D R A Ž E N C E P I Ć

Department of Sociology, University of Zadar, Zadar, Croatia

KARIN DOOLAN
Department of Sociology, University of Zadar, Zadar, Croatia
DA N I J E L A D O L E N E C
Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

Class Analysis as Systemic Critique

A Historical Case Study

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the role of class analysis in envisioning a better world, in both the past
and the present. It critically reflects on class research conducted in the second half of the 20th century in
Yugoslavia, and contemporary class research from selected countries of former Yugoslavia, in order to
explore the place that class analysis as systemic critique occupied and occupies in a socialist and capitalist
context. This approach is informed by Wright’s (2015) evaluation of different forms of class analysis
through the game metaphor. According to Wright, whereas Marxist class analysis questions “what
game to play,” Weberian class analysis engages with “the rules of the game” and Durkheimian class
analysis examines “moves in the game.” Our historical case study of Yugoslav scholarship on class
during state socialism illustrates that, despite its role in sanctifying the status quo, class analysis also
drew on both Marxism and Weberian inspired life-chances research as tools for systemic critique. On the
other hand, our review of post-Yugoslav class research suggests that, currently, class analysis as an
instrument for the critique of capitalism is not prominent. Indeed, in contrast to the late Yugoslav
period in which sociology engaged class analysis in order to question what game should be played, the
post-socialist 1990s and 2000s brought a silencing of Marxist left critique, while sociologists transformed
their research into what Wright (2015) would describe as struggles over the rule of the game:
problematizing the variety of capitalism that emerged in post-socialism rather than capitalism itself.
KEYWORDS class analysis, socialism, capitalism, critique

INTRODUCTION

In Sociology, Capitalism, Critique, Dorre, Lessenich, and Rosa (2015) advocate a socially
engaged, critical sociology as they propose different critiques of capitalism. Their message
is that sociology should be more concerned with and engaged in systemic critique. The
question of socially engaged and critical sociology has become ever more important
during recent social turmoil and movements such as Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo
movement, which have inspired sociologists to contemplate what sociology has to offer in
terms of the systemic transformation of society. This is the key aim of critical sociology, as
a sociological subdiscipline.

Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol. 55, Number 2, pp. 104–119, ISSN: 0967-067X, e-ISSN: 1873-6920
© 2022 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to
photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page,
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104
 In this article, we analyze the potential of sociology to provide systemic critique by
focusing on different traditions of social class analysis. This is an area in which a critical
approach has most notably been pursued by Erik Olin Wright, whose research on social
class inequalities has contributed to a neo-Marxist critique of capitalism. According to
Wright’s (2015) typology of social class theory, which he elaborates through the game
metaphor, Durkheimian class analysis examines “moves in the game,” Weberian class
analysis engages with “the rules of the game,” but only Marxist class analysis questions
“what game to play.” This means that, according to Wright, only the Marxist paradigm
does not take the capitalist societal and economic framework as given, but scrutinizes its
very assumptions and offers an alternative political economic imaginary. Drawing inspi-
ration from Wright, who explores the potential of class analysis as a tool for the critique
of capitalism, we explore its somewhat paradoxical mirror image in the state socialist
regime of Yugoslavia, famously described by Rusinow (1978) as an “experiment,”1 as well
as the particular trajectories of class analysis in the post-Yugoslav capitalist context of the
1990s and 2000s.
The article is structured as follows. First, we outline Wright’s (2015) categorization of
social class theory vis-à-vis political struggles in capitalist societies and we use it as the
starting point for our analysis of systemic critique in Yugoslav class research. The his-
torical evolution of class analysis in state socialist Yugoslavia is presented in three phases,
which we defined as the sequential dominance of three different conceptualizations of
social class: strata approach, Praxis school, and life-chances research. In order to carry out
such a study, we have reviewed an exhaustive list of books and articles published on social
class from the 1950s to the 1980s in Yugoslavia. Following this, we discuss how the main
findings of our historical analysis structure the evolution of class research after 1990 in
Croatia and Serbia, again based on our literature review. This is followed by concluding
remarks.

