The formalities which attest that philosophy has achieved this importance, that it is the living soul of a culture, that philosophy is becoming worldly and the world philosophical, have been the same in all times: we may open any history book and will find with stereotyped fidelity the simplest rituals again and again unmistakably marking the introduction of philosophy into drawing rooms and priests' studies, into the editorial offices of newspapers and the antechambers of courts, into the hatred and love of the people of the time. Philosophy is introduced into the world by the yelling of its enemies who betray their internal infection by their noisy call for help against the blaze of ideas.

—Karl Marx, “The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung”

A Provocation

Rudi Supek relates the following conversation, which took place one day in 1972 with one of his “young colleagues” in Zagreb:

“'It's fine, professor, to talk about Marxist education, but doesn't it seem to you that it would be useful to know, first of all, which Marxism is in question?’

“‘Why “which” Marxism?’

“‘Why, you know very well that there is no single Marxism, just as there is no single concept of socialism?’

“‘Of course. We are talking about our Marxism. We parted ways long ago with the dogmatic and positivist Marxism which we inherited from the Soviet Union after the war.’

“‘You said, “our Marxism.” Can you really say which is our Marxism?’ (I did not detect the catch in the question.)

“‘Certainly. Our Marxism is that which you have heard our Marxists, philosophers and sociologists, speak to you about at all our conferences, Marxism which we call creative, humanist and democratic, because it best corresponds to Marx's idea and vision of socialism. It is rather well-known today thanks to the fruitful creative activity of my comrades gathered around the journal Praxis. ‘

“‘Apparently, professor, you do not follow the Party press. Otherwise you would know that while in the most authoritative political places you are indeed seen as Marxists, you are not at all considered representatives of “our Marxism.” Tell me, then, what is “our Marxism”?’”¹

This interchange, Supek recalls, “left me astonished, even though it was quite clear to me that my young colleague was pronouncing what was known as the ‘official position' toward the ‘praxisisti'.” For Supek was painfully aware that he and his Praxis colleagues, despite their profound commitment to Marxism and democratic socialism, had been and continued to be targets of increasingly severe domestic criticism and repression. He was aware of the existence of blacklists in publishing houses and the mass media which, especially since the student disturbances of 1968, excluded the dissemination of works and appearances by Praxis Marxists with a fair degree of success. But the question, “What is our Marxism?” left him puzzled. Was it not that Marxism which had been developed in conjunction with the Yugoslav critique of the Soviet Union throughout the course of the previous two decades, a Marxism which he and his colleagues had always insisted was most adequate to the concept of self-management and the “Yugoslav path to socialism?” Was it not that Marxism propounded by the most eminent spokesmen of Yugoslav philosophy, eminent by virtue of both their international reputation and their institutional positions within the Yugoslav academic establishment? What, indeed, was the answer to the perplexed question so often put to Supek by foreign intellectuals with an interest in Praxis, “naive” as Supek calls it: “how to explain the fact that while in the Marxist world we are considered the theoretical interpreters of self-management socialism and its philosophical and sociological bases, in our own society we are singled out for suspicion and persecution?”²

To ask all these questions is really to ask, in a broader sense, why social institutions construct conservative ideologies even when those ideologies have their generic roots in revolutionary thought and experience, and why these same institutions feel that they must protect themselves against groups which question the basis of the social order by questioning the soundness of the ideological system. It is to ask why, as Gramsci might have put it, the ruling culture seeks to maintain its ideological “hegemony” by making superficial adjustments to defuse social criticism and often by suppressing the critics themselves. And not least importantly, it is also to ask why, from time to time, there arise certain institutions of cultural dissent—the religious sect, the salon, the thick journal—which seek to give that dissent a certain degree of continuity and an internal identity, often taking upon themselves the “vanguard” mission of instilling in the public mind alternative visions and standards of alternative ways of living. Such an institution was Praxis.

Some Praxis Marxists, most notably Supek himself, might take exception to this characterization. If Praxis was an institution, they might ask, then where were its office and full-time staff (it had none)?³ Did not, moreover, the spontaneity of discussion and independence of initiative characteristic of gatherings such as the Korɩula Summer School stand in marked contrast to the routinization of revolutionary consciousness?⁴ And if social institutions ordinarily generate self-perpetuating ideologies, did not the openness of Praxis Marxism to all creative currents of world thought and its intolerance of all dogma exclude it from the category of “institutions”?

These objections, on closer examination, are not really to the point. While the first two objections confuse institutions in general with a specific kind of institution (bureaucracy), the third somewhat ingenuously overlooks the fact that while the Praxis group may have deplored the link between doctrine and authority, its members were nevertheless united by a doctrine of their own—the critical Marxian theory of praxis and alienation. It was moreover precisely because this philosophy of praxis had found, through the journal Praxis, a culturally legitimate institutional base in Yugoslav society that it could, speaking with a voice of collective strength, embark on the “critique of all existing conditions” with a surprising degree of impunity and a record for longevity truly enviable by Eastern European standards. And as will be suggested in the pages that follow, the history of Praxis as an institution of social criticism was an important cultural and political dimension of the third decade of Yugoslav socialism whose ultimate fate can tell us a great deal about the future evolution of Yugoslav society.

Praxis 1964-1975: A Narrative History

In the very first issues of Praxis, the primary purpose of the journal was explicated in a number of seminal theoretical essays: to undertake a thorough Marxian critique of all aspects of modern human existence, irrespective of national boundaries or definitions of social reality prescribed by institutions of social authority. In his essay on self-management and bureaucracy, Mihailo Marković emphasized that criticism involves not merely an abstract negation in the name of “chimerical ideals of the distant future,” but rather a complex, dialectical act of simultaneous negation and affirmation “in the name of the origin of [the] human future in the present.”⁵ Marković's essay, through its concern with problems of self-management, itself demonstrated that there was no question of “criticism in general” in his mind. Instead, it was clear from the beginning that he and his colleagues were vitally concerned with the application of a critical consciousness based on Marx's theory of human alienation and praxis to concrete problems of social life.

In another important early essay, Milan Kangrga took a more rigorously philosophical approach to the problem of criticism. Criticism, he argued, is that faculty which enables man to change the world through praxis by anticipating the future on the basis of the existing world and the obstacles which that world presents to further human development. In this sense criticism is organic to the very essence of human existence; indeed, the critical relationship of man to the world is the presupposition of the possibility of praxis itself. But while his essay was principally devoted to seeking a general, ontological basis for criticism, Kangrga noted that the majority of tracts about criticism “in general” were produced not by those who practice criticism, but instead by individuals interested, for more instrumental reasons, in restricting criticism to prescribed forms and boundaries. In these circumstances, the discussion about criticism tends, Kangrga complained, to concentrate on “pure” criticism isolated from and opposed to other types of social activity, as if the “object of criticism had ceased to exist.”⁶

Indeed, the first broad frontal attack on Praxis took the form of precisely the kind of discourse decried by Kangrga. The first public attacks against Praxis can be traced back as far as February and March 1965, when Mika Tripalo, then Secretary of the Zagreb City Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia (LCC), and Savka Dabɩević-Kuɩar, Chairman of the LCC Ideological Commission, took Praxis to task for what was alleged to be its “destructive” attitude toward the task of social criticism. Parallel with these attacks, the Zagreb daily press, complained some Praxis contributors, kept Praxis under what Supek called “ideological quarantine” by giving it unusually short shrift in the customary review articles devoted to cultural events.⁷ In late 1965 a series of articles signed by prominent Party publicists in the daily press and in the Party's Central Committee's official journal, Socijalizam, cautioned against an overly broad interpretation of “the critique of all existing conditions,” testifying to genuine concern over Praxis in high Party circles. The most influential of these attempts to discredit the Praxis Marxists on their own theoretical ground was that of Kardelj himself. His arguments merit close attention not only because of Kardelj's high political position, but because of all the published attacks on Praxis during the course of the forthcoming decade, Kardelj's 1965 polemic was the most consistently presented and the most thoroughly revealing of the official political mentality of the day.⁸

The main thrust of Kardelj's tract was to warn that the “destructive criticism” of the Praxis Marxists was having a disorienting effect on the “conscious forces of social development” (by which he referred to the Party), opening “the door wide to criticism which consciously works for the restoration of this or that element of the old society.”⁹ Their “alchemistic mixture of abstract eternal truths about humanity and freedom,” according to Kardelj, bypassed “the objective laws of social life.” To this Kardelj added—reconfirming his traditionalistic approach to Marxian theory—that Marx was only secondarily a critic, while his “greatest significance is to be found in his discoveries of a series of social regularities which enable man . . . to exert a conscious influence on ever broader areas of social events.” Kardelj also took this occasion to resurrect the sectarian logic of dogmatic Marxism, according to which behind all criticism there always stand class determinants, insinuating that the humanist critics were in some way representative of elements of the old class order of bourgeois society.¹⁰

Permeating this attack on the Praxis Marxists was the spirit of a crass pragmatism which tolerates theoretical digressions only to the extent that they do not complicate the world of action. Just as it was Kardelj who had written urgently twenty-five years before, in the context of the Peɩat debates between the Party and the Krleža faction, that “this is not a time for lengthy theoretical discussions but for quick analysis and complete unity in that analysis,” he now wrote:

Society is not a debating club. . . . Society is life itself. It is struggle, creation, constant action, a material relation between people, and involves simultaneously the making of decisions and the assumption of responsibility in given objective and subjective conditions and possibilities.¹¹

Kardelj voiced his impatience with those “subjectivistic social critics . . . [who] do not ask themselves about the place of this or that element of ‘the existing' in the process of socio-historical development,” as well as his utter disdain for criticism divorced from the mainsprings of political power. These lines were perhaps the most important in Kardelj's entire philippic:

Moral-political education in society and social criticism from the standpoint of ethics will be successful in so far as it relies as consistently as possible on knowledge of objective necessity and those social functions which are alone capable. . . of changing those circumstances in which man lives. . . . Subjectivist criticism on the basis of eternal moral truths or priestly sermons have in themselves never, in the course of history, changed a thing.

