1968 In Yugoslavia. Issue 3 (3rd April 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Močnik, Josip Rastko
• Is Part Of: Interventions. Volume 23:Issue 3(2021)
• Page Start: 399
• Page End: 416
• Publication Date: 2021-04-03
• Subjects: Yugoslavia -- socialism -- post-capitalism -- student movement -- restoration of capitalism -- 1968; Postcolonialism -- Periodicals; 325.3
• DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2020.1762694
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1369-801X

Abstract

Abstract : This essay presents Yugoslav 1968 as a student revolt. Focusing on the developments in Slovenia, the Socialist Federacy's northernmost republic, it shows the uneven development of the student movement in various university centres, while describing its ideological horizon and theoretical background. The essay contends that the economic reform of 1965 strengthened the capitalist processes in Yugoslavia to the extent that later reforms were unable to contain them. The student movement was able to diagnose the critical contradictions (bureaucratic domination and the capitalist subversion of socialist processes), but failed to mobilize a mass socialist movement. While post-1968 theory developed a stronger conceptual apparatus, it remained trapped in the ideological struggle against the domination of political bureaucracy, and consequently failed to confront the restoration of capitalism. This is the main reason, the essay argues, why a Yugoslav theory that was able to hegemonize the global theoretical discourse of the 1990s (as the "Ljubljana Lacanian School") was unable to theorize and intervene in the dissolution that the same decade brought to Yugoslavia itself.