THE GAME METAPHOR AND SOCIAL CLASS THEORY

Wright (2015) has proposed a classification of theoretical approaches to social class

analysis based on their approach to struggles over power. This classification borrows
from Alford and Friedland’s (1985) work on political struggles in capitalist societies. For
these authors, political struggles in capitalist societies can be understood as struggles over
systemic, institutional, and situational power. They use the metaphor of a game to
illustrate how these struggles differ: struggles involving systemic power are over what
game should be played (e.g., capitalism versus socialism); struggles involving institutional
power are over the rules of the given game (varieties of capitalism); and struggles involv-
ing situational power concern moves within a fixed set of rules (e.g., conflicts over
spending priorities) (Wright, 2015, pp. 119–120). Acknowledging the reductionism of
this typology (“multiple ‘games’ are being played simultaneously” [p. 121]), Wright

1. Allcock (2004) provides an informative history of Yugoslavia.

Cepić et al. | Class Analysis as Systemic Critique 105

nevertheless advocates for its value as a tool for highlighting distinctions between differ-
ent forms of class analysis.
For Wright (2015), Marxist class analysis engages with the idea of an emancipatory
systemic alternative to capitalism—that is, it asks “what game to play”—whereas Weber-
ian class analysis is situated at the level of “the rules of the game.” According to Wright
(2015), “For Weberians, capitalism is the only viable game in town, but its institutional
rules can vary a lot” (p. 122). Lastly, Wright characterizes Durkheimian class analysis as
taking both capitalism and its institutional rules as given and examining “moves in the
game.” Commenting on these differences, he emphasizes that although each of
the theoretical traditions of class analysis predominantly addresses different levels of the
game, the distinction is not always clear-cut: “the rationale for Marxist class analysis is
understanding the conditions for challenging and transcending capitalism, but Marxists
are also deeply engaged in understanding struggles within capitalism that don’t call the
game into question” (Wright, 2015, p. 123).
We find Wright’s typology of theoretical approaches to class analysis to be of great
importance. Such meta-sociological analyses occupy, or should occupy, an important
place in sociological thinking as they raise awareness of the type of analytical tools which
we (as sociologists and class scholars) have at our disposal. At the same time, Wright’s
emphasis on the agency of specific theoretical approaches to propose systemic critique
and bring about societal change takes capitalism as the dominant context. However, what
happens with class analysis as systemic critique in a socialist context? Whereas in a cap-
italist context Marxist class analysis has served as a critique of capitalism with socialism as
an emancipatory systemic alternative, we have found that in a socialist context it has
served to critique state socialism contrasting it to communism. We have also found that
systemic critique in late socialist Yugoslavia was a prerogative not only of Marxist class
analysis, but also of liberal currents for which capitalism was understood as a viable
systemic alternative. In the next sections, we develop this observation in the historic case
of class research in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

C L A S S A N A L Y S I S I N A “C L A S S L E S S S O C I E T Y ”: Y U G O S L A V C L A S S R E S E A R C H
(1964–91)

Class inequalities represented an intriguing and potentially perilous field of research for
Yugoslav sociologists during state socialism. A political order based on the doctrines of
Marxism-Leninism, the Yugoslav socialist system of self-management (Kardelj, 1976)
drew its legitimation from an ideology of egalitarianism and the abatement of class
struggle. At the same time, the discrepancy between the proclaimed goals of a classless
society and Yugoslav social reality rendered the problem of social inequalities difficult to
avoid (e.g., Berković, 1986; Cvjetičanin, 1989). Identifying dominant approaches, we
gleaned three main phases in the country’s research on social inequality. First is the
period of the early and mid-1960s when sociology was established as a separate area of
teaching and research at Yugoslav universities. Class research set off from there, although
initially the politically loaded term “class” was avoided and the more neutral “strata” (sloj)