Philosophy, he added, “will be really anticipatory only when its point of departure is the objective movement of society rather than mythology.”¹²

For Kardelj, an integral aspect of this “objective movement of society” was constituted by the position of the Party as the ideological vanguard of the working class. “Social criticism,” he observed,

is not separate and cannot be separated from the political struggle, nor can the freedom of criticism be discussed while ignoring the real relation of social forces. The democratic efforts of socialist society to create conditions for ever freer criticism, moreover, must necessarily be linked with the efforts of the socialist forces to create all the other conditions for pure, creative Marxist criticism as leading and progressive social criticism.¹³

In effect, Kardelj seemed to be saying that the most dangerous aspect of Praxis criticism lay in the conscious gap which the “critique of all existing conditions” had created between itself and the Party. Kardelj was certainly well aware that in the absence of a strong link between the critics and the Party, the former would often in fact be reduced to nothing more than a moralizing posture and their theories to what he had contemptuously called an “alchemistic mixture of abstract principles.” By the same token, it seems just as true, recalling the nature of the conflicts between the critics and the Party during the early 1960s, that it was the Party's very inability to absorb this critical activity which ultimately forced the Praxis Marxists into a position of profound political isolation. It was thus far from clear that the alleged gap between Praxis theory and social practice was actively willed, much less created, by the Praxis Marxists themselves.

Only with the foregoing in mind, moreover, did Kardelj's most serious political charge against the-Praxis Marxists hold any real meaning: that the “real” aim of these abstract philosophers of truth and morality was power. The sentiments motivating their “destructive criticism,” Kardelj maintained, resided in irresponsible individuals “who are not in a position to understand the essence of social relations, egoists, demagogues ambitious for power, the disoriented man who wants to be original at all costs.” “The fundamental question,” Kardelj wrote,

is whether our social criticism will educate democratic public opinion, whether it will influence the creation of a democratic consciousness in the direction of democratic methods of self-management . . . or whether it will introduce . . . methods of political struggle between political cliques. For the political struggle is a struggle for power, and the struggle for power is a characteristic of a society in which class rules over class and man dominates over man.¹⁴

Thus it was not so much their goal of creating a new socialist culture to which Kardelj objected as the immanent danger (especially if they should meet with obstacles along the path to their primary goal) that the Praxis Marxists would constitute a political faction prepared for political struggle. In this struggle the adversary, Kardelj feared, was to be the Party itself. And to Party-minded individuals like Kardelj, a struggle with the Party signified no less than an outright struggle for power and a grave challenge to the basic structure of socialism in Yugoslavia.

Certainly any imputation to the Praxis philosophers of a will to power was capable of generating a deep mistrust toward them in the popular mind, where visions of the total rule of a secular dogma could easily conjure up old fears of Stalinism and “Cominformism.” In response to such allegations, which began to proliferate at about the time of Kardelj's article,¹⁵ the Praxis Marxists felt themselves forced in turn to disavow all interest in “politics” in the sense in which that term is commonly understood. The following editorial statement, issued in the midst of a later rash of attacks on Praxis, became characteristic:

Our criticism is not (and does not aspire to be) political criticism, one which is situated exclusively in the sphere of direct, everyday, current political action oriented toward the pure actuality of the existing. For—we are not, and do not want to be, political! This is why we are not nor can be a “political opposition”. . . . The struggle for power is not our domain nor is it our intimate preoccupation, much less is it our sole obsession. We are for the power of the working class in the traditional sense. . . . We do not want to exercise power in anyone's name because we do not want to exercise it at all.¹⁶

The ingenuousness of this passage is startling. Indeed, perhaps the most telling point of all is to be found in the affectedly lofty, condescending posture toward that distasteful “sphere of everyday, current political action oriented toward the pure actuality of the existing.” Taken at face value, this statement would almost lead one to suppose that in tacitly accepting Kardelj's equation of politics with power, the authors of the statement were acknowledging by default the legitimacy of the monopoly of the holders of power over all questions of “political” import. It would suggest, moreover, that the leading Praxis Marxists were somehow unaware of the fact that the very creation of their journal and its commitment to the “critique of all existing conditions” had in fact been a political act of great significance, the culmination of their efforts to find a place for consistent, radical criticism in a socialist society, and the final mark of their frustration with the unwillingness of political institutions—principally the Party—to accommodate such criticism in their own ranks. For is not, after all, radical social criticism, even if predominantly theoretical or philosophical in form, a type of politics?

But what kind of politics? As the discussion in Chapter III has indicated, many of the Praxis Marxists have held that to identify politics and power is profoundly at variance with the true nature of political activity. Indeed, Tadic has suggested that “the ‘irresponsibility' of the intelligentsia is the consequence of the monopoly of responsibility retained by the man of political action.”¹⁷ For with the means of political action under the jealous watch of the state and its representatives, intellectuals such as the Praxis Marxists may often find themselves excluded from the realm of political power per se, viewing it merely as a realm of political alienation, precisely because of its exclusiveness and artificiality. By charging that the Praxis Marxists were motivated by visions of power, Tadic has argued, the bureaucracy only betrays its own preoccupation with a corrupt vision of politics. The bureaucracy, he writes,

cannot conceive of any other sort of dissatisfaction which might be, for instance, socially motivated, i.e., guided by solidarity and an ideal of general interests. For this reason the party bureaucracy sees all dissatisfaction and criticism from the standpoint of its own situation and its own psychological position. And it ascribes the lowest motives to the communist intelligentsia, projecting onto it its own mentality.¹⁸

As Victor Brombert has observed of accusations linking intellectuals with the will to power, however, “the importance of such accusations cannot be limited to the intentions of those who formulate them: it is precisely such comments, such judgments which help situate existentially the intellectual and define him to himself.”¹⁹ In fact, as early as 1964, the intellectuals of Praxis had already been “situated,” only partially by choice, outside of the Party. Since that time their politics consisted of the politics of culture—more specifically, the effort to generate a broad critical consciousness as the precondition for any truly “political” community in the classical sense of the term. And as Brombert's remarks also suggest, the early frontal attacks on Praxis by Kardelj and others served only to make the journal more prominent in the public eye and further to strengthen the resolve of its adherents to pursue their originally charted course in the face of all obstacles.

Therefore while in late 1965 and 1966 Praxis continued to be a target of official criticism,²⁰ a variety of more subtle pressures began to be applied by the government as well. One such approach was to withhold financial support. Since its sponsor, the Croatian Philosophical Society, had no funds of its own for publications such as Praxis, the journal was dependent on the proceeds of sales and subscriptions, but most heavily of all on contributions from various social funds maintained by the government.²¹ Even in 1965, the Fund for the Promotion of Publishing of the Republic of Croatia furnished only half of the journal's requested sum of 26 million (old) dinars, while the Federal Fund for Scientific Work contributed a meager 3 million dinars toward the remaining half of the journal's costs not covered from other sources. The first of Praxis's chronic financial crises then ensued, at one point leading its Editorial Board to despair that continued publication of Praxis did not seem possible. The difficult financial situation was further compounded in 1966 when the Croatian fund for publishing assistance was dissolved in accordance with the official new social philosophy, generated by the economic reforms, of forcing all cultural products to compete on the open commodity market. With this source of support extinct, in late 1966 Praxis turned to the Croatian Republican Fund for Scientific Work with a request for 17 million dinars, while the Federal Fund which in 1965 had contributed 3 million dinars now refused to give Praxis even a token sum. For eight months in mid-1966 Praxis was forced to cease publication altogether for lack of funds, desperately concentrating its resources on a triple-number of the Yugoslav Edition toward the end of the year. This story would repeat itself regularly, with variations, in the coming years.²²

The weapon of financial pressure proved to be a weak one, however. Even in the face of chronic difficulties such as rising costs only partially offset by price increases, as well as the additional financial burden of the parallel International Edition, the Praxis editors and contributors almost always managed to ensure continued publication through a variety of extraordinary appeals to their readers and considerable self-sacrifice. While most Yugoslav scholars write in journals principally in order to supplement their incomes, the Praxis collaborators received only token honoraria for their contributions and on more than one occasion forwent remuneration altogether in the interests of perpetuating the journal. (No honoraria were given for contributions to the International Edition.)²³ Appeals to readers to commit themselves to long-term subscriptions appeared regularly since the journal's inception, and in one instance the publication of an issue of the Yugoslav Edition was made possible only by virtue of a special collection taken up by Zagreb University Philosophy students.²⁴ Through efforts such as these, Praxis managed to limp from issue to issue, and from debt to debt, without seriously interrupting its continuity.

