‘The primitive accumulation of capital and memory’: Mnemonic wars as national reconciliation discourse in (post-)Yugoslavia

Abstract

The article elaborates on Marx’s concept of the so-called primitive accumulation of capital by extending it to the field of memory and introducing a new concept of the ‘primitive accumulation of memory’. The article argues that this concept gives us an innovative path to understand the relationship between memory and capital. To arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the break-up of Yugoslavia and its thoroughly revised memoryscape, this text combines a politicoeconomic analysis with the evaluation of memory-related ideological shifts that are in fact perceived as long-term mnemonic wars in (post-)Yugoslavia. The article analyses how nationalism and memory revisionism are internally linked to capitalist accumulation. More specifically, the article will observe how an ethnocentric mnemonic war sought to openly negate the socialist and anti-fascist past. Indeed, the creation of an anti-communist, and at times anti-antifascist, orientation was integral to the imagining of new nation-states. Juxtaposed to this creative and generative current of memory revisionism, the primitive accumulation of capital in post-Yugoslavia began with the ‘deaccumulation’ of social infrastructure and wealth, and with the dispossession of working people. The bigger the dispossession, the larger the nationalist accumulation of memory and displacement of class antagonism. Finally, the article discusses what at first glance seems to be a pacifying discourse of ‘national reconciliation’, which stoked a thorough revision of the public memory of World War II. This revision reconciled fascist collaborationists and anti-fascist Partisans, and it helped to challenge Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist consensus, while also framing the ethnic wars of the 1990s.

Introduction: Marx and memory studies in post-Yugoslavia

Enzo Traverso (2017a) argues that the missed encounter between Marxism and memory studies has to do with differences in their objects of research and concomitant differences in their methodologies (p. 54). We could further argue that the missed encounter is an outcome of the historical process of delinking Marxism and history or memory studies, which marked the period from 1980 onwards, preceding the demise of state socialism. The move to post-Marxism and the explosive rise of memory studies can thus be seen as a part of a general process of ‘culturalization’ (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991), evidenced by an absence of class analysis in a wide range of fields in the humanities and social sciences. In the post-socialist countries, this process was often politically motivated and present in a wide array of intellectual conversions from (not so) Marxist positions to liberal and nationalist positions (Kuljić, 2001). Historical revisionism was a major part of this conversion, and this ranged from new historians who reinterpreted histories through exclusive national(ist) lenses to Heideggerian philosophies that embraced ‘national being’. ¹ Alongside the birth of new nation-states, the transition to capitalism went completely unchallenged. This text brings Marxian analysis back to understanding seismic shifts in ideology and memory – mnemonic wars – and economic shifts that deaccumulated social wealth.

The existing (post-)Yugoslav studies have provided solid theoretical and historical analyses for evaluating the break-up of the socialist Yugoslavia. We can categorize these into two strands: (1) the more marginal politico-economic strand, which has mostly relied on the concept of the world-system and on (neo-)Marxian analysis, with its focus on rising peripheralization, increasing class inequalities, the waning welfare state and the privatization process (Močnik, 2003; Podvršič, 2018; Veselinović et al., 2011) and (2) the cultural strand that has focused on a critique of revisionism and nationalist ideology (Bešlin, 2013; Brentin et al., 2018; Centrih et al., 2008; Đureinović, 2020; Kirn, 2020; Luthar, 2014; Radanović, 2016). This strand has critically investigated the excesses of nationalism and the role of the media (Wachtel, 2000), and the links between nationalism and intellectual elites (Dragović-Soso, 2014; Kuljić, 2012). (Post-)Yugoslav memorial revisionism was not exceptional; the ideological shifts should be situated within a long-term turn to neoconservative reactions within European historiography and official or public memory (Ghodsee, 2014; Losurdo, 2015; Traverso, 2017b). In the (post-)Yugoslav context, however, the mnemonic wars that began in the mid-1980s broke the anti-fascist consensus and prepared the ground for the violent break-up of the 1990s. A strong sub-cultural current of ‘Yugonostalgia’ developed (Petrović, 2013; Velikonja, 2009), which fought nationalist public memory. Yugonostalgia does not only entail a structure of feeling that reminisces about and idealizes the ‘good old times’. Rather, it is visible in various everyday activities, from commemorations of Partisan battles and the popularity of Yugoslav songs to the commodification of memory and the traumatic (or not) coming to terms with the loss of the country and its socialist welfare provision. ²

I argue that if a political economic analysis does not deal consistently with memory, then the opposite is also true – that is, memory and historical studies of the (post) Yugoslavia lack a more rigorous approach that could evaluate the changing relations between political economy and collective memory. The theorizing of the relationship between memory and critiques of political economy over the post-socialist transition has been largely undertheorized, and this article attempts to bridge the gap between these two approaches by returning to Marx’s conception of the primitive accumulation of capital.