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was used instead to describe social inequalities in Yugoslavia. Second, in the period of
social turmoil marked by the social movements of 1968 and 1971, scholars belonging to
the Praxis school used class terminology to address current political events and criticize
communist authorities. Finally, in the mid-1980s, the most exhaustive empirical research
on class was conducted with a focus on class determinants of life chances. Whereas
previously the benchmark for critique was primarily the communist ideal of a classless
society, in the 1980s sociologists in Yugoslavia undertook a Copernican reversal whereby
advanced capitalism of the West became the ideal that informed their class analysis. This
overview reflects broader conditions in which the research was undertaken, rather than
just trends within sociology: the shift from the ideological orthodoxy of the intermediate
period of state socialism (after sociology became established as an academic discipline),
radical critique inspired by social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the
liberalizing tendencies in the period of late socialism in the 1980s.
Before we present the three phases of Yugoslav class research, three caveats are needed.
First, even though the phases are presented chronologically, it was impossible to avoid
some overlaps between the different phases. Take, for example, the class discourse that
blamed bureaucracy for betraying the ideals of socialist revolution: although this
approach is described in the overview of the second phase, from the late 1960s to the
first half of the 1970s, the anti-bureaucracy narrative was present for a longer period of
Yugoslav history. Second, our analysis focuses on how sociologists framed class inequal-
ities. This is why the first phase begins with class-strata scholars who were research active
in the 1960s. It certainly cannot be denied that the notion of class was present in
Yugoslav intellectual debates prior to that, primarily through the writings of communist
politicians and ideologues, but the aim of our article is to reconstruct the sociological field
of class analysis. Third, we acknowledge that social inequalities were being addressed in
research areas such as the field of industrial sociology, which generated a wealth of
empirical work on social relations within firms. Although we do not capture this
research, Dević (2022) in this issue does so with much detail.2

Class-Strata Approach
Although sociology became a part of academic curricula at Yugoslav universities in the
1930s (mostly at law departments), the first departments of sociology were founded in
the early 1960s. According to Supek (1966), this was because across the USSR and the
Eastern Bloc, sociology was considered a bourgeois science and as such was forbidden.
Similarly, Mirković (1976) describes how sociology as a bourgeois science was deemed
unnecessary; instead, dialectical materialism as Marxist philosophy and historical mate-
rialism as its application to society were together considered sufficient. Korać (1968)
describes initial sociological research in Yugoslavia as follows: “Instead of a critical
research attitude towards facts, what prevailed was dogmatic apriority: given that in
principle everything was explained by general laws of social development, there existed

2. Please also refer to Archer, Duda, and Stubbs (2016) for a collection of historical case studies on inequalities
in Yugoslavia.

Cepić et al. | Class Analysis as Systemic Critique 107

no specific individual case that one could not subsume under the general laws” (p. 345).
Supek (1966), one of the founders of Yugoslav sociology, advocated an empirical soci-
ology and the use of “bourgeois” empirical methods, arguing against those for whom such
methods were unacceptable to Marxist analysis.
Social inequalities became an important area of research from early on, although the
tacit consensus was to conceptualize existing inequalities in terms of strata rather than in
class terms (in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language, this pertains to the distinction
between sloj and klasa). The congress of the Yugoslav Sociological Association held in
Split, in 1964, outlined this approach. According to congress participants, there were no
classes in Yugoslav society, but inequalities existed because people belonged to different
strata. This so-called class-strata approach, which became the dominant research para-
digm in 1960s Yugoslav sociology (Bernik, 1987, p. 548), was consistent with official
Marxist doctrine, which defined class in terms of ownership over the means of produc-
tion. Owing to the process of nationalizing production, and limits to private ownership,
sociologists could argue that there were no classes in Yugoslav society (Mirković, 1976).
On the other hand, the acknowledgment that Yugoslav society remained divided along
vertical lines allowed sociologists to recognize that goods and resources in state socialism
were unequally allocated. This conclusion was consistent with the idea of state socialism
as a transitional phase to a communist ideal. Even if there were relics of previous
hierarchies (in the form of strata, if not classes), it was supposedly only a matter of time
before these would be eliminated on the path to Yugoslavia becoming a fully
classless society.
In a 1969 article, Cvjetičanin neatly summarized Yugoslav sociologists’ attempts to
deal with the topic of social inequalities within a state socialist regime. According to him,
Marxist sociology should be able to capture social stratification in socialist regimes. For
this, three elements were needed: the Marxist theory of class struggle, the functionalist
theory of social stratification, and elite theory. Since Marx’s theory was developed to
capture the dynamics of capitalism, in the Yugoslav context it required adaptation in two
respects: functionalist theory provided certain key terms for analysis though it was
unacceptable as a theoretical basis, while elite theories were useful because of their focus
on functional social groups. According to Mirković (1976), functionalism served a pro-
regime narrative, used on the one hand to reject the existence of classes in Yugoslav
society and, at the same time, to justify growing inequalities. As Horowitz (1963) has
argued, though functionalism significantly derives from the 19th-century liberal tradition
in politics, its tenets can in principle be applied to justify any system of inequality.
In this phase, conceptualizing social inequalities remained within the domain of what
was politically acceptable: it was couched within the Marxist definition of class, and
underpinned by the idea of state socialism as a transitional phase. In terms of the role of
class analysis as systemic critique, we find that in this phase it was not prominent. In
Wright’s terms, early Yugoslav research on social class accepted the “game” of state
socialism and its institutions; it simply examined “moves” within this “game.” By con-
trast, class analysis began to take up the role of systemic critique in the next phase of
research, which followed the period of social turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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As Uskoković (1973) noted, in the late 1960s inequalities were no longer being discussed
coyly and abstractly but, instead, openly and concretely.