Another tactic employed against Praxis—only once, and without success—was that of internal sabotage. The 1966 anti-Praxis campaign had its source, according to François Fejtö, at the very summit of the Croatian Party organization in the person of the veteran Party leader Vladimir Bakaric.²⁵ While Fejtö finds the motivation for this campaign in the shock administered to the Yugoslav political system by the “Brioni Plenum” of the LCY (July 1, 1966) ousting Ranković from power, events of the previous month had already signalled a turn for the worse for Praxis. In June the Croatian Sabor (Parliament) had erupted into heated debate over the award of the Božidar Adžija prize for scientific research to two Praxis collaborators, Kangrga and Petrovic, with the Chairman of the Sabor's Awards Committee losing his post for what was judged to be his poor taste.²⁶ Most outspoken of all on this matter was Bakarić, who complained that the Praxis Marxists all

express agreement with Yugoslav socialism and the Yugoslav path but at the same time view as “scientific” those [elements] with which Yugoslav socialism publicly disagrees. . . . Comrade Gaće asked who pays for this. We have provided and continue to provide Praxis with financial support. . . . I plead for no more than “to call a spade a spade,” i.e., if something represents political action, then it is political action, while scientific action is another matter.²⁷

Bakarić's speech certainly provided the official rationale for withholding financial support from Praxis. But it is also worthwhile to note that in the midst of the ensuing uproar Praxis Coeditor-in-Chief Danilo Pejović suddenly transformed himself into the chief internal obstacle to the continuation of Praxis's activities. Indeed, as already noted, the next issue of Praxis did not appear for another eight months, while the 1966 Korɩula Summer School failed to take place at all because Pejović, as President of the School, refused to cooperate.

That the Brioni Plenum, as Fejtö argues, was the main contributing factor to the 1966 anti-Praxis campaign certainly cannot be doubted. There is a peculiar political mentality in Yugoslavia which seems to dictate that when the Right suffers a severe political setback—as in the case of Ranković, or of the repression of the nationalistic student disorders in Zagreb in 1971—the critics of the Left must be publicly punished as well in order to ensure that the latter are not able to take undue advantage of the situation. (This in itself, it might be noted, is testimony to the extraordinary elasticity of the Yugoslav political system, where a certain degree of pluralism is recognized and is able to operate within the confines of what is still formally a one-party system.) In addition to the Ranković affair, however, a matter of some significance was the arrest, in August, and subsequent imprisonment of the writer Mihajlo Mihajlov, who had publicly called for the establishment of an explicitly anti-Marxist, anti-socialist journal basing itself on the ideology of “Djilasism” and forming the foundation of a new, legitimate political opposition movement.²⁸ While the substance of Mihajlov's “historic proposal” was in many respects diametrically opposed to the scope and goals of the Praxis experiment, it added fuel to the fire of those who, like Bakarić and Tripalo, feared that Praxis itself represented the core of a potentially broad oppositional movement. Indeed their deepest cause for concern may well have lain in a perception that efforts such as Mihajlov's were being encouraged by the very success of Praxis in surviving for over two years in spite of the adverse circumstances which it confronted. The specter of an opposition press was becoming an imminent reality.

As the post-Brioni backlash built to a climax, Danilo Pejović's internal obstructionism only intensified. On September 28, when Pejović refused any further collaboration with Praxis, the Editorial Board voted to replace him as Coeditor-in-Chief with Rudi Supek. A week and a half later Pejović, as President of the Croatian Philosophical Society, together with CPS Vice President Ante Marin, issued a public statement in which it was claimed that Pejović had been removed involuntarily from his editorial post. In the name of the Croatian Philosophical Society, Pejović and Marin publicly rejected any further responsibility on the part of the Society for Praxis, a move which Petrović and others protested vigorously on the grounds that it was taken without proper authority. The issue was Finally settled at the Society's Annual Meeting in December, when the great majority of the Society's members gave the Praxis Editorial Board a strong vote of confidence, thereby repudiating the actions of Pejović and Marin.²⁹

Rather than having a moderating influence on the Praxis Marxists, however, this complex episode of 1966, and subsequent crises as well, seemed only to strengthen their resolve. Some months later a statement of the Editorial Board, referring specifically to the Ranković affair but no doubt reflecting as well on their own more immediate problems of the recent past, asserted:

The events of the past few months in Yugoslavia have demonstrated that the dangers threatening our socialist development lie precisely where we have seen them. . . . Contrary to those who pretend that the problems treated by Praxis are already solved and that the journal has lost its rationale for existing, we can affirm that these problems have become even more complex. . . . This is why the journal henceforth has an even more difficult mission as well as a greater responsibility.³⁰

Of a far more serious nature than the Pejović resignation— and perhaps even than the Ranković affair—was the spate of student revolts which took hold of Yugoslav universities, most dramatically in Belgrade, for a brief seven days in June 1968. The genesis of the student movement, curiously, was in many respects more closely akin to Western student radicalism than to the type of student discontent hitherto familiar to the countries of Eastern Europe. The initial moment of student radicalization came in late December 1966, when a demonstration against the Vietnam War (prompted by the commencement of American bombardment of Hanoi) turned into a violent confrontation with police when a large crowd of student demonstrators attempted to march from the University on the nearby American Reading Room in a sign of protest. For the next year and a half student passions were kept at a subdued pitch although they occasionally surfaced publicly in response to student demonstrations in other countries, most notably in Western Europe in the spring of 1968. But it was a relatively innocent event, an overflow crowd at a workers' benefit performance in the student quarter of Novi Beograd (New Belgrade) on the rainy evening of June 2, 1968, that sparked off the most serious wave of spontaneous protest which Yugoslavia had witnessed since the Second World War. The student crowd was encountered by a police detachment armed with batons and firehoses; with no avenue of retreat, the crowd panicked and a bloody clash ensued. Hardly one day later, the students had occupied the University building housing the Faculty of Philosophy and issued a list of demands calling for major political and social changes in all areas of Yugoslav life.³¹

Ideologically, the 1968 student revolt was leftist in character, which is only to say that the students, agitated over the adverse consequences of the economic reforms and frustrated by the inability of Yugoslav society to rid itself of the vestiges of authoritarianism, clamored for direct implementation of those ideals of social equality and justice for which the revolution itself had been waged. In this sense their demands did not represent a truly “radical” departure from officially articulated norms; much more serious breaks with revolutionary traditions, they stressed, inhered in the increasing gaps between various sectors of the Yugoslav community and in proposals—such as a stock-sharing scheme introduced in the press just prior to the student outbursts³²—that would, in their eyes, have represented no less than a return to the ways of bourgeois society. The major political document and rallying-point of the revolt, the so-called Action-Political Program of the Belgrade students, addressed itself to such pressing problems as social differentiation and privilege, unemployment and political sinecures, real as opposed to merely formal self-management, the democratization of all social organizations and especially of the League of Communists, land speculation, the commercialization of culture, and the quality of university life.³³ Even Tito, in his celebrated television address of June 9, 1968, was compelled to concede the justice of the students' demands and the authenticity of their motivations, as this strongly worded passage from that speech attests:

The revolt, so far as it went, is partially the result of the fact that the students perceived the same problems to which I have repeatedly pointed but which still have not been solved. This time I promise the students that I will wholeheartedly press for their solution, and in this the students must help me. Furthermore, if I prove incapable of resolving these problems there will no longer be any need for me to remain in my position.³⁴

The nature of the involvement of the Praxis Marxists themselves in the 1968 student demonstrations is difficult to determine. To be sure, the echoes of many Praxis ideas were audible in the students' demands, while the Faculty of Philosophy, in Belgrade as in Zagreb, was the epicenter of radical student activity and debate during the stormiest days of protest. On the other hand, it is just as true that the social and political ideals invoked by the students derived directly from the legacy of the socialist revolution and were not the property of any single group of intellectuals. Indeed, the “events” of June 1968 taken cumulatively may be seen as representing the political coming of age of a new generation—one which had not passed through the purifying flames of the Partisan War—and its affirmation of the revolution's goals, an affirmation as intense and spontaneous as it was short-lived. Neither were the conditions generating this explosion of indignation—unemployment, inflation, increasingly evident signs of social differentiation and increasingly strident articulations of divisive nationalist ideologies bred by competing regional economic interests and reinforced by bureaucratic pressures—products of the activity of a small group of philosophers and sociologists. Nor, finally, was it true, as some unfriendly “observers” claimed, that the Praxis Marxists encouraged the students to engage in anarchic street demonstrations and acts of wanton destruction. Indeed in several instances, it was these same Praxis Marxists who successfully urged restraint and moderation on agitated and frustrated student gatherings.³⁵ No doubt the ability of these individuals to dissuade the students from potentially damaging physical confrontations with the authorities was at least partially a function of the strong moral support they enjoyed among the most concerned participants.