Marx’s concept has been recently updated in approaches evaluating neoliberal restructuration and ‘shock therapies’ (Harvey, 2005; Perelman, 2013), and it will be extended here to understandings of changes in the nationalist memoryscape and the capitalist transition of the (post)Yugoslav context. Rather than presuming the dominance of either state or capital, I will demonstrate the complex and changing dynamics of the relationship between the social instances of the capitalist economy, ideology, and the state. In the first part, I will show how the primitive accumulation of capital during the 1990s ethnic wars achieved the major dismantling – or even the destruction of – social(ist) infrastructure that resulted in a de accumulation of social wealth and ownership. To initiate a new cycle of capitalist accumulation, both the required ruination and destruction on the one hand, and nationalization of social property on the other, took place.

In the second part, I analyse what I call the ‘primitive accumulation of nationalist memory’, which also worked dialectically: the mnemonic war of the mid-1980s was first launched to undo the anti-fascist consensus and unity of socialist Yugoslavia, while at the same time, it created a new nationalist imaginary. Indeed, the ‘invention of national traditions’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1988) and the creation of nationalist ‘sites of memory’ (Nora and Kritzman, 1996) were the political work of conservative intellectuals who started revising public memory linked to World War II and the Partisan anti-fascist period. The latter was correctly regarded as the central pillar of socialist Yugoslavia: the federal and anti-fascist legacy on which the socioeconomic solidarity of self-management stood or fell. New nationalist actors, especially in Slovenia and Serbia in the 1980s, attacked the anti-fascist consensus by highlighting Partisan crimes, weaponizing national victimhood and even rehabilitating fascist collaborationism. This article will highlight the central points of the prevalent commemorative project in Slovenia, whose goal was to facilitate national reconciliation and the revision of public memory. National reconciliation aimed to reconcile the antifascist Partisans and fascist collaborators and was instigated by right-wing cultural circles and intellectuals. The mnemonic wars became material – that is, they reached the masses – at the moment when nationalist politicians appropriated and instrumentalized these wars in the late 1980s.

A theoretical note on the so-called primitive accumulation of capital

In Marx’s Capital (1867 [1967]), the most essential entry point is to study capital through an analysis of the world of commodities and value forms. What ultimately emerges is the question of the relationship between workers and capital, and an openly political question: work produces ‘surplus value’, which consequently always enters into an asymmetrical relationship with capital. Instead of slogans of freedom and equality before the law, Marx demonstrated that the emergence and perpetuation of the capitalist mode of production are based on inequality and exploitation. Workers offer their labour, but they are not able to choose the contractual terms and they have very little say in the valorization process (a process defining wages and profits). Marx’s theoretical tenets have proved even more valid during the recent period of intensified globalized capitalism. Instead of free market forces forging a harmonious field led by an ‘invisible hand’, Marx’s tenets speak of social conflict and global inequalities, a rise in poverty and a crisis of overaccumulation and logistics, all of which create visibly chaotic and conflictual relations in the ‘capitalist world-system’ (Arrighi and Silver, 1999; Gindin and Panitch, 2012; Harvey, 2005).