Praxis School
The second phase of class research in Yugoslavia was associated with the Praxis school of
Marxism. Named after the flagship journal Praxis, the school built its research agenda
around the study of Marx’s early writings (so-called humanist Marxism) and gained
international recognition (Vodovnik, 2012). It lost prominence after the journal was
suppressed in 1974 due to its overtly critical stance toward Yugoslav communist author-
ities, which had been sparked by political turmoil in the period from 1968 to 1971. The
first wave of social movements took place in 1968 when, inspired by examples from
France, Germany, and other European countries, students criticized the Yugoslav regime
for betraying communist ideals of equality and justice (Fichter, 2016). Members of the
Praxis school supported protesters by developing the Trotskyist motif of the “revolution
betrayed,” and related this directly to the expansion of the middle class. According to
them, the middle class had become the main political force in the country by abducting
the socialist revolution and infiltrating the Communist Party (Kangrga, 1971).
Unlike depictions of Yugoslav society through the concept of strata, as in the previous
phase, this body of research unambiguously described Yugoslavia as a class society (Nasa-
kanda, 1989), whereby class antagonism was seen as inherent to Yugoslav socialist society
(Žitko, 2019). The oligarchy/bureaucracy, with indirect ownership over the means of
production, was placed at the top of the class pyramid and included political elites and
executives of state enterprises who were seen as responsible for the appropriation of
surplus value and therefore as exploiting the working class (Nikolić, 1971, p. 585).
Members of the middle class (technicians, engineers, administration, scientists, doctors)
had no control over surplus value, but were said to have a higher standard of living than
the working class, and represented a recruitment pool for the oligarchy. According to this
approach, the working class and small peasants as immediate producers were at the
bottom of the class structure. Furthermore, Kuvačić (1972a) described the Yugoslav
middle class as closer to the “new” middle class, comprising administrative employees,
rather than the “old” middle class, epitomized by the liberal professions and small
entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, his descriptions were not backed by any qualitative or
quantitative data. Kangrga (1971) and Kuvačić (1972b) referred to the works of repre-
sentatives of the Frankfurt School, and drew inspiration from the classical writings of
Marx and Freud, yet these studies were also mostly speculative rather than based on
empirical research.
In comparison to the first phase of social class research in Yugoslavia, sociologists
affiliated with the Praxis school of Marxism formulated a more explicit political critique.
The strict model of a classless society (no private ownership, hence no exploitation) was
modified so as to replace capitalists (as de jure owners of the means of production) with
the bureaucracy (as de facto owners of the means of production) (Davidović, 1985). This
refined dichotomous model of class structure with the bureaucracy and workers as the
main agents of antagonistic class relations was akin to the New Class theory of Milovan

