• by Vesna Peric Zimonjic (belgrade)
• Thursday, June 04, 2009
• Inter Press Service

Few visitors to Belgrade miss the pedestrian Knez Mihailova Street. Apart from its colourful stores and boutiques, it is known for its street vendors selling DVDs, CDs, T-shirts, international and Serbian magazines, and books.

Over the past two months, some long forgotten books have become hits, above all The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, the 19th century philosopher and father of communist ideology whose beliefs swept parts of the globe, including former Yugoslavia, in the early 20th century.

'I'd say that the 'Manifesto' is becoming a hit; more and more people are buying it,' Aleksandar Stevic, a vendor at Knez Mihailova told IPS. 'I've reached a weekly sale of 50, which is a lot for my place.'

The young, he says, are driven by curiosity, while elders 'want to refresh their memories.' As for himself, Stevic says he is 'not interested', although Marxism was a mandatory subject when he was in high school two decades ago.

Marxist was taught in secondary schools and at the university level until the introduction of the multi-party system in 1990 in former Yugoslavia.

Generations grew up with Marxism following World War II, in a country that saw 'communism with a human face.' That meant decades of strict state control of development and the economy but also freedom unusual for a classic communist state, such as ease in travelling abroad, and a 'neither- East-nor-West' political status.

The new interest, inevitably, is driven by the financial crisis. 'It's Das Kapital people ask for,' says Bojana Miloradovic, attendant at a bookstore. 'Some of them say that it partially deals with the collapse of the global economy and the end of capitalism, or the downturn we see now.'

Copies are becoming a prize possession. 'I'd love to read Das Kapital as well, but it cannot be found easily in Slovenia,' said visitor Jaka Martinc. 'I'll read this (the Manifesto) instead, as some expressions I see do ring a bell, and Marxism is despised in my country.'

The works of Marx are selling in other ways. Ads appear in dailies, to buy or sell copies of the manifesto and other works, particularly Das Kapital. Some sellers say they have fished the books out of their parents' or grandparents' cellars.

'It's a time of crisis for neo-liberal capitalism, a concept we only ran into recently, when the traumatic wars of the 1990s ended and (former leader Slobodan) Milosevic fell from power in 2000,' professor of sociology at Belgrade University Ratko Bozovic told IPS. 'For many, the new interest in Marx is an illusion that things could have been better had we not embraced the capitalist concept.'

But other ex-Yugoslav countries are not seeing the same level of interest in Marx as Serbia, the largest ex-Yugoslav state.

'It's odd, Croatian Marxists in former Yugoslavia were the most prominent, but they seem to have disappeared since 1991,' analyst Bozidar Nikolic commented in the daily Danas.

In Bosnia, well-known former Marxist Zarko Papic recently dedicated a column in the weekly Dani to the problems of neo-liberal capitalism. He says in his essay titled 'The worst is yet to come', that the global crisis is 'only the tip of the iceberg, as it marks the beginning of the dissolution of the current system of consumer culture that went global.'

But Belgrade sociologist Stjepan Gredelj (56) believes 'there will be no big renaissance of Marxism' in the former Yugoslav region. 'We had too big a concentration of ideology of Marxism for decades, which was in conflict with the practically open society we lived in until 1991,' Gredelj told IPS.

'It was soft communism, where people always wanted more than the dry ideology provided by Marxism. Even when I was teaching it to students a while ago, I used my classes as a stage for presenting other, different and counter-positioned ideas...I doubt that anyone who buys The Communist Manifesto now reads the book till its end.'

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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