek Kofakowski, Karel Kosĺk, Henri Lefebvre, Georg Lukács, Serge Mallet, Herbert Marcuse, Enzo Paci, David Riesman, Kurt Wolff, Aldo Zanardo—and others. Nearly all the members of the Advisory Council took an active interest in Praxis and Yugoslav philosophy, frequently contributing essays to the journal and attending philosophical conferences in Yugoslavia. Thus the Advisory Council was more than a mere showpiece for the sake of domestic and international prestige. Similarly, the International Edition of Praxis itself was intended, in the words of the original editorial statement of purpose, “not to ‘represent' Yugoslav thought to the foreign scene, but to encourage international philosophical collaboration for the study of the crucial questions of our time.”¹⁰¹

A problem of particular delicacy for the Praxis Editorial Board was that of editorial responsibility for the content of individual Praxis articles. It was clear that Praxis was to be no ordinary journal and it was certainly to be anticipated (if not actively desired) that a given issue of Praxis might contain any number of assertions offensive to the authorities. It was hardly the wish of the Editorial Board to exert anything resembling pre-censorship on contributors to the journal, yet at the same time it was obvious that failure to maintain a reasonably moderate tone could provoke severe government repression and jeopardize Praxis's very existence. While facing this possibility without illusion, the Editorial Board established an official policy designed to protect the journal by assigning full responsibility to the contributors as individuals. In the introduction to one of the early Praxis issues it was stated:

Is it necessary to add that all the essays published here are above all the expression of the points of view of their authors? It is self-evident, in our opinion, that the positions frequently diverge, and the Editorial Board does not see anything in this that detracts from their value. And it is precisely in the hope that they may generate discussion, perhaps even misunderstanding, that the Editorial Board presents them to the public: Our journal declares itself ready to open its pages to any worthy theoretical reply, and even to controversy.¹⁰²

By far the most important extracurricular activity of the Praxis Marxists was the Korɩula Summer School, an annual series of talks and discussions lasting about ten days in late August held in the relaxed setting of the charming Adriatic island of Korɩula. The first school was a small gathering of Zagreb and Belgrade Marxists held in August 1963 at the suggestion of Rudi Supek (whose modest summer house is located across the channel from Korɩula in the town of Orebić), but in 1964 invitations were sent to intellectuals in the rest of Europe and America to participate in the meeting. The result was an impressive volume of papers and discussions entitled “The Meaning and Perspectives of Socialism,” printed in both the International and Yugoslav Editions of Praxis. The 1964 Korćula Summer School was marked by lively and bold discussions by Lefebvre, Kosĺk, Marcuse, and Mallet, as well as by several Yugoslavs, on problems of Marxism, self-management (Marković and Rus), freedom and democracy (Stojanović), and mass culture (Životić), while Marcuse and Mallet engaged in a stimulating exchange over the integration of the working class into capitalist society and the future of socialism in the highly industrialized countries. In subsequent years a high level of discussion was generally sustained, with 1968 standing out particularly with the presence of Marcuse and Bloch following the revolutionary outbursts in Western Europe, America, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Attendance at the Korɩula Summer School ranged consistently in the hundreds. After 1968 the presence of Marxists from the other countries of Eastern Europe dropped off sharply, but this was more than compensated for by increased participation of Yugoslavs, Western Europeans, and Americans, including increasing numbers of students. While the links between the Korɩula Summer School and Praxis were formally only indirect, their goals and collaborators were identical. Together they earned Yugoslav Marxism a respected place in the ranks of the world philosophical community.¹⁰³

In its first phase, the primary task of Praxis was the demystification of theory as the necessary precondition of the demystification of practice. Even in 1963, Milan Kangrga wrote in anticipation of such an undertaking that

at first it will be necessary, perhaps even with the help of quotations (only of another sort!) to point to the essential, significant, and above all creatively interpreted and reinforced passages from the classics, passages which for socialism are decisive.¹⁰⁴

And while contextual analysis and exegesis (to be sure, in a new form) had already, in fact, become an established method among these thinkers for the revelation of deviations from the “authentic” thought of Marx, not even Marx himself would be immune to the universal sweep of radical criticism. For if, as even the dogmatists maintained (however reluctantly), it is necessary to “develop” Marx's thought, then as Danko Grlić wrote in the first issue of Praxis,

the question of authority, of supreme ideological authority, is today an open question facing Marxist philosophy. For how. . . are we to develop Marxist thought at all if we cannot, in principle, have different, even divergent views on some issues from those held by the classics?¹⁰⁵

No idols, then, were to be spared the penetrating gaze of criticism from the standpoint of revolutionary praxis and humanism. The critical philosophers of Pogledi, the “victors” at Bled, had finally achieved their first goal—to establish a journal of their own. Their task was now to demolish all dogmatism and the authority of truth based on political power. While this course would soon bring them into direct conflict with the representatives of the power structure in Yugoslavia, individuals who not long before had found themselves in a similar position with respect to the Soviet Union and before that with respect to the bourgeois regime, the intellectuals of Praxis now felt that they had a more secure basis for their crusade than at any time in the past. They were now as well prepared as they ever would be for conflict in the name of the ruthless critique of all existing conditions, ruthless “in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be.”¹⁰⁶ These words of the young Marx would be both the motto of the Praxis group and their chief source of inspiration in the difficult years that lay ahead.