Cepić et al. | Class Analysis as Systemic Critique 109

Djilas (1957), a leading Yugoslav communist who became a dissident. Djilas was vice
president of Yugoslavia’s postwar government who soon grew into a vociferous critic of
the new regime. From 1954 onward he spent the better part of the decade in prison as
a dissident, which is probably why his works are not referenced in Yugoslav sociology
until much later, though his book received international reception and influenced various
authors including Ralf Dahrendorf (Mirković, 1976). Much later, in a special issue of the
journal Sociologija from 1990, the contributors, many of whom had been close to the
Praxis school, called Djilas’s work “brave and historically important” and a “turning
point in understanding the class structure of state-socialist societies” (Jakšić et al.,
1990, p. 243).
Reflecting on the embeddedness of social class research within its broader political and
economic context, according to Bernik (1987), class scholarship in early Yugoslav soci-
ology encapsulated two views on the historical role of state socialism. The first view,
emblematic of the class-strata approach, included the perspective of state socialist societies
as transitional (1987, p. 549). This approach offered an acceptable compromise to
sociologists who wanted to point out inequalities, but also wanted to avoid attributing
problems to distortions in socialist regimes. Tomić-Koludrović (1996) characterizes this
approach as “permitted criticism”: the regime allowed for interpretative pluralism as long
as it was legitimated as Marxist. The second approach, on the other hand, applied a fully-
fledged Marxist critique, arguing either that state socialist regimes represented nothing
but a version of capitalism, or that it was a system sui generis (Bernik, 1987, p. 550). For
these authors, an emancipatory systemic alternative was based on Marxist humanism. In
Wright’s terms, Yugoslav sociologists of class during this period questioned the very
“nature of the game” by relying on an expanded theoretical palette, which allowed them
to critique “actually existing” socialism from a Marxist perspective.
We date the end of this phase of class research to 1974, when Praxis ceased to be
published. This was followed by almost a decade during which no class research was
published in Yugoslav sociological periodicals. Reviewing Yugoslav sociology in the
1970s, Deutsch (1977, p. 141) observed “an apparent paradox,” since on the one hand
one could find evidence of academic repression and limitations on free expression, but at
the same time there was strong growth of investment in social science and the growth of
social science at universities. In part, what is going on is also a generational change, with
older colleagues maintaining an orthodox Marxist approach, whereas younger sociologists
entering the field are interested in empirical research (Denitch, 1971). Following the
death of Tito in 1980, the Yugoslav state and society began to undergo a transformation
that encouraged the third phase of class research in Yugoslav sociology.

Life-Chances Research
We roughly date the third phase of class scholarship in Yugoslavia to the mid-1980s. The
decade leading up to the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was
marked by liberalization in various domains of public life—student media, culture and
performing arts, pop and rock music, youth subcultures (Zubak, 2013). At the same time,
this era was marked by a growing dissatisfaction with the system, encapsulated in the

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atmosphere of ambivalence and cynicism, whereby different actors used (and contributed
to) the legitimacy crisis of the socialist regime to speak openly about social and political
issues. Even though social scientists in this period played a less prominent public role than
during the 1968 and 1971 protests, research on social inequalities clearly demonstrated
the discrepancy between egalitarian ideals and class reality.
Unlike previous periods when class analysis was, according to critics, insufficiently
empirical (and therefore partial) (Popović et al., 1987, p. 23), in the 1980s class research
in Yugoslavia witnessed an intensification of empirical studies. Despite the political aim
to create a classless society, studies demonstrated that the upper classes had higher income
(Bogdanović, 1986), with income level and occupation highly correlated with level of
education (Popović et al., 1987). Income dispersion had increased especially from 1974
to 1986 due to the economic crisis (Popović et al., 1987, p. 362). Furthermore, it was
shown that the upper classes enjoyed a higher standard of living, measured by the quality
of nutrition, health, work conditions, cultural consumption, and leisure activities (Čolić,
1986; Popović et al., 1987; Lay, 1991).
Inequalities were particularly salient in terms of housing: social apartments were most
often allocated to executives and experts, who on average had larger and better-equipped
apartments when compared to those of members of the working class (Popović et al.,
1987; Mlinar, 1983). According to Popović and his associates (Popović et al., 1987),
members of the working class were forced to rent their apartments while the upper classes
enjoyed the benefit of free housing and used their earnings to build weekend houses. The
upper classes also had greater political influence, with a distinction between physical and
intellectual labor as the crucial aspect of social differentiation (Mrkšić, 1986). According
to Popović et al. (1987), political power was concentrated in the hands of a small fraction
of people with high positions in the administrative apparatus and state firms, whereas
workers, clerks, and peasants had little say in political matters. Studies also showed that
social differentiation in Yugoslavia was founded on the unequal distribution of resources
and power, which then led to unequal chances for different strata to articulate their
interests (Bernik, 1982).
Social mobility was the most explored area of class research in this period. Studies
pointed out Communist Party membership and education attainment as key channels of
upward mobility (Lazić 1986a). According to Sekulić (1984), social mobility was highest
for the age cohort that entered the labor market around 1960, but began to decrease for
later generations (Sekulić, 1987). The decreasing openness of the Yugoslav class structure
was therefore related to reduced rates of upward and downward mobility (Sekulić, 1984);
limited rates of upward and downward mobility among three main classes (agricultural
workers, manual workers, and experts) (Flere & Ðurd̄ev, 1984); and unequal chances of
acquiring educational attainment, since education strategies were also dependent on
economic status (Popović et al., 1987).
The majority of studies in this period based class indicators on employment relations
and conceptualized classes as social groups with unequal life chances in a Weberian
fashion, avoiding the implications of antagonistic relations between classes (Čolić,
1986; Popović, 1984; Popović et al., 1987). This last phase of class research also opened

