Suppressed Works · Banned Texts
The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System
The book that invented a phrase and cost its author seven years. Djilas, who had been Tito’s closest associate and was briefly next in line to lead Yugoslavia, argues that a communist revolution does not abolish class but manufactures a new one: the party bureaucracy, which owns nothing on paper and controls everything in practice, and whose privileges are therefore invisible to the theory that produced it. He had been expelled from the party in 1954 and tried for hostile propaganda in 1955; the manuscript was smuggled to the West in 1957 and published in New York by Praeger, and the Yugoslav state answered with a second trial and a seven-year sentence. It was translated into some sixty languages and sold around three million copies while remaining unpublishable in the country it described, where the ban on Djilas’s writing held until 1988.
- Period
- 1957
- Region
- Yugoslavia
- Language
- English
- Rights
- In copyright — do not store. First published in New York by Praeger in 1957; the United States renewal is recorded as RE263665, naming Milovan Djilas, Morton Puner and Konrad Kellen. THE RENEWAL WAS CHECKED RATHER THAN ASSUMED. A United States book published between 1923 and 1963 lost its copyright unless the term was renewed, so "published in 1957" is not by itself an answer. Stanford’s Copyright Renewal Database was searched for Djilas and returns renewal records for this work and for the other two major titles. The renewal is real; the work is not free. WHO HOLDS THE RIGHTS IS AN OPEN QUESTION, and this record does not pretend otherwise. The finding aid’s terms of access say only "For copyright status, please contact the Hoover Institution Library & Archives," and Hoover’s copyright policy pushes it straight back: researchers are "responsible for compliance with copyright law," including "identifying the copyright owner," and staff help only where Hoover or Stanford itself holds the copyright. No public record found names an estate, an executor or an agent for Djilas. His son Aleksa Djilas appears in the 1984-1989 publishing correspondence in this collection, which is evidence of involvement and NOT evidence that he holds the rights; the distinction is left standing here rather than closed by a guess.
- Source
- https://archive.org/details/newclassanalysis00djil
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