Thus while many students may have derived part of their intellectual inspiration from the Praxis Marxists, it cannot be said that the students were in any way incited by them, as it was then and later claimed in the popular press. It is perhaps more accurate to say that while the Praxis Marxists may have actively sympathized with the students and their concerns, their identification with the students was limited insofar as they felt that the students, as individuals, must assume responsibility for their own actions. Indeed the Praxis editorial statement circulated in March 1968 protesting the dismissal of six philosophers including Kolakowski, Morawski, and Baumann from their posts at the University of Warsaw (a statement not, however, reproduced widely in the Yugoslav press) can well be read retrospectively as being generally representative of the attitude of the Praxis “fathers” toward their own intellectual “sons”:

When one speaks of Marxist scholars as “protectors and defenders” of the organizers of student agitation, we ask ourselves what is meant by the protection of students who are grown men, adults, and in their majority. Is it still possible that in a socialist country social sanctions are taken against the fathers, fathers in blood or in spirit, for what their grown sons have done in availing themselves of all their rights as citizens?³⁶

Whatever the extent of their direct involvement, however, official Yugoslavia lost little time in proclaiming the political and moral responsibility of the Praxis Marxists for the students' actions. On June 9, the day of Tito's speech, Gajo Petrović and Mladen Čaldarović were expelled from the Party in Zagreb for having “sharply advocated very extreme demagogic anarcholiberal positions . . . [and] attempted to destroy the League of Communists as well as the rest of our self-managing institutions.”³⁷ In Belgrade, while attempts to deprive individual Praxis collaborators of their Party membership initially failed for legal reasons (primarily because the Party organization of the Philosophy Faculty boldly refused to sanction the decision of higher Party organs), in July the Party organization of the Department of Philosophy and Sociology was abruptly and unceremoniously dissolved.³⁸ A press campaign against “hostile” and “alien” elements which had allegedly infiltrated the student movement was climaxed by a speech by President Tito on June 26, barely two weeks after he had addressed the protesting students in such a conciliatory tone. Tito's speech on this second occasion demonstrated the real depth of his concern over the student movement as an embryo of something much more ominous. It also marked the official beginning of the concerted and prolonged campaign to rid the Yugoslav scene of the Praxis Marxists and their influence once and for all.

Tito's June 26 remarks were aimed specifically at a group consisting, in his words, of “individual professors, some philosophers, various praxisovci and others, various dogmatists” whom he insinuatingly lumped together with “those who were responsible for various deformations in the Administration for State Security” (a barely veiled reference to the Ranković affair) in a unified desire “to create chaos and to fish in troubled waters.” “We must,” he continued,

offer them decisive resistance, say a decisive “no”. . . . For them the working class and its role are transcended. For them the League of Communists means nothing. They think that some wise men, some technocrats ought to stand on a pedestal and give orders by waving their wands. . . . There is no place for them. . . . Do such people educate our children in schools and universities? There is no place for them there! . . . We must, moreover, reduce such people to impotence. . . . And, if it ultimately comes to this, it will sometimes be necessary to use administrative measures as well. . . . We must preserve our socialist self-managing society.³⁹

The new strategy, as the tone of these exhortations suggested, was to dissociate the students from those professors perceived as their “ringleaders” and to discredit and ultimately destroy the latter. Tito's rhetoric was immediately amplified upon in a hostile press campaign involving many of the country's leading political Figures, charging the “infiltrators,” among other things, with a “reactionary political conspiracy.”⁴⁰ But it proved much more difficult to convert these charges into concrete political actions. Indeed, the actual campaign to rid the universities of the Praxis Marxists did not begin with full force until 1972, a full four years after the President of the Republic had spoken—an extraordinary state of affairs which at least on one occasion led Tito publicly to express his dissatisfaction with the lack of progress in the matter.⁴¹ During these four years, it seems likely that the Praxis Marxists must have been under the protection of sympathetic officials in high Party circles. Otherwise, it would be difficult to account for the fact that Tito's demands went unheeded for so long.⁴²

Clearly, what most alarmed the Yugoslav political establishment about the affinity between some of the students' demands and views expressed by Praxis Marxists was that the June revolt seemed to offer the long sought-for conclusive proof that the latter had gained a highly articulate and potentially explosive following. Whereas previously the Praxis Marxists could be discounted as unusually vocal intellectuals whose readership was restricted to narrow professional circles, the simplistic political calculus of the moment now urgently pointed to the uncomfortable conclusion that the fears of the most strident critics of Praxis had been right all along: Praxis indeed represented the core of a movement of political opposition. Students exposed to the teachings of the Praxis Marxists at the nation's leading academic institutions, it was feared, would soon take jobs in some of the most responsible positions of social authority and would be able to use that leverage to effect fundamental changes in the general social and political structure, to the detriment of the nation. Courses in Marxist philosophy, which in traditional “socialist” polities have always served to affirm the framework of the existing order and to provide an eschatological world-view which, however paradoxically, confirms a logic of political pragmatism, were being divested of their conservative ideological function and in fact working contrary to the official purposes of the society. Above all, the frightening vision of an organized oppositional political movement, whose very existence could legitimize the formation of other, non-Marxist, oppositions, seems to have been the regime's greatest cause for concern. It was this fear that made so ominous Tito's claims—completely unfounded, so far as the Praxis Marxists themselves were concerned—that these individuals wanted “to create some kind of embryo of a multiparty system and to establish themselves as a factor in it, which would negotiate on an equal basis with the Skupština and with other [bodies].”⁴³

For all this, the student movement did have a profound, if somewhat delayed, impact upon Praxis itself. Student radicals, their self-confidence perhaps somewhat inflated by their recent show of strength, began to criticize their Praxis elders for being overly “philosophical” and abstract in their approach to concrete questions of Yugoslav life. Some Praxis figures, most notably Supek, did not react well to such barbs. A tension, first noted by the French Marxist literary critic Lucien Goldmann in 1968,⁴⁴ was chronically present at gatherings such as the Korɩula Summer School between activist students seeking to use the occasion as a political platform and some of the more established Praxis collaborators who preferred to stress the educational purposes of the gathering. (In the case of the Korɩula Summer School in particular, Supek, the School's organizer, no doubt also had in mind the entirely pragmatic consideration that as little cause as possible should be offered to watchful officials to discontinue the School's operation.) This tension was manifested with increasing regularity in the years that followed. On one occasion, a student meeting at the August 1970 Summer School protesting the persecution and imprisonment of several radical student leaders ended in a rather unfriendly confrontation between

Supek and many of the assembled students.⁴⁵ Indeed this event had serious repercussions, nearly leading to a permanent rift within the Praxis collective, since some prominent members of the group who had particularly close sympathies with the students, especially Životić and Pešić, were so distressed at Supek's performance that they resolved to boycott the Summer School in subsequent years. Thus the student movement, an explosive issue for Yugoslav society at large, proved to be a volatile source of friction even within the Praxis group itself.

Yet it is worth noting that the Praxis editors and contributors, apparently fearful of bringing down the regime's full wrath upon the results of their hard-fought struggle to establish a public forum for their views, avoided all discussion of the student movement in the pages of Praxis throughout 1968 and 1969. As a consequence, for all the widespread accusations against the “praxisovci” which appeared in the popular press during those two years and the bitter polemics in which the Praxis Marxists themselves engaged in other forums,⁴⁶ not a single issue of Praxis was confiscated until 1971, a remarkable record as compared with that of other Yugoslav journals (such as Razlog and Delo) that lacked Praxis's notoriety. At the meeting of the Praxis Editorial Board in Korɩula in the summer of 1969, Stojanović, one of the most sympathetic among his colleagues to the student cause, expressed his concern that

Praxis and Filosofija have anticipated in a certain way the ideas of the new democratic left [in Yugoslavia], but when it appeared on the scene, we did nearly nothing toward a critical analysis of its experiences.⁴⁷

This meeting of the Editorial Board must be viewed as a critical breaking point between the still somewhat aloof Praxis of the 1960s and the much more socially engaged Praxis of the 1970s. All those present, with the possible exception of the Belgrade legal philosopher Mihailo Djurić (later to be imprisoned), sensed that Praxis was dangerously nearing a point of intellectual stagnation if it had not already reached it, and that as Supek himself suggested, some collective “change of personality” was now indicated. Part of the problem involved the generational issue. Most of the members of the Editorial Board were by now senior scholars, the composition of the Board having remained virtually unchanged ever since 1964-65. Thus Životić warned that Praxis had not “opened itself up sufficiently to the younger generations” even though the journal's survival, as he intimated, was dependent precisely on that generation's radical spirit. The deeper question, however, was one of content and orientation. Had the critique of Stalinism run its course, even though, as Branko Bošnjak cautioned, manifestations of Stalinism had far from disappeared in Yugoslav political and cultural life? Was it true, as Tadic asserted, that “Praxis has lost its initial rhythm and intensity of ideas that have attracted the attention of the Yugoslav and foreign public”? Had the student movement and the concurrent resurgence of nationalist forces made it incumbent on the Praxis Marxists to address themselves more explicitly to the political issues of the day; and if so, would it be possible to maintain a balance between what Djurić somewhat contemptuously called “political publicism” and the high level of discourse hitherto maintained as a matter of editorial policy and professional conscience? Had it not been, after all, the theoretical cast of the journal which was responsible not only for its great intellectual appeal and soundness, but also for its apparent invulnerability to direct acts of repression? One participant in the discussion, having in mind Veljko Korać's observation that “the journal would . . . commit suicide if it were to swim in the peaceful waters of scholasticism,” summed up the predicament in the following terms:

Praxis has not even to this day enjoyed the favor of socially influential circles. Intensification of its critical activity would definitively place the journal in disfavor, with the consequence of putting into question its very existence. The journal obviously faces a dilemma: how to exist?⁴⁸

In response to these concerns, a new orientation gradually began to emerge in subsequent issues of Praxis. In number 3-4/1970 of the International Edition (but not in the Yugoslav Edition) several provocative articles appeared containing material of a much more directly political nature than ever before. The issue included translations of some articles that had already been published elsewhere in the Yugoslav press, such as Nebojša Popov's groundbreaking study of worker and student strikes in Yugoslavia, along with Stojanović's above-mentioned analysis of the 1968 student movement in Yugoslavia and even (“for discussion”) Steven Vraɩar's highly controversial essay calling for a multi-party political system.⁴⁹ In subsequent issues, outspoken contributions by young men of the new generation—Nebojsa Popov and Trivo Indjić of Belgrade, Božidar Jakšić of Sarajevo, Žarko Puhovski of Zagreb—many of whom had taken an active part in the student movement in both publicism and action, became increasingly frequent. The heightened tempo of radicalization was also evident in the choice of themes discussed in Praxis articles. While the official editorial policy continued to assert that “in a theoretical journal every author is responsible for his own statements,”⁵⁰ it was nevertheless clear that the nature of the content of the essays was itself changing dramatically. Nationalism and class society, the political dismemberment of the working class and police repression, the role of the Party and the charismatic leader—all these tender points of Yugoslav society were probed with ever greater intensity in topical issues of Praxis beginning with number 3-4 of 1971. This change, to be sure, may have been less a factor of any explicit editorial policy than of the general, spontaneous intellectual radicalization of individual members of the Praxis collective.