Cepić et al. | Class Analysis as Systemic Critique 111

up more space for theoretical pluralism than in the previous periods. Some sociologists
tried to renew the Marxist approach by resorting to newer trends in analytical Marxism as
opposed to structural Marxism (Lazić, 1986b; Bernik, 1987). On the other hand, Sekulić
(1983) criticized the ideological baggage of Marxism, the Marxist focus on ownership, but
also the transitional class-strata approach (classes evolving to strata, and strata evolving to
a classless society) and advocated multiple stratification dimensions.
Our attempt to classify the growing number of empirical studies on social class reveals
striking parallels to how the sociological field in 1970s Hungary was described by Konrád
and Szelényi (1979). According to these authors, critical intellectuals could be divided
into two camps: “humanists,” who were motivated by improving socialism, critiquing it
from the Left and cultivating links with Western Marxism, and “revisionist-empiricists,”
who wanted to “modernize” the system and aimed to show the ruling elite that the “facts
on the ground” contradicted the Marxist theory of statecraft and economy. The second
group also cultivated international links, but mostly with academic centers focused on
empirical sciences. Their focus was on social stratification and mobility, especially class
reproduction through education. Most importantly, “revisionist-empiricists” referred to
the Western ideal of modernization that assumed capitalism and democracy, against
which state socialism was deemed aberrant. Given the relevance of modernization theory
for these analyses, it is important to emphasize that modernization theory was the child
of the Cold War political climate, and that in its original Parsonian formulation the US
was explicitly postulated as the normatively superior model of development, against
which other societies are measured and found deficient (Harrison, 1988). In addition
to that, it is worth remembering here that in developing his structuralist-functionalist
approach, Parsons himself defined his research program as opposed to Marxist social
analysis (Jacobs, 1969). While from a Marxist perspective research is motivated by
searching for ways in which man can overcome structures of domination, Parsons came
“to associate the realization of human needs with the triumph of American capitalism”
and hence felt no need for critical social theory (Jacobs, 1969, p. 67).
According to classical modernization theory, development was understood unequiv-
ocally as becoming “more like” Western Europe and the US, while other societies can
either join in on this trend or remain cut-off backwaters (Jacobs, 1969). This thesis
according to which state socialist modernization is “deviant” and incomplete was very
influential in Yugoslavia in the 1980s (Dolenec, 2015). One of its main protagonists was
the Croatian sociologist Josip Županov (1983, 1985), who used class analysis to explain
the genesis and persistence of deviant modernization in Yugoslavia. According to him,
a class compromise, which he described as a “coalition of the unequal,” between the
political elite and manual labor—whereby workers accepted the state legitimacy and in
return received economic security—cemented the status quo and prevented the possibil-
ity of development. He contrasted this patron–client relationship to the United States,
where the coalition between science and capital ostensibly secures system legitimacy
(Županov, 1983).
The third phase of class analysis in Yugoslavia therefore broadly corresponds to how
Konrád and Szelényi (1979) described the sociological field in Hungary, as divided

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between humanists and revisionist-empiricists. The Praxis school, as well as the work of,
for instance, Branko Horvat (1969, 1984), which had wide international reception,
would fall into the Left-humanist camp, while sociologists analyzing social stratification
could be placed within the camp of liberal modernizers, who aimed to point out flaws of
the state socialist system vis-à-vis advanced capitalism in the West. By the mid-1980s,
papers at sociological conventions in Yugoslavia were openly proposing multiparty
democracy, market reforms and other types of economic and political liberalization
(Dolenec, Doolan & Žitko, 2015). Over time, research in the empiricist camp increas-
ingly drifted into elite theory, focusing on the features of political bureaucracy and
lamenting the fact that experts did not have a say in the nation’s development (Dolenec,
Doolan & Žitko, 2015). Linking this back to Wright’s argumentation about Marxist class
analysis as a tool for a critique of capitalism, our analysis suggests that during the late
1980s in state socialist Yugoslavia both Marxist and liberal theory was employed by
sociologists (as well as liberal economists such as Milovanović [1990]) who used class
analysis to question the nature of “the game” and advance a systemic critique of the
regime.

