By the early 1950s, Djilas began questioning the system he helped build. He observed that despite eliminating the old capitalist bourgeoisie, the state had not withered away as Karl Marx predicted. Instead, a new elite had seized absolute control. After publishing articles criticizing party corruption, Djilas was stripped of his official positions, expelled from the Central Committee, and eventually imprisoned. It was during this period of dissent and political exile that The New Class was written and smuggled out of Yugoslavia to be published in the West in 1957. Core Thesis: The Rise of the Bureaucratic Elite

To understand the weight of The New Class , one must understand Milovan Đilas. Born in Montenegro in 1911, Đilas was a radical leftist intellectual who rose to become one of the top four leaders of the Yugoslav communist state after World War II, alongside Josip Broz Tito. He was the chief propagandist of the regime, a wartime partisan hero, and the man expected by many to succeed Tito.

In the communist system, the state officially owned the factories, land, and resources. However, the Communist Party bureaucracy held absolute control over the distribution and use of that wealth. Because they controlled the means of production and reaped the personal benefits of that control, the party bureaucracy effectively functioned as a new owning class. 2. The Monopoly on Power and Privileges

To understand the weight of The New Class , one must understand the man who wrote it. Milovan Đilas (often spelled Djilas) was not an outside observer or a lifelong Western capitalist. He was a high-ranking Yugoslav revolutionary, a close wartime ally of Josip Broz Tito, and a key architect of the socialist Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia.

The enduring interest in a digital copy of Djilas’s work is driven by several factors:

As the regime consolidated power, Djilas grew deeply disillusioned by the stark contrast between communist ideals and reality.

When readers access the Nova Klasa text, they encounter a systematic breakdown of the totalitarian state. The book is organized into chapters that dissect various facets of the regime: