The Lingering Constituency

Abstract

Tracing the political and academic treatment of the notion of class, in this article I emphasize overlapping continuities and discontinuities from the socialist period. I argue that in Serbia, class preserved its policy relevance at least until the mid-1990s, since there was a peculiar melding of nation and class in public discourse. Key to these developments was the rise of Milošević as a reformed communist already in the late 1980s. Milošević’s agenda was heavily reliant on class-based appeals and the mobilization of workers for its legitimacy. Even though formal democratization began in 1990, with an accompanying mobilization of nationalism, the category of workers remained politically relevant, present in the patronizing rhetoric of most political sides. Only after 2000, with renewed democratization and neoliberal reforms, did public discourses begin to downplay class in the conventional sense, while young scholars took up issues of class in new, more critical ways.