CLASS ANALYSIS AFTER YUGOSLAVIA

Our central task in this article has been to elucidate the historical context from the
second half of the 20th century in Yugoslavia, which gave rise to competing sociological
perspectives that employed class analysis as a tool for systemic critique. By the 1980s
Yugoslavia had many characteristics of a mixed economy, with an advancing market
orientation that aimed to coexist with a socialist rhetoric (Bockman, 2011). This created
the conditions for the regime to be critiqued both from the Marxist left, as betraying its
own stated goals, and from the liberal perspective, which increasingly found grounds for
comparing Yugoslavia to Western capitalist economies and pronouncing it lacking.
Given the development of these competing critical approaches, what happened after
the state socialist project was officially pronounced dead and buried? In brief, Marxist
critique evaporated, while a Weberian life-chances approach became the main pillar of
sociological research into stratification, social mobility, and related topics. After the
country’s dissolution in the 1990s, the volume of class research decreased substantially,3
with class being “the key concept of the toppled nemesis” as Ost (2015, p. 546) has
insightfully observed. The concept of class was associated with Marxist teaching and
socialist values, and rapidly fell from grace in the academic and broader social setting
(Dolenec, Doolan & Žitko, 2015; Kasapović, Dolenec & Nikić Čakar, 2014). The irony
of the fact that the very same Marxist class analysis that was delegitimized in the anti-
communist atmosphere of the 1990s was the source of systemic critique of the Yugoslav

3. Dolenec, Doolan, and Žitko (2015) conducted an empirical analysis of the curricula and research publications
in the field of philosophy in Croatia between 1985 and 1995 and showed how all aspects of Marxian teachings were
phased out of the curricula and published papers in the main domestic academic outlet, Journal of Philosophical
Research.

Cepić et al. | Class Analysis as Systemic Critique 113

state socialist regime and contributed to its legitimation crisis, was lost to many
commentators.
Sociologists in the revisionist-empiricist tradition were now working in dramatically
changed circumstances, chronicling the transition to capitalism and democracy (Dolenec,
Doolan & Žitko, 2015). They continued to focus on analyzing social stratification and
social mobility: Sekulić and Šporer (2000a, 2000b) in Croatia and Lazić (2000) in
Serbia positioned their research within the debate over elite reproduction, analyzing the
extent to which managerial elites previously belonged to the communist nomenklatura.
Elites were also studied via the intersection between class, ethnicity, and political attitudes
(Katunarić, 1996), and the scholarship on post-socialist entrepreneurs (Čengić, 2009),
although the latter avoided using class terminology. Furthermore, Lazić and Cvejić
(2007) have explored people’s orientations toward liberalism, collectivism, and redis-
tributive statism in the context of the burgeoning topics of post-socialist literature:
democratization and marketization. The debate on the middle-class role in spreading
values of liberalism, individualism, and meritocracy as central to the capitalist social order
was specifically addressed, leading authors such as Lazić and Cvejić (2011) to conclude
that the Serbian middle class supported liberal-democratic values, but failed to embrace
economic liberalization.
The heritage of state socialism remained central to this research, as continuities and
discontinuities with the socialist past in the new context of a market economy and liberal
democracy provided not only key points of reference but also the main explanatory factor
for most deficiencies that were identified (Dolenec, 2016). In the 1990s and 2000s, the
original thesis about deviant modernization under state socialism was modified to help
explain obvious problems with the “transition” to capitalism and democracy. While
during the early 1990s the term capitalism was rarely used in sociological studies, by
the late 1990s and 2000s it made more frequent appearances, usually prefixed as “crony,”
“political,” or “wild” (Dolenec, 2016). The deviant character of socialist modernization
was in this period redeployed to explain lasting sociocultural values in the population,
such as radical egalitarianism, as reasons behind the conclusion that in the post-Yugoslav
context capitalism is not what it should be (Županov, 2002). Referring back to Wright’s
typology, in contrast to the late Yugoslav period in which sociology engaged class analysis
in order to question what game should be played, the post-socialist 1990s and 2000s
brought a silencing of Marxist left critique, while sociologists transformed their research
into what Wright (2015) would describe as struggles over the rule of the game, proble-
matizing the variety of capitalism that emerged in post-socialism rather than capitalism
itself.
It is worth making two points here. First, the disappearance of class analysis in the
post-Yugoslav space of the 1990s corresponded to the end of class debate (Pakulski &
Waters, 1996). In a postmodern vein, Pakulski and Waters (1996, p. 24) were dismissive
of class sociologists, accusing them of imposing characteristics of 19th-century societies
on 20th-century ones. According to the authors, “In the contemporary period of history,
the class paradigm is intellectually and morally bankrupt” (Pakulski & Waters, 1996,
p. 26). Second, although Marxist class analysis remains integral to general reviews of

