Darko Suvin, Splendour, Misery, and Possibilities: An X-ray of Socialist Yugoslavia

Darko Suvin, Splendour, Misery, and Possibilities: An X-ray of Socialist Yugoslavia, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018, xxi + 428 pp., $28.00.

The reviewer is not a specialist on the history of the Balkans or Socialist Yugoslavia; yet, one of this work’s many merits is precisely its nonconformity regarding today’s ever-narrowing thematic and disciplinary boundaries. Instead, Darko Suvin constructs a subtle and complex historical narrative that should appeal to a broad readership in its virtuoso seesawing between political theory, political economy, the history of ideas and historical sociology. The book is indeed a lesson in how an ostensible ‘non-specialist’ – the author is a distinguished literary theorist, especially in the field of science-fiction – can, through a fertile enough methodological orientation and the sheer hard-work of absorbing a vast amount of material on the topic, produce a top-notch historical account. As such, Suvin’s Splendour, Misery and Possibilities is a landmark contribution to the scholarship on the socialist experiments of the twentieth century that should be of particular interest to all those unconvinced by the ‘a priori tenet of Cold War ideology...that a plebeian communist revolution must necessarily end in catastrophe’ (8).

By regarding the ‘Yugoslav socialist wager’ as a realm of possibilities – rather than as ‘doomed from the word go’ (83) –, Suvin delivers a compelling stock-taking of historical communism that is that much more fertile, because it is done by means of one of its most peculiar specimens. The Yugoslav socialist experience was, in Suvin’s metaphor, a ‘two-headed Janus’, bearing ‘simultaneously huge liberations and a threat of counter-revolutionary re-subordination if the revolution did not, after coming to power, permanently continue by other means’ (75). The entire book is, in fact, constructed around this fundamental tension.

A hallmark of the work is Suvin’s effort at conceptual clarity and his rigorous yet flexible approach; rather than do away with polysemic or contested concepts such as ‘democracy’, ‘socialism’ and ‘patriarchy’, the author puts his analytical cards on the table and specifies his own definitions of these terms (as well as of the more abstract ‘freedom’, ‘disalienation’ etc.) to the reader’s great benefit. If Suvin is squarely within the Marxist tradition, his stance latches onto the undogmatic perspectives of Benjamin, Bloch and Brecht, evoked throughout the text; he is thus unafraid to replace ‘proletarians’ (‘abused in enthusiastic propaganda’) with ‘plebeians’, since the latter term expresses both ‘civic opposition to State power’ and ‘the equally important position within the capitalist production process’ (15). In this and many other efforts at conceptual clarification Suvin’s key concern is finding the proper articulation between the political and the economical, as therein lies the pitfall for the Marxist historian. The characterization of Socialist Yugoslavia’s politocracy as a ‘ruling class’ (Ch. 4) is exemplary in this regard – a careful undertaking that, without ignoring the debates on the issue within the communist movement of the past century, does more than choose among the available explanations for the nature of ruling strata in socialist states.

It is Chapter 6, however, that best embodies the work’s interplay between critical theory, historical reflection and emancipatory horizon. Its 15 Theses about Communism and Yugoslavia are a reworking of On the Jewish Question, ‘translating Marx’s discourse from the time of the already tottering Sacred Alliance into our own discourse of looking backwards from 2011 to post-revolutionary Yugoslavia from 1945 to the mid-1970s’ (108). The chapter is, at bottom, an inquiry into how the left should relate to Marx in light of the experience of twentieth-century communism, another of the books’ leitmotivs. That Suvin returns to theoretical reflection around the midway point of his effort is also highly suggestive of his rigorous yet open conceptual apparatus; as the analytical pathway renders Socialist Yugoslavia a more concrete entity, Suvin doesn’t stop to refuel – i.e., simply restating the categories expounded in the introduction –, but rather adjusts the methodological vessel mid-journey in light of the empirical terrain just traversed.

The narrative’s constant interplay between the historical process and the epistemological and utopian horizons inscribed in it also sets Suvin’s approach apart from a field of communism studies which, for the most part, assumes ‘the West’ as a silent norm. Hence, rather than structure his analysis upon the hypothesis that socialist countries could have been thriving and affluent social-democracies had the revolutionary path not been taken or had the Soviets never come, Suvin engages historical communism from the perspective of a possible socialism. By shedding the Western norm without ever becoming apologetic or masking the shortcomings of Socialist Yugoslavia, Suvin delivers rigorous historical reflection that continuously interrogates what can be learned from the ‘betrayed disalienation’ it embodied:

‘I consider integral self-government from below in all human affairs our only hope to oppose the barbarously violent neo-fascist turn of capitalism in which we are presently living.... The positive and negative lessons of Yugoslav development, centring on self-management, are indispensable for working out lineaments of such self-government’ (81-82).