The 3-4/1971 issue of Praxis was significant for another reason as well. This was the first issue of Praxis which the authorities directly attempted to suppress through judicial proceedings. Initially, the District Prosecutor of Sisak (the industrial Croatian city where Praxis was printed) sought to ban the entire issue because of what he claimed were “false, distorted and alarming assertions which evoke the agitation of the citizens and [disturb] the public order and tranquility”⁵¹ made in the editorial introduction and in articles by Popov, Supek, Pešić-Golubović, and Kangrga. Judging from the decision of the Sisak District Court, it was evident that the most offensive piece of the lot was Kangrga's “Phenomenology of the Ideological-Political Advance of the Yugoslav Middle Class.”⁵² It was in this essay that Kangrga delivered the most searing indictment hitherto printed in Praxis of the rising nationalist movement in Yugoslavia (and especially in Croatia), linking it intimately with the efforts of a new middle class to consolidate its position. The assertions contained in Kangrga's article, according to the District Judge, were “distorted . . . do not correspond to the present system of workers and social self-management and . . . are certainly likely, in the judgment of this Court, to evoke the agitation of the citizens.” While the District Judge restricted the ban only to Kangrga's article instead of upholding the District Prosecutor's request in full, eventually an appeal to the Croatian Supreme Court succeeded in lifting the ban altogether.⁵³

The significance of the coincidence of the attempted ban on Praxis with the appearance of Kangrga's provocative article cannot be ignored. It was in 1971 that national feeling throughout Croatia was building to a fever pitch, stirred on by the rhetoric of republican Party leaders such as Mika Tripalo and Savka Dabɩević-Kuɩar (long-time foes, it will be recalled, of Praxis), and that new amendments to the Constitution giving greater powers to the republics were topics of heated debate in all public forums. Praxis, with its relatively small but select audience, represented at the time one of the chief obstacles to the politics of nationalism.⁵⁴ The consistently outspoken and hostile attacks of the Praxis collaborators on the spirit of nationalism had made it increasingly urgent for the nationalist ideologues to discredit Praxis in the public eye and to impair, insofar as possible, its further activity. For it was precisely the audience which Praxis did attract—the intelligentsia—which had historically formed the core of the great nationalist movements of Eastern Europe. Indeed, it was no doubt precisely those “citizens” who had invested the most political capital in the nationalist movement whose “tranquility,” to quote the language of the Sisak District Prosecutor, was most profoundly disturbed by essays such as Kangrga's. It is unlikely, therefore, that Praxis's strategic value in the struggle against “nationalist deformations” went unnoticed by the federal authorities, and it cannot be doubted that calculations such as these played some role in the Croatian Supreme Court's 1971 decision to overturn the Sisak District Court's ban on the contested issue of Praxis.

The Croatian nationalist movement reached its zenith with the student demonstrations that shook Zagreb in November and December of 1971. In their aftermath, the Croatian Party organization underwent a massive purge of the most outspoken representatives of the nationalist movement, with leaders such as Tripalo and Dabɩević-Kuɩar falling into total disfavor. At just about this time Praxis seems to have acquired an ally in the highest councils of the League of Communists of Croatia (LCC), when the Zagreb sociologist Stipe Šuvar was designated President of the LCC Ideological Commission. Only a few months before, Šuvar, in the pages of Praxis, had called for full working-class representation in all political organs, including the Party, and for an “intense ideological confrontation with the protagonists and theses of petit-bourgeois nationalism.”⁵⁵ Šuvar repeated this demand at a March 1, 1972 meeting of the Ideological Commission shortly after he assumed his new duties.⁵⁶ At the same time he explicitly disowned any attempts to subject publications such as Praxis to financial harassment. Of Praxis in particular he stated:

It is obvious that Praxis and the [Korɩula] Summer School ought to continue to be Financed, since the basic ideological platform of this journal is correct and it is anticipated that its editorship will become further committed to a responsible approach to all questions. . . . The basic Marxist orientation of this journal cannot be questioned.⁵⁷

A few months later, an even more noteworthy event took place in Zagreb, this time in the heart of the academic community. An election was to be held in Zagreb University for a successor to the previous Rector, Ivan Supek, a noted Yugoslav nuclear physicist and brother of Praxis Marxist Rudi Supek. After a vigorous campaign and University-wide debate, the “nationalists” suffered a serious setback with the election of Predrag Vranicki, for years one of the most active and respected members of the Praxis collective if one of its most moderate representatives. To be sure, this victory for Vranicki, a widely admired scholar in his own right known as much for his gentle and conciliatory personal manner as for his humanist commitment, did not necessarily signify a victory for the Praxis Marxists as a group, for in spite of his Praxis activity Vranicki had managed not only to retain his Party membership but also his seat on the Party's Zagreb City Committee. But Vranicki's new position and the support he enjoyed throughout the University community at the very least represented a guarantee that any outside efforts to apply pressure through the University against the Zagreb Praxis group would meet with very stiff opposition. As subsequent events would show, however, neither Šuvar's kind inclination toward Praxis nor Vranicki's presumed ability to protect the personal fates of the Zagreb Praxis collaborators would constitute, in the final analysis, sufficient guarantees that Praxis itself would be allowed to continue publishing indefinitely.

While in Croatia Praxis may, for the time being, have found valuable guardians in Šuvar and Vranicki, the significance of local developments was now overtaken by policies dictated at the federal level. The purge of the Croatian League of Communists was an integral part of a general reassertion of federal over republican prerogatives, symbolizing the beginning of a profound structural reorientation of the balance of power within the federation as a whole. The impact of these larger developments began to have ominous overtones for Praxis, and in particular for its Belgrade representatives. As already noted, in January 1972 Tito had called for a redoubled effort to remove the recalcitrant professors from their teaching positions, an appeal which he had first sounded after the student demonstrations of 1968. In a major speech in which he also addressed himself to the more recent nationalist outburst in Zagreb, Tito lashed out at the opposite pole as well:

I was glad to hear some professors, university delegates to the Conference, stress that there should be no place at the universities for those who do not agree with the policy of the League of Communists and with our social system in general. This is evident. We have said so long ago. And yet we pay them. . . . And yet such people are working against our social system. And it is they who are educating our youth. . . . I am now waiting for practical measures, for action, for those who are corrupting our youth to be removed from their posts. I have spoken of these matters long ago. But any words went largely unheeded. There was even some slightly ironic comment. . . . Now we shall act. As for those who refuse, and are responsible as political leaders, we shall ask them why they have failed to act accordingly.

Tito's motive was not solely one of vengeance against those whom he called “wiseacres who say: Why was this not done much earlier?” In addition, in his speech Tito wished to sketch out a new course that would re-cement the Yugoslav community to its ideological moorings, one component of which was, in his words, to have “Marx to return to the university.” Concurrently with the elimination of hostile theories from the academic environment, Tito wished to restore the old Marxism with which he and his companions were familiar—and to restore to Marxism what he saw, from his traditionalist standpoint, was its proper ideological function. “Marxism,” he asserted,

must provide the basis of the theoretical education of our youth, of our young cadres, regardless of the profession they may choose. Well, then, these young people of ours who have such flimsy connections with Marxism, what do they know of dialectics? Not very much. And in our country there is so vigorous a process of social change that some knowledge of dialectics is essential.⁵⁸

The “dialectics” of which Tito spoke here were of course the same “dialectics” that the Praxis Marxists had been criticizing, well before their intellectual tendency was formalized by the creation of Praxis itself, as metaphysical, dogmatic, and apologetic. In effect, Tito was attempting to turn back the clock, at least in a cultural sense, to a period when the ideological foundations of the political order were unquestioned and when internal party discipline held its own in the face of external challenges. What Tito did not, perhaps, realize with sufficient clarity was that in this case, the challenge confronting the Party had developed organically from within the communist movement itself and that it represented but a further development of the continuing quest for a “new path” to socialism. Tito's reaction, however, was to seek refuge in the old ways.