In the conclusion to volume 1 of Capital, rather than continuing his conceptual analysis of capital, Marx presents us with a short historical analysis that demonstrates the origins of capitalism, namely, how this mode of production came into existence. In the bourgeois political economy, capitalism was often linked to an originary myth in the figure of Robinson Crusoe, a character whose individual and entrepreneurial spirit built the whole system (on an isolated island). In contrast, Marx demonstrated that for capitalism to take hold, a set of historical conditions had to first occur. The most important condition for capitalist transition was extra-economic restraint – violence. Instead of the market’s invisible hand and diligent capitalists, what is actually at stake is the emergence of a strong nexus of state authority and capital power. For a ‘free’ workforce to emerge, the enclosure of common land had to occur. Enclosure took place through various levels of repression, and it led to the dispossession of an army of peasants. Vagabonds and beggars needed to be disciplined, potentially imprisoned and even executed (Labica, 2001). The primitive accumulation of capital internally guaranteed the necessary labour power for manufacturers. In so doing, it pushed dispossessed vagabonds and beggars into factories (production), while also enacting violence against emancipated women (Federici, 2003). Finally, colonial conquests deemed as civilizational efforts, which in fact carried out brutal acts on enslaved and slaughtered populations, led to the external expansion of capitalist markets. Marx’s concept of the primitive accumulation of capital was written from the standpoint of colonial war and state-perpetrated class violence. It is here that the asymmetries within the capitalist world-system and between workers and capital take hold, and it is also this originary myth and constant violence that the memory of capital(ism) structurally forgets. This forgetting of violent beginnings of capitalism is part of its very structure, in other words, the illusion of its idyllic origins is structural.

If, for Marx and many generations of Marxists, the primitive accumulation of capital has remained on the margins of their theoretical preoccupations for a surprisingly long time, should we not say that the violence of primitive accumulation can be transposed rather neatly into memory studies – into the core of its memory economy? As Ann Rigney (2018) demonstrates, the very fabric of memory (studies) constellation is based on the paradigm of violence. Like the Marxist critique of political economy, where we have an asymmetrical relationship based on exploitation between the worker and the capitalist, within memory and trauma studies we have a constitutive and asymmetric relationship between the perpetrators and the victims based on violence. However, the stakes and temporalities are very different. In Marxist theory, exploitation is a basis of structural economic antagonism, and it is perpetuated in an unequal relationship. An organized working class must not only be made aware of this but must also struggle against it by revolution, reform or both. For memory studies, then, violence is taken to be a rupture in everyday life, and the effects of that violence are still felt well after the ‘originary’ violence. These traumatic consequences can then be addressed by very different strategies ranging from reconciliation and rehabilitation to forgetting, repair and others. If, for a long time, Marxist theory had been preoccupied with the logic and social relations of capital, while ignoring other forms of domination (e.g. race, gender) and violence, then for memory studies the preoccupation has been with the entity and violence of state (and nation), which has largely ignored economic violence (capital) and different logics of oppression and class exploitation. If Marxist theory long remained embedded in the sphere of the economy and structural violence of capital, then memory studies – and a giant part of Western memory culture – has been shaped by a vague analytic of totalitarian violence and victimhood (for a critique of the universalism of antitotalitarian memory, see Lim, 2021). Juxtaposed to vague analytics, one can find Michael Rothberg’s approach that lucidly demonstrates how conventional approaches in memory studies can come to terms with heterogeneous forms of violence and their histories (Rothberg, 2009). Furthermore, for critical memory studies to account for the complexities of time, violence and the field’s interdisciplinarity, the plea for memory activism and solidarity with the oppressed should necessarily extend beyond the national frame and the centrality of the state and its apparatuses (Feindt et al., 2014; Lim, 2021; Rigney, 2018).

Marx’s most often quoted text in relation to memory studies is undoubtedly the essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in which the nightmarish weight of the past (struggles and trauma) pushes itself onto the consciousness of the living, and it will play its role in the future ‘social revolution’ (Marx, 2008). Even if Marx has not produced any serious theory of memory, we can tease out three considerations of memory that feature prominently in his analysis of capitalism: (1) the iconoclasm of capital as the forgetting of tradition, (2) the exploration of complex transitional temporalities of memory and capital – especially in times of social change and (3) the formative role of memory for working-class consciousness (Fritsch, 2005: 15–21). Marx’s essay navigates the second consideration, which is directly linked to the primitive accumulation of memory.

The primitive accumulation of capital and memory in (post)Yugoslavia

How, then, can we conceptually link the fields of memory studies and Marxist theory? This article suggests that one possible path of their encounter is to elaborate on Marx’s notion of ‘primitive accumulation’, which stretches between the capitalist transition and the thoroughly revised public memory and memoryscape. I consider the primitive accumulation of memory as the most vital part of the historical process that took place in the mid- to late 1980s in socialist Yugoslavia. This was a proper mnemonic war, and it served as ideological fuel that was then instrumentalized by the political elites to intensify political conflicts and mobilize people in the ethnic wars of the 1990s. The ethnic wars then brought about the utter destruction of lives and socialist infrastructure, with nationalist memorialization projects contributed to a swifter transition, while leaving the economic dispossession of working people unchallenged.

