When The New Class was published in New York in 1957, it caused an international sensation. It was translated into dozens of languages and sold millions of copies worldwide. Why the Book Was Revolutionary:
Djilas' critique of communist elites was scathing. He argued that they had become corrupt, cynical, and isolated from the people they claimed to represent. The new class, Djilas claimed, was more concerned with maintaining its power and privileges than with serving the interests of the working class. He saw the communist party as a vehicle for the new class to maintain its power, rather than as a genuine representative of the people.
In 1954, Milovan Djilas was a revolutionary hero. By 1957, he was a dissident imprisoned for publishing The New Class . His central question was deceptively simple: If the communist revolution abolished private property, why did it not abolish inequality? His answer was radical: the revolution had produced a new exploiting class—the party bureaucracy. Unlike Marx’s bourgeoisie, this class did not own the means of production outright; instead, it controlled them through political monopoly. Djilas thereby transformed the critique of communism from an economic one (failure of planning) to a political one (emergence of a new oligarchy). Milovan Djilas Nova Klasa.pdf
Djilas identifies four mechanisms through which this class perpetuates itself:
In "Nova Klasa," Djilas argued that communist revolutions, which aimed to eliminate class differences and establish a classless society, had ultimately led to the creation of a new ruling class. This new class, which Djilas termed the "nova klasa" (new class), was composed of high-ranking communist party officials, government bureaucrats, and managers of state-owned enterprises. According to Djilas, this new class had developed its own interests, privileges, and powers, which were in direct conflict with the original goals of socialism. When The New Class was published in New
Djilas begins by accepting the Marxist premise that history is a series of class struggles. However, he decisively breaks from Lenin and Stalin by arguing that a party-led revolution cannot abolish class per se . “The idea of a classless society,” writes Djilas (1957, p. 37), “has proved to be an illusion. The communists have not succeeded in creating a society without classes, but only in creating a new class of bureaucratic exploiters.”
"The system is... one of absolute political monopoly... The new class acquires its strength, its privileges, its supremacy, and its power from the party." He argued that they had become corrupt, cynical,
Those who enforce the regime's control through repression.
The PDF document, Nova Klasa or The New Class , is the full articulation of Djilas's theory. He argued that the communist revolution had not led to the "withering away of the state" or the creation of a classless society, as Marxist theory had predicted. Instead, it had given birth to a .
Upon its publication in the United States, "The New Class" was a bombshell. The Times Literary Supplement later ranked it as one of the 100 most influential books since World War II. It provided the intellectual framework for understanding communist societies not as socialist utopias but as new forms of bureaucratic tyranny. For a generation of anti-communist thinkers, it was a manifesto.