To understand the text, one must understand the author. Djilas was no ordinary dissident. Born in Montenegro in 1911, he joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia as a young firebrand. He fought alongside Tito as a partisan during World War II, enduring torture and leading guerilla campaigns. By 1953, he was the President of the Federal People's Assembly of Yugoslavia—effectively the second most powerful man in the country.
If you are downloading this PDF today, you are likely looking for insights into authoritarianism or the corruption of ideals. The book remains relevant because it describes the universal tendency of bureaucracies to serve themselves. Milovan Djilas Nova Klasa.pdf
If you want, I can: (1) provide a more detailed chapter-by-chapter summary; (2) compare Djilas’s thesis to a specific country (USSR, China, or Yugoslavia); or (3) draft a short critical essay taking a position for publication. To understand the text, one must understand the author
While The New Class was a bestseller, physical first editions are rare and expensive. Libraries often restrict access to reference copies. A free, scanned PDF allows students in Eastern Europe, Asia, and South America to access a text that is often censored or ignored in their local curricula. He fought alongside Tito as a partisan during
In the mid-1950s, a slim volume of political theory escaped the Iron Curtain. Its author was not a disillusioned capitalist scholar or a CIA operative, but a man who had once been the heir apparent to Josip Broz Tito—the Vice President of Yugoslavia. His name was Milovan Djilas, and his bombshell was titled Nova Klasa (The New Class).
Searching for is a search for one of the most dangerous books ever written about power. Djilas ended his life in obscurity in Belgrade, having spent more than a decade in prison. He died in 1995, just as Yugoslavia was collapsing into genocide—a bloody denouement that he had predicted decades earlier.
It applies not just to historical Communism, but to any system where a small group holds total power without accountability or private property rights. It serves as a warning: when power and property rights are concentrated in the hands of the state, a "New Class" of bureaucrats inevitably emerges to exploit the system for their own benefit.