While this orientation evokes the work’s relevance to a wide readership, the fact that it centers on this particular case study matters very much. Socialist Yugoslavia is a thorn in the side of communism history as it prevents the attribution of a uniform physiognomy to the twentieth-century socialist experience; it is the product of a genuine revolution (the struggle against Nazi occupation turned into a Communist-led peasant uprising) that would go on to break with Stalin and refuse satellite status to the USSR, in addition to playing a peculiar role in the Cold War (through the Non-aligned movement). As Suvin points out, Yugoslavia’s singular status rests on the intersection of the three ‘major impulses arising out of victory against fascism: the militarised Welfare State, the separation of the “Soviet Bloc” into a subsystem of centralised planning…, and the decolonisation’ (162-163). It was also the seat of ambitious experiments at workers’ control (‘self-management’) and ‘market socialism’ (approached systematically in Chapters 8-10).

Self-management, in particular, emerges as Yugoslavia’s single greatest achievement and the source of the better part of the democratic and revolutionary impulses of the entire experience; Suvin’s account breaks down how the marginalization and increasingly limited influence of workers’ councils directly correlates to the exhaustion of emancipatory energies. Surprisingly, the reader also learns that the reawakening of nationalisms stems in large part from an effort at decentralization centered on devolving power to the individual Yugoslav republics and to communes – i.e., an effort to stymie the ills of Stalinist bureaucratic central planning and its accompanying autocratic streak (170). Added to the increasing power of the financial sector at the republican level and the reliance on foreign loans (Yugoslavia was the first socialist recipient of IMF support [179]) and the elements that would culminate in a ‘final, suicidal singularity’ were in place.

Suvin’s account does not encompass the breakup of Yugoslavia, halting instead at the onset of the downward spiral, which he places at 1972. In other words, only after the ‘central and crucial question’ of whether ‘self-management [would] be built up horizontally (outside of industry) and vertically (up to the real seat of power, the Party/State centre in Belgrade), into an all-encompassing plebeian associative democracy’ (193) is answered in the negative by the historical process, does the narrative find its endpoint. With this analytical break, Suvin also suggests that the internal potentialities of Socialist Yugoslavia had reached their limits before the three global vectors of the postwar era (the Welfare State, the expanded socialist camp and a defiant Third World) entered into crisis or showed signs of exhaustion. In other words, only when utopian energies could no longer counteract the disaggregating forces of nationalism, oligarchic ossification and the increasing role of finance, did the latter – in conjunction with the external context of decline – seal Yugoslavia’s fate.

The bloody breakdown that ensues is perhaps the fundamental event (ominously) signalling the start of a new epoch in the 1990s. In mainstream discourse, conversely, it is the twin Germanies that epitomize Europe’s postwar trajectory, with West Germany neatly embodying the ‘splendour’ and the GDR the ‘misery’ experienced by European society between 1945 and 1989. The period’s ‘possibilities’, in turn, are conceptualized in the negative either as pending nuclear annihilation or through the palpable symbol of the Berlin wall. The fall of the wall announces the realization of negated possibilities and all ends well. The breakup of Yugoslavia renders this narrative entirely untenable. It is not only contemporary to German reunification; both events are linked at the waist. ‘The USA preferred a united subservient Yugoslavia. The German banks and the Vatican, with longer memories of painful defeat, preferred dismembering it; they won out (104).

Yugoslavia’s breakup is not a tragedy resulting from the intrinsic tendencies of an ever troublesome region (as the term ‘Balkanization’ implies); it is a founding catastrophe of our times. Not grasping it as such is a significant stumbling stone in the confrontation of present complexities. In this sense, deciphering the lessons of the Yugoslav experiment is part and parcel of imagining a future pathway of liberation. A passage from the book evokes this predicament. The greatest sin of party leaders faced with the mounting contradictions of Socialist Yugoslavia, Suvin argues at one point, is that they simply ‘didn’t want to know’ (153). The same could be said of much of the left today with regard to twentieth-century communism. Suvin’s work is ultimately an antidote to willful forgetfulness.

Victor Strazzeri
Historisches Institut
University of Bern, Switzerland
victor.strazzeri@hist.unibe.ch