It was in such an atmosphere of growing official hostility toward the Praxis Marxists that an incident occurred in Belgrade that further clouded their prospects for a balanced hearing. At a professional symposium at the Law Faculty of Belgrade University held on March 4, 1972 devoted to the controversial constitutional amendments, the legal theorist Mihailo Djuric, a member of the Praxis Editorial Council, made some remarks that were publicly interpreted as being inflammatory of Serbian nationalist sentiments.⁵⁹ For these statements Djurić received a harsh two-year prison sentence in a widely publicized proceeding, over the strenuous objections of his colleagues. The Praxis Editorial Board published a protest about the incident, defending Djurić's right to speak freely in academic discussions, although delicately refraining from defending the content of his remarks. This article was in turn quickly banned by the Sisak District Court, with the Croatian Supreme Court this time upholding the lower court's ruling.⁶⁰

The Djurić affair had even broader implications, however, for the Praxis Marxists. In another editorial statement in the same issue of Praxis, the Editorial Board aired its suspicions that the harsh sentencing of Djurić was part of an intense and more general campaign to repress the Praxis group as a whole. They pointed to the discontinuation of funds from the Croatian government, a decision apparently reached over Šuvar's head in the LCC Ideological Commission; the “blacklists” of “undesirables” who were not permitted to appear on radio and television broadcasts; the revocation of the passports of four Praxis associates in Belgrade (Vojin Milić, Zaga Pešić, Dragoljub Mićunović, and Nebojša Popov) while “various plunderers of social property” were free to come and go as they pleased; the arrest and sentencing of activist students on the basis of spurious charges of “Trotskyism”; and finally, the ominous precedent set by the Djurić case with regard to removing scholars from their teaching positions on the basis of views expressed in professional debates with their colleagues. It seemed paradoxical to the Praxis collective that there had evidently been

an escalation of repressive measures against creative Marxism . . . and this precisely when some people, in the name of political power, speak of unsatisfactory “Marxist education” as one of the causes of the lack of socialist construction of our society!⁶¹

The Editorial Board was not mistaken in its fears. In the ensuing months, direct attacks on the Praxis Marxists would intensify along the broad front of methods deplored in this editorial statement. Subsequently it would become even more difficult than before for “praxisovci” to publish their works; the journal would find itself in an increasingly serious state of chronic financial crisis; more passports would be revoked in Belgrade (including those of Stojanović, Marković, Životić, Tadic, and Trivo Indjić); and efforts to remove the Belgrade Praxis Marxists from their teaching positions on the basis of “moral” and “political” criteria would be greatly intensified. Meanwhile this editorial statement, along with the statement specifically addressed to the Djurić affair, was banned by the Croatian authorities. It might be noted that in upholding the ban, the Croatian Supreme Court, when speaking to the specific charges enumerated in the editorial statement, called them “distorted” but cautiously refrained from using the term “false” except in the most general connection.⁶² Apparently the Court knew better.

By the same token, Praxis was permitted to continue its publishing activities in Croatia. Provocative articles condemning the nationalist syndrome that might well have been banned a year before were now left untouched by the attentive hand of the Sisak District Prosecutor.⁶³ Clearly, the new constellation of political forces in Croatia found itself in strange alliance with Praxis and this circumstance seemed to dictate forbearance from direct measures against the journal in the interests of a united front in the struggle against nationalism. And so long as a resurgence of nationalist feeling would continue to be a major threat in Croatia, Praxis itself would remain safe from coarse attempts at total repression.

In Serbia there existed no such obstacles, save one: resistance in the top ranks of the Serbian Party apparatus to the effort to remove the university professors who were “corrupting” the nation's youth. Serbian Party President Marko Nikezić, in particular, was reputedly inclined to be lenient toward the Belgrade Praxis collaborators and encouraged the growth of democratic relations within the Party's ranks. Tito, however, had not forgotten his pledge to discipline Party leaders who failed to cooperate in the campaign against the dissident intellectuals. In late October 1972, after the circulation of a “Letter” to all Party organizations calling, among other things, for increased ideological vigilance against “all ideological and political adversaries of the League of Communists,” Nikezić and Serbian Party Secretary Latinka Perović were forced to hand in their resignations. Before the year was out the gravity of the situation was emphasized with the voluntary protest resignations of several prominent Yugoslav political leaders, such as the popular Foreign Minister Mirko Tepavac, the equally popular member of the Federal Presidency and Partisan hero Koɩa Popović, and the leaders of the Slovenian and Macedonian party organizations (Stane Kavcic and Slavko Milosavleski, respectively).⁶⁴ The outward complacency with which Tito reacted to these major losses bore striking testimony to his characteristic unity of purpose in pursuing his goal.

At the same time, persecution of the Belgrade philosophers and sociologists accelerated rapidly, eventually culminating in concrete actions designed to force the dismissal of eight of them—Stojanović, Marković, Tadic, Pešić, Životić, Popov, Mićunović, and Indjić—from their posts.⁶⁵ The dramatic affair of the “Belgrade Eight,” while perhaps formally distinct from the fortunes of Praxis itself, was the culmination of a confrontation between the government and the Praxis Marxists which had been building for many years. On October 9, 1972, the University Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia demanded, in an open letter to the Philosophy Faculty's Party Organization, that the “Eight” be dismissed from the University.⁶⁶ The grounds for dismissal were a set of “moral-political” criteria for university professors, including conformity to the Party line, which had been only reluctantly accepted by the University in the face of intense pressure from above. No action in response to the Party's demands was taken by the Philosophy Faculty for several months, prompting a letter from the LCS University Committee angrily stating that the Faculty was sheltering a group of dissident professors “in open conflict with the party.”⁶⁷ Finally, the Faculty's Party organization issued a bold statement in sharp defiance of the Party initiative. “The Communists of the faculty of philosophy,” the resolution asserted, “oppose implementation of administrative measures against the instructors criticized in the letter of the university committee.”⁶⁸ With this the conflict was now in full view of the public, which witnessed at the same time the mounting of an increasingly abusive press campaign against the now notorious “Eight.”

Parallel with these developments, the government began to apply pressure on individual Praxis Marxists in ever more blatant ways. An entire book by Mihailo Marković entitled Reappraisal, consisting of no more than articles previously published freely in Praxis and other journals such as the Belgrade Filosofija edited by Tadic and Pešić, was banned by the Belgrade District Court in November 1972. This decision was only partially reversed the next month by the Serbian Supreme Court, sustaining the suppression of Marković's essay, “The Structure of Power in Yugoslavia and the Dilemma of the Revolutionary Intelligentsia,”⁶⁹ which had appeared unhindered in Praxis at the end of 1971. It will also be recalled that it was in the summer of 1972 that Mihailo Djurić was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for his allegedly nationalistic statements, while the young Praxis Marxist from Sarajevo, Božidar Jakžić, was tried and sentenced for his 1971 Praxis article on “Yugoslav Society Between Revolution and Stabilization” the following autumn.

The main thrust of the Party's attack, however, was reserved for the sole remaining protection available to the Belgrade Praxis Marxists—the long-standing tradition of the autonomy of Belgrade University from outside interference. Ironically, it was this very tradition that had been responsible for permitting Belgrade University to become one of the greatest strongholds of communist organization and agitation in the 1930s. Now the Party attempted to reverse all this. In December 1972 it managed to push through a new university law over initially stiff opposition which formalized the so-called moral-political guidelines, gave political organizations the right to initiate proceedings against any faculty member if he or she was suspected of being in violation of the guidelines, and instituted “self-managing” councils within each faculty consisting half of faculty representatives and half of “outside” members, some of whom were appointed by the government and Party and some elected by professional societies. Naturally, it was the last provision which gave the “Eight” at the Philosophy Faculty the greatest cause for concern, and the composition of the Faculty's Council quickly became a topic of heated controversy. By packing the Council with their own representatives and by exercising a combination of persuasion and intimidation over the other members, the authorities evidently expected that they would finally be able to get their own way. Finally the Council was constituted and in January 1974, as required by the new law, it solicited reports from forty leading Yugoslav scholars from all parts of the country on the moral and political fitness of each of the “Eight” in response to the continued insistence of Party organs.

The Party took advantage of this pause by attempting to create as much hostility as possible among the members of the Council and their constituents. Since it apparently believed it a foregone conclusion that the instructors would vote as a block with the beseiged professors and that the “outsiders,” on the other hand, would vote with the Party, the Party concentrated its efforts on harassing the students in the hope that the professors—now in a very delicate position—would fail to come to their aid, alienating their student allies and weakening their own position. In this, the Party evidently hoped to play upon the latent, and sometimes open, tensions that had existed in the past between the radical professors and their even more radical and impatient “protégés.” An attempt in November 1973 by the University's submissive student organization to provoke an open confrontation in the Philosophy Faculty in fact had the opposite of the desired results.⁷⁰ Arrests and interrogations of students failed to persuade them that they would be able to save themselves by disowning their mentors. Finally, in impressive demonstrations of solidarity, all 800 students of the Philosophy Faculty threatened in December 1973 and March 1974 to strike en masse if the persecution of the “Eight” was carried through to its destined end. A sympathy demonstration by students in Zagreb even erupted briefly into violence when students ejected Party spokesmen who had come to speak against the philosophers.⁷¹ What the Party feared most of all, a repetition of the revolts of 1968, was becoming an increasingly likely prospect. And this time, the Party would have no one to blame but itself.