To be clear, Yugoslav socialism was not a paradise on earth, despite its differences from other socialist countries, its historical achievements in education, social infrastructure and services, and its experimentation with worker self-management, which attained relative socioeconomic prosperity and participation within the sphere of (re)production. However, the political structure of Yugoslav self-management was fairly authoritarian. The Yugoslav communists followed the principle of democratic centralism, later redefined as ‘agreement socialism’ which, in the last instance, made party members and the rest of the society follow specific directives decided by the most important political bodies of socialist authority, and that were adopted by major congresses of the League of Communists (Kirn, 2019; Rusinow, 1977). When we focus on the field of public memory, the main political and cultural institutions invested effort and resources to remember and commemorate the Partisan and antifascist legacy, which was seen as a cornerstone of the new socialist and federal Yugoslavia. In a nutshell, the commemorative formula of mourning the victims of the fascist occupation and collaborationism on the one hand and celebrating the victory of the Partisan Liberation Struggle on the other were culturally embodied in a broad range of practices, museums, monuments and cultural artefacts. The fact that, historically speaking, the Yugoslav Partisan antifascist resistance – largely organized by communists, the Women’s Antifascist Front, and democratic left forces – managed to liberate Yugoslavia on its own, was an integral part of socialist Yugoslavia’s official constitution and formed its ideological and political basis.

Also importantly, Silič-Nemec (1982) rightly argues that the culture of remembrance was not only about official politics, or a memorialization imposed from above. Rather, in the first decade after the war, it was predominantly organized from below, and it emerged as a spontaneous memory reaction to the horrors and heroic acts of World War II. Local communities, many of which lost family members, felt a strong need to commemorate the victims and heroes, and this need materialized in various ‘people’s architectural monuments’ (Silič-Nemec, 1982: 14). From the mid-1950s, we can trace more organized commemorative efforts led by the Veterans’ Association and the commissions (Karge, 2009), while in the late 1960s and 1970s, broad alternative late modernist monuments (Kirn, 2020) were erected, alongside a populist mythologizing of cultural works that dealt with the Partisan struggle through music and Partisan films (Stankovič, 2011). Such oversaturation because of this massive platform of the genre of Partisan artworks gradually led to the emptying out of anti-fascist and Partisan memory, which weakened Yugoslav’s own ethical prescription of ‘never again’ returning to the civil war and fascist collaborationism present during World War II.

It was in the mid-1980s that the fundamental structure of socialist Yugoslavia, which had been based on inter-republican solidarity (preventing rising inequalities among republics) and a shared memory of the Partisan antifascist past, was deeply challenged and eventually dismantled. This challenge came after the death of Josip Broz Tito in 1980. He had been the undisputed leader of the socialist Yugoslavia, and his death resulted in a prolonged political crisis within the political apparatus. It was unclear who would gain the upper hand in federal politics and later the republican leaderships of the League of Communists began to compete with one another, which in the historian Dejan Jović’s words perfectly demonstrates the ‘withering away of Yugoslavia’ (Jović, 2009: 2). Simultaneously, Yugoslavia suffered from the major after-effects of the 1970s oil crisis, rising unemployment, and a deepening economic crisis aggravated after the introduction of neoliberal austerity policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other credit institutions in the early 1980s (Magaš, 1993). Apart from the systemic turmoil, there was also a strong democratic civil society and workers’ strikes demanding more socialism and more democracy. Many of these bottom-up political actions were met with repression; the fiercest response occurred in the autonomous region of Kosovo, which later also lost its autonomy through Milošević’s rise to power. Civil society, however, was not only progressive but also very reactionary, especially within the cultural elite, most notably among writers and intellectuals (Dragović-Soso, 2014) in the socialist republics of Serbia and Slovenia, where anti-socialist, anti-Yugoslav and (extreme) nationalist positions became active. Once the dramatic events in Kosovo unfolded, it was intellectuals who first produced nationalist ‘dissident’ texts and declarations that steered nationalist sentiment and called people to arms. These intellectuals spoke of preserving and defending the ‘national substance’ and they highlighted eternal national victimhood – all these acts were alarming signs of the early period of mnemonic struggles. Their first target was Yugoslavia and its shared collective memory, anti-fascist struggle and international solidarity. The increasing investment in nationalist memory came at the same time as the dismantling of economic solidarity among workers and republics by commercial banks and international credit institutions, which forced the republican leaderships to make calculations based on their national interests and to gradually move away from Yugoslavia.

