Milovan Dilas Novi Razred Apr 2026

The New Class remains essential reading for one reason: it predicted the rise of the as the dominant form of elite power in the 20th and 21st centuries. You see echoes of Đilas not only in studies of the Soviet nomenklatura but in critiques of “crony capitalism,” “political capitalism,” and even the managerial elite in Western democracies.

However, the book is also a prisoner of its moment. It is written with the fervor of a betrayed lover—angry, intimate, and at times, naive. It assumes that exposing the hypocrisy of the New Class would be enough to topple it. History proved otherwise. The New Class often simply rebrands itself (as “technocrats” or “national developers”) and continues. milovan dilas novi razred

Few books have landed with the geopolitical force of Milovan Đilas’s The New Class . Written from a prison cell by a man who was once the vice president of Yugoslavia and a devoted Stalinist, the book is an autopsy of the communist revolution performed by one of its most trusted surgeons. It is not merely a polemic; it is a political and sociological treatise that argues a radical and uncomfortable thesis: the communist revolution did not create a classless society. Instead, it created a new, brutal ruling class—the party bureaucracy. The New Class remains essential reading for one

Published: 1957 (written after Đilas’s break with Tito and subsequent imprisonment) Original language: Serbo-Croatian ( Novi razred ) It is written with the fervor of a

This “New Class” is defined not by ownership of capital in the traditional sense, but by . They control access to resources, jobs, housing, and information. Their privilege is not a salary but nomenklatura —the right to occupy key positions. Đilas argues that this class is more ruthless than the old bourgeoisie because it masks its self-interest behind the sacred rhetoric of “social ownership” and “the common good.”