In the months between January and July 1974, while the reports on the “Eight” were being prepared, the Party mounted an unusually vituperous campaign against them in preparation for the Tenth Party Congress, which was expected to result in major changes in the direction of greater Party unity in response to the regional divisiveness which had plagued the country in recent years. In a widely publicized speech delivered in February, the prominent Party Executive Secretary and favorite of Tito, Stane Dolane, devoted an unusual degree of attention to the affair in Belgrade and made the following confident prediction:

I have mentioned the example of these philosophers only in passing as I do not consider the struggle against them one of our more important tasks. They will fall by the wayside of themselves for the simple reason that their concept has nothing in common with the broadest political and ideological concept that has been adopted by the vast majority of our working people. I mentioned them only because I feel that in the preparations for the Tenth Congress, communists and all the other socialist and progressive forces of Yugoslavia may look back with pride on the road they have traversed.⁷²

Indeed the Tenth Congress of the LCY, held from May 27 to 30, 1974 and billed as the “Congress of Unity,” accomplished in broader terms what the Party's aim had been all along in focusing on the “Belgrade Eight”: to strengthen the Party ideologically, to restore unity on all major questions of political orientation, and to situate Marxist criticism in a framework where it would no longer be able to jeopardize the Party's hegemony. Surprisingly little explicit attention was given at the Congress to the struggle with the dissident Marxists themselves. But in resolution after resolution, the crucial importance of a proper understanding of Marxist fundamentals was stressed. In particular, one resolution ominously recalled the “moral-political” criteria established over a year before at Belgrade University for the appointment of faculty, extending it to educational institutions throughout the country:

The League of Communists attaches special importance to the professional abilities and moral political qualities of teaching personnel. . . . The choice of teachers necessarily becomes a matter of general interest; therefore social criteria must be established for the election of teachers, leading professional personnel in particular, whereby the present composition of professional personnel will be improved.⁷³

With its now official endorsement of the moral-political guidelines, the Party turned to the long-awaited reports on the eight Belgrade Praxis philosophers with an air of confident expectation. But when the reports finally arrived in early July, the Party was stunned. Not only were they all highly favorable, but they were accepted virtually unanimously by the 154 members of the Philosophy faculty, with only one abstaining vote. A few days later, on July 5, the Faculty's “self-managing” Council convened amidst considerable Party pressure to postpone the meeting and followed suit in adopting the reports' favorable conclusions regarding the “Eight,” to all appearances closing the issue. In a hasty effort to save face, the government restored to all eight professors their passports with the right to travel abroad, proposing in turn that the professors agree to refrain temporarily from their undergraduate teaching responsibilities in order to cool off the heated passions which the affair had aroused. The “Eight” confidently countered with a list of their own conditions, insisting that two (Stojanović and Pešić) be allowed to accept teaching positions abroad, two others (Marković and Tadić) concentrate on teaching graduate students, the two youngest members of the group (Indjić and Popov) be given leaves of absence to complete their doctoral studies, and not least notably, that Životić and Mićunović continue to teach undergraduates. While the last condition remained unacceptable to the authorities, for the time being it seemed that for the “Eight” the worst was over.

That, however, was not to be the case. With the resumption of the fall semester, harassment of students was resumed in full force, resulting in the sentencing of several students to long prison terms on spurious charges of spreading “hostile information.” Those Party-appointed members of the Philosophy Faculty's Council who had voted in favor of the “Eight” in July were recalled, while the Party continued to attempt to exert pressure on the other Council members through a series of low-key “interviews.” This, however, proved to be no easy task. Thus in November, 1974, exasperated in its attempt to use even a semblance of democratic procedure in ousting the “Eight,” the Party obtained passage of legislation in the Serbian Parliament which made all “outside” representatives on faculty councils subject to direct governmental appointment, furthermore allowing the Parliament itself (should the former tactic fail) to expel university professors unilaterally should it find that their activities threaten “social interests.”⁷⁴ For two months the new law was allowed to sit idly while speculation abounded as to whether such a draconic and unprecedented measure would actually be brought to bear. Then, Finally, on January 28, 1975, the Serbian Parliament, riding roughshod over the entire university structure which had earlier been established at the government's insistence to arbitrate such matters, decided to issue its own verdict and sentence. The “Eight” were formally dismissed from the University by legislative decree.⁷⁵

These events were but the most dramatic expression of a growing conservative mood in high Party circles. The period preceding the Tenth Congress was one of intense reflection for the Party, not only about the relatively minor problem of the fate of the Praxis Marxists, but also about the very nature of the relationship between the Party and society at large. It was sensed that it was time to reassess the role which the Party had fashioned for itself after the Sixth Congress in 1952, when it virtually abandoned the traditional doctrine of the “leading role” of the Party in all major political and organizational matters in favor of a less commanding educational and ideological role. As early as October 1972, Tito himself had publicly expressed his doubts about this historic transformation, opening the way for further discussion on this vital issue.⁷⁶ In an important speech in late March 1974, Kardelj repeatedly stressed the importance of “the leading ideological and political role of the LC in society,” remarking that “we were too permissive towards various theories and practical actions in the LC itself” that questioned this role. The political disorientation occasioned by over-decentralization in the economy and the polity, he suggested, was to some degree directly attributable to the Party's loss of influence over “key positions” in society. Not only ideological hegemony, but now once again political hegemony, must be the goal of the League of Communists:

These and like experiences are convincing as a warning that in [the] future we shall have to be far more alert and resolute towards all attempts at undermining the role of the LC in society. We must also candidly state that communists will not waver in fighting for key positions in all areas of the social system to be in the hands of progressive socialist forces, of those who really uphold the positions of socialism, Marxism, self-management democracy and the national freedom and equality of our peoples.⁷⁷

Kardelj's analysis of the rise of dissident groups, having in mind primarily the Praxis Marxists themselves, ran along similar lines. He spoke of certain inadequacies of the economic reforms of 1965, specifically the failure to introduce “a new concept of social planning in line with the system of expanded reproduction in associated labour on the grounds of self-management” as well as the unprecedented growth of finance capital as contributing to the “growth of destructive criticism levelled against self-management in its entirety.” He perceived the major flaw, however, in the lack of vigilance within the Party itself:

Moreover, a vacuum developed wherever the LC, bowing before the pressures of opportunism and nationalism, wavered or even withdrew from the fight for the interests of the basic strata of the working class and working people. This vacuum soon began to be filled in by the so-called “new leftists” whose ideology is a melange of Stalinist dogmatism and ultraleftist anarchy.

To correct this state of affairs, Kardelj asserted, it would be necessary to endow the Party with a degree of ideological unity corresponding to its restored political responsibilities. Once again he repeated a position he had taken often in the past, but now with a new urgency:

Party bodies cannot be debating clubs for the confrontation of attitudes from positions that differ in principle. Party leaderships must be operational, action leaderships. And they can achieve this only if they are unified.

In order to ensure this unity, the Party needed to provide some guarantee that journals such as Praxis would no longer be able to publish freely and become platforms for consistent social criticism and intellectual opposition as had been the case in the past. “In the first place,” Kardelj warned,

we must be quicker about developing the entire system of information activities, for which provision is also made in the new Constitution. It would probably be most fitting for that system to be built up as a specific community of interest [i.e., for all publishing activities to be organized within a single political framework—css] involving all the factors in society that are concerned with these matters. We also need popular, up-to-date publications which will not only offer the required information and statistics but also reply to questions and counter destructive and lying criticism. We have recently neglected this kind of publication. Moreover, the opponents of our system and of the LC have proclaimed such type of information as being used by the bureaucrats to popularize and vindicate themselves.⁷⁸

On the last point, Kardelj offered no rebuttal, and perhaps for good reason. There can be little question, however, that by following Kardelj's advice the Party would strike much more deeply at phenomena such as Praxis than by concentrating its efforts on individual personalities and their livelihoods. By consolidating its control over all public discussion of social issues and instilling it with an explicitly ideological mission, the Party would deprive the radical intelligentsia of its primary instrument of reaching the public and of defining itself as a distinct sociocultural force. Without access to a public audience—whether through the underground newspaper, the illegal duplication and dissemination of manuscripts, the control of one or more publishing houses, or the “thick journal”—any modern intelligentsia which wishes to challenge the existing order is condemned to impotence and dissolution. This surely is the reason why the underground press network in the USSR (“samizdat”) and the vicissitudes of the underground publication, the Chronicle of Current Events, have assumed so much importance in the life of dissident Soviet intellectuals.⁷⁹ When doubts are shared only in whispers and in strict confidence, a dictatorial government need have no cause for concern. But when these same doubts are expressed publicly and in printed form, it becomes possible to speak of the formation of a distinct intelligentsia. Both the doubts and the means of their expression then take on a political significance which no government living in fear of the truth would dare ignore.

