For all its brilliance, The New Class suffers from the very idealism it claims to reject. Đilas writes as a disappointed believer. His critique is essentially that the revolution failed to live up to its own ethical promise of freedom and equality.
Read The New Class not as a work of impartial political science, but as a tragic memoir of a revolution that ate its children. It is a flawed masterpiece—the first and most powerful insider account of how communism’s promise of equality curdled into a new, gray tyranny of the party card. milovan dilas novi razred
★★★★☆ (Essential for understanding the Cold War and the nature of bureaucratic power; limited as a blueprint for any alternative.) For all its brilliance, The New Class suffers
The book’s undeniable power comes from Đilas’s credibility. This is not a Cold War tract written by a disillusioned exile from a safe distance. Đilas was the insider’s insider. He fought with Partisans, served in Tito’s highest councils, and personally helped build the system he later eviscerates. Read The New Class not as a work
Consequently, the book has almost nothing to say about a market economy or liberal democracy as alternatives. Đilas’s solution is vague: a return to a “democratic,” “self-governing” socialism (he admired the early workers’ councils). He cannot see—or refuses to see—that the centralization he criticizes might be a feature, not a bug, of state-controlled economies. He still believes in socialism without the party.
Furthermore, the book’s scope is limited. It is a brilliant anatomy of Stalinism and its Yugoslav variant, but it struggles to explain communist systems that adapted (like China’s market reforms) or collapsed (like the USSR). It predicts stagnation, which was largely correct for the USSR, but cannot account for the rapid industrialization of East Asia under similar party structures.
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.