What Can Marx Teach Us About the Restoration of Capitalism?
What Can Marx Teach Us About the Restoration of Capitalism?

Summary/Abstract: This article discusses an epochal regression, while seeking to avoid the social science melodrama. Situating its reflection on the conceptual level, it examines the restoration of capitalism in social formations with a socialist project in Marxist and Marxian terms in order to test their theoretical capacity for historical analysis and, above all, to show what the alternative movements and theory in Yugoslavia could have done but failed to do while they still had time to intervene. More precisely, the article attempts to reveal the locus where theoretical insights turned out to be disconnected from political commitments (i.e., the title should be read as “What we should have learned from Marx but failed to take into account in our practice”). Facing the principal contradiction between socialist processes and political bureaucracy (of which capitalist processes are an indirect effect), the alternative movements in Yugoslavia – disregarding the top managerial groups and their enormous influence within the political bureaucracy – found themselves theoretically unprepared and practically powerless when the united forces of reaction conducted a top-down counter-revolutionary coup and destroyed the socialist federation in fire and blood.

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