The concept of the primitive accumulation of capital has not featured prominently in the analysis of the transformation process from socialism to capitalism during the late 1980s, 1990s, and later. Very few authors from the post-Yugoslav region have suggested the concept’s potential use, either applying it to highlighting the conflictual dimension of the war and capitalist transition (Komel, 2008), or in analysing political antagonism directed at workers’ organizations (Bembič, 2013). Furthermore, David Harvey’s analysis of neoliberalism can be helpful insofar as it shows how the new cycle of capitalist accumulation advances by dispossessing large parts of populations and concentrating power and wealth in the hands of a few (Harvey, 2003). The case of Yugoslavia’s post socialist transition is of particular interest to Harvey’s argument of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2003: 137–182): first, the socialist Yugoslavia introduced social ownership in the 1950s, which meant that workers became directly involved in managing the produced value (at their workshop), and the social ownership then expanded to encompass social housing, factories, fields of culture and sport and forests. Consequently, all social sectors came into the hands of associations of producers or users – that is, of society in general. Social wealth and infrastructure were never simply managed by political bureaucrats (which was enabled by the nationalization of property, as occurred in many state socialist countries). The privatization process was delayed not only because of war conditions specific to the post-Yugoslav context but also because the newly and democratically elected governments had to first nationalize the socially owned infrastructure, companies and land. What was euphemistically called the ‘denationalization’ process in the early 1990s first entailed the nationalizing of all the most important branches of the economy, and privatization of others (such as social housing) with specific laws. The nationalization of major companies was carried out by a tightly knit and carefully selected group of people well connected with the governments (oligarchs and tycoons), and with the sale of these nationalized assets, a characteristic form of crony capitalism developed (for details on the gradual privatization see Bohinc and Milković, 1993) that had an extremely damaging effect on social wealth of working people (for a critical view, see Zupan, 2021). ³

However, even before one can tackle the economic transformation, another major dimension of the primitive accumulation of capital needs to be addressed: war. If, at least for a large part of the former Soviet countries, the capitalist transition was not accompanied by military conflicts, then in the (former) Yugoslavia, violence was the determining force and frame of the transition on all social levels: economic, political, cultural and military. To consider seriously what the primitive accumulation of capital entailed in (post-)Yugoslavia, we need to start with its most violent manifestation. I argue that to read primitive accumulation in precise dialectical terms, we need to stretch dispossession further, in what could be called ‘war capitalism’, a capitalist form that managed to mobilize society and military forces into war through the primitive accumulation of memory in particular (I return to this point in the next section). Such war capitalism brought about a genuine and major de accumulation of social capital and the dismantling other modes of production and exchange that had been established during self-management. The wars in the former Yugoslavia can be seen as the ultimate ‘expenditure’, that is, the physical waste and destruction, of three fundamental aspects: (1) symbolic violence over emancipatory ideas connected to Yugoslav federalism, nonalignment, socialist self-management, gender and national equality, (2) symbolic and real violence enacted against (working) people who, due to their location, beliefs, or for other reasons, resisted being transformed into an ethnic subject (of new nation-states) and (3) violence enacted against the infrastructure, wealth, and social fabric that had been created, accumulated, and which had become socially owned during socialism. Rather than the more conventional primitive accumulation of capital in the former Eastern Bloc, which progressed through a change in ownership and the dispossession of companies, state, land and the public sector, in the post-Yugoslavia such war capitalism entailed a huge amount of destruction and the deaccumulation of past social wealth and infrastructure of the self-managed society. The dismantling of social security and the socialist market with its specific protected institutions and time regimes led not only to the bankruptcy of many companies and factories but also to skyrocketing unemployment: this generated an intense accumulation of a giant ‘reserve army’ of labour power that was