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theoretical traditions in class research, sociological research has marginalized this
approach. According to Atkinson (2015, p. 38), “virtually no one uses Wright’s class
scheme in sociological research,” although for him “Erik Olin Wright’s remains the best-
known sociological effort to rethink and refine . . . Marx’s ideas.” And Wright (2015,
p. 9) himself recognizes that most sociologists ignore domination and exploitation when
talking about class. Indeed, in the Serbian and Croatian context there has been a note-
worthy interest in Bourdieusian class theory (e.g., Cvetičanin & Popescu, 2011; Tomić-
Koludrović & Petrić, 2014; and Doolan & Tonković, 2021). In conclusion, in the
context of Yugoslavia a bitter paradox remains: during the nondemocratic regime that
many describe as despotic, anti-systemic critique emerged both from the Left and from
liberal perspectives, while in the supposedly free capitalist democracies that emerged in
the 1990s anti-systemic sociological critique has been silent.

CONCLUSION

Our central task in this article has been to provide a historical overview of the political
role of sociological perspectives on class in socialist Yugoslavia and two of its successor
states, Croatia and Serbia, while engaging with Wright’s (2015) typology of social class
theory. This typology was developed with a capitalist system in mind: a Marxist approach
radically critiques capitalism, whereas Weberian and Durkheimian approaches take cap-
italism as given. Even though Wright’s (2015) valuable work on the critical potential of
different traditions of class analysis initiates an important meta-sociological debate, we
have reached a striking, crucial conclusion: in the sociopolitical context of socialism, not
only Marxist but also Weberian-inspired perspectives encouraged sociologists to conduct
systemic critiques, to question the nature of “the game” in Wright’s terms. This was
especially true in the 1970s and 1980s, when both domestic and international political
transformations fostered a plurality of conceptual approaches to social class rooted in
a deeply critical sensibility. Clearly, the Marxist approach associated with the Praxis
school could be seen as radical critique in Yugoslav sociology. However, as it was shown
in the reconstruction of the historical field of class research, the life-chances approaches
to class analysis drawn on by “revisionist-empiricists” could also be understood as
radical critique.
This critique was possible precisely because the political field was marked by the
dominant ideology of Marxism which aspired to an egalitarian communist society and
which based its intervention on that ideal benchmark. In response to the unachieved
egalitarianism, liberals advocated Western-style modernization, to change “the game,” as
it were. On the other hand, sociological research on social class in the post-Yugoslav states
of Croatia and Serbia has been remarkably apolitical: at best, it examines “moves” within
the capitalist “game.” Capitalism in this context is deeply uncongenial to systemic cri-
tique. Yet sociology, and sociological research on class in particular, as evidenced by our
insights in this article, are potentially powerful tools of systemic critique, of challenging
the “game” of capitalism and offering an alternative political imaginary. n

Cepić et al. | Class Analysis as Systemic Critique 115

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful
comments, Mislav Žitko for engaging with them in conversations about class analysis
as well as Jeremy F. Walton for his valuable insights on an earlier version of this article.

FIN A N CIAL SU P P OR T

This work has been supported in part by the Croatian Science Foundation under the
project number 3134.

Corresponding author email: dcepic@unizd.hr

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