These considerations bring us naturally to the events and controversies leading up to the closing of Praxis itself. The Yugoslav Edition of Praxis in 1973 and 1974, in issue after issue, contained some of the most acrimonious exchanges between Praxis and its opponents which the journal had ever witnessed. Three of the Belgrade group—Pešić-Golubović, Stojanović, and Popov—unable to publish elsewhere in the country, turned to Praxis to print their responses to press attacks which they would otherwise have been powerless to refute.⁸⁰ Gajo Petrović, abandoning his serene philosophic pose and revealing himself as a formidable polemicist, battled on two separate fronts. In an “open letter” to the inveterate dogmatist Boris Ziherl, he defended himself masterfully against Ziherl's clumsy but insinuating attacks which had been published in Borba in late January 1974.⁸¹ On another occasion, Petrović involved himself in a heated debate with the Ljubljana philosopher Vojan Rus (the brother of Praxis associate Veljko Rus) and three of his colleagues after it had been proposed that the League of Philosophical Societies of Yugoslavia, which had been acting since 1969 as a cosponsor of Praxis's International Edition as the League's official publication, ease Praxis out of this role and instead found a n'ew and more “representative” philosophical journal which could presumably better speak on behalf of Yugoslav philosophy as a whole. Petrović suspected, perhaps with some reason, that this initiative was in fact an attempt to undermine Praxis itself by cutting it off from one of its most important sources of funds. Still, Petrović's extremely bitter and strongly worded reply to Rus did little to elevate the overall tone of the debate and left the unpleasant aftertaste of personal warfare which the Praxis editors, including Petrović himself, had done so much in the past to avoid.⁸²

It is difficult to determine how much significance should be attributed to the departure in late 1973 from the post of Coeditor-in-Chief of Praxis's Yugoslav Edition of one of the journal's foremost personalities, Rudi Supek. The announcement in Praxis about Supek's decision to relinquish his post was brief, thankful, and to the point, noting that “since Comrade Supek remains a member of the Praxis Editorial Board, he will continue in the future to collaborate intensively in the work of the journal.”⁸³ A reference in the announcement to “overwork” no doubt referred to Supek's time-consuming duties as President of the Yugoslav Sociological Association as well as his newly found interest in ecological matters.⁸⁴ Although Supek came to his coeditorship of Praxis only two years after the journal's founding, in 1966, for seven years thereafter he made an indelible imprint on Praxis although his role in terms of technical editorial work was rather limited. Through his prolific contributions it was he who played perhaps the largest role in steering the journal toward what I have called elsewhere the “politics of culture,” helping Praxis to avoid the pitfalls of conventional political involvement. His moderating influence at times had to be quite vigorously introduced into debates with his colleagues, which always remained warm and friendly nevertheless. But this same moderacy often put him in opposition to more radical elements both inside and outside the journal, especially some members of the student movement, who tended to view Praxis as an instrument which could be used for their own ends; not unexpectedly, Supek's reserved attitude toward the student movement also generated occasional tensions within the Editorial Board itself. Partly because of the confusion resulting from this state of affairs, Supek seems to have come to believe by 1972 that it was time for the radical Marxist intelligentsia to formulate a focused political program, as if to answer the sweeping (and often self-contradictory) attacks of its critics with a clear ray of light. Many of Supek's colleagues rejected this idea—and, given the framework of a “thick journal” such as Praxis, they may have been right.⁸⁵ Supek's recognition of the inappropriateness of Praxis as a vehicle for such a program may, therefore, have convinced him that for him to continue to occupy a leading role in Praxis would be of limited value. His Zagreb colleague Ivan Kuvaɩić, a capable sociologist but nonetheless a somewhat less dominant personality, took over Supek's duties as Coeditor-in-Chief of the International Edition. It is not altogether likely, moreover, that Supek's departure and Petrović's unprecedented polemical outbursts were sheer coincidence. For these and a variety of other reasons, Praxis was beginning to move onto very shaky ground, as indeed the strident tone of Petrović's defensive tirades itself seemed to suggest.

In these last months, the thin boundary between philosophy and politics took on vital significance for the journal and its adherents. On two occasions the Editorial Board spoke out boldly in defense of the Belgrade Eight, once directly and the second time by reprinting its reply to the vicious anti -Praxis attacks of 1968 (but this time in bold type, “for easier reading”).⁸⁶ In this context Branko Bošnjak wrote for Praxis a lengthy and provocadve exposition of the Praxis group's attitude toward the distinction between (conventional) politics and philosophy. “If the philosopher seeks power,” Bošnjak contended, “then he is not a philosopher, because the problem of action involves not power but the humanization of human relations.” “The critical relationship toward reality,” he continued, “is nobody's privilege, nor do there exist philosophers who might consider themselves called upon to pass judgments about everything.” But “the philosopher can teach people to think, to understand that which is in its essence. . . . Such understanding can never be opposed to the interests of the working class.” Poignantly summarizing the dilemma, Bošnjak noted that the charge that the Praxis Marxists have used their platform in the universities for their own political ends

is a little reminiscent of the content of the accusation against Socrates. It was the charge against him that he was corrupting the young; the charge that he did not believe in the gods in which the State believed may here be left to one side. Socrates entered into a logical polemic and after its conclusion even admitted the possibility that he was indeed corrupting the nation's youth, “but if I am corrupting them, it does not logically follow that it is you who makes them better.”⁸⁷

It was indeed becoming painfully apparent by this time that the Socratic analogy was not at all inappropriate. A year later, the prominent Serbian litterateur Dobrica Cosić argued in one of the most compelling and even poetic essays ever to appear in Praxis that to be true to the intellectual calling in Yugoslavia under current conditions was an exceedingly dangerous affair. “The classical dilemmas”—

creativity or nihilism, egoism or belonging to the people and the nation, conscience or immorality in public life, personal dignity or submission in the face of power, action or apathy—in our times have assumed fateful significance and tragic resolution.

The critical and independent intellectual, who could stand and say (as, at one time, did Maksim Gorky), “No matter whose hands the power is in—it is my human right to relate to it critically” was now pressed in on all sides by the “honorable intelligentsia, that reserve army of the political bureaucracy,” whose main loyalty was to the “privileges attendant on expertise.” Warning of the danger of a “consumerist Stalinism,” Cosić lamented that

traditional historical optimism, faith in the constancy of progress, that most cunning form of conformism, must be abandoned to the ideologues and the hedonists, if it is wished to sustain hope in socialism as a possible society of freedom and justice, reason and conscience.

And as for the charge that certain intellectuals had abused their freedom, Cosić retorted that “in the history of the world and of this country, the greatest abuse of freedom has always been committed by people of power and political ambition. . . . The most fatal social act is to deprive a person of his freedom.”⁸⁸

This issue of Praxis was to be its last. Toward the end of the issue the editorship inserted a copy of the decision of the Council for the Coordination of Science and Technology in the SFRY regarding the funding of journals; Praxis was at the top of the list of those journals which, with no additional explanation, were not to receive any further support.⁸⁹ There can be little doubt, however, that the generally worsening political climate, aggravated by Praxis's published defenses of the “Belgrade Eight” as well as its increasingly strident tone in its last months, was prominent among the immediate factors leading to this decision. At about the same time as the “Eight” were ousted from the university in Belgrade at the end of January 1975, the trade union organizations in Sisak were ordered to cease work on the printing of Praxis. Finally, on February 21, 1975, it was announced in Belgrade that Praxis had been closed after its Editorial Board had rejected an ultimatum from the authorities.⁹⁰

The Praxis Editorial Board addressed these final poignant words of explanation and farewell to the readers of the Yugoslav Edition:

We inform our readers and subscribers that the Yugoslav Edition of the journal Praxis no longer enjoys the opportunity to be published. The difficulties with which we have been confronted have grown especially in the past year, when the journal was deprived of all financial support, and recently our printer . . . sent us written notice “that the political activ and management organs [of the enterprise] has decided not to perform the service of printing the journal Praxis in the future” . . .

At this time, when the Yugoslav Edition of Praxis ends its existence after a ten-year period of publication, one might expect that the editorship would offer an analysis and assessment of its work and activity. But as it does not appear that such an analysis could be published at this time, we have no choice but to defer an assessment of our activity to the future.

We once again wish to affirm that the members of the Editorial Board of Praxis in their activity have stood and stand on the principles of the critical and open Marxism and the humanistic and self-managing socialism which they clearly proclaimed in the first issue of the journal and which they attempted to defend and develop in the course of the ten years of its publication.⁹¹

Whatever the ultimate fate of the Praxis Marxists, the events of recent years summarized above plainly demonstrate the truth of Marx's observation quoted at the beginning of this chapter: “Philosophy is introduced into the world by the yelling of its enemies who betray their internal infection by their noisy call for help against the blaze of ideas.” Indeed Praxis was never so widely circulated and avidly read as after the bannings of 197172 and the public surfacing of the affair of the “Belgrade Eight.” As efforts at repression intensified, so did the Praxis group become a cause cèlèbre on the Yugoslav scene. Each additional newspaper report of a court decision or a Party resolution only served to spread the notoriety of the “praxisovci” much more effectively than they could ever have done themselves on the pages of their cumbersome, often dense, and predominantly professionally-oriented journal. Whatever the Yugoslav public's feelings about the theoretical and political views expressed in Praxis, it was the courageous response of the Praxis collaborators to measures taken against them that increasingly earned them and their journal the reputation proclaimed by one of their number:

Real power needs not only potentates but also those who bow down in the face of power, and obedience demands not only those who command but also those who peacefully listen, slumber, and nod their heads. But these latter qualities, this reverent and self-effacing humility, cannot, I think be ascribed to Praxis.⁹²

At the very least, then, the spectacle of Praxis, insofar as it penetrated public consciousness through protests, scandals, and official attacks whose intensity increased in direct proportion to their desperation, provided the Yugoslav public with an object lesson in the art of self-management. The “praxis” of Praxis spoke to that public perhaps more eloquently than all its discourses on Marxism, the content of socialist culture, and its critiques of the existing order could ever hope to do. In the final analysis, Praxis's popularity was due largely to forces beyond the control of its individual contributors. The clumsy actions against the “Eight” in Belgrade and the closing of Praxis itself, taken in the broader context of the politics of the 1970s, appear to confirm that the Yugoslav revolution is entering decisively on a conservative phase. Tito, refashioning Yugoslavia so that it might survive without him, has set the country on a new course. While it seems clear that post-Tito Yugoslavia will remain united, prosperous, and most probably independent, it appears that it will be a Yugoslavia in which spontaneous, honest social debate and critical thinking—elements which were manageable during Tito's lifetime by virtue of his own immense authority and prestige—will become mere memories of a past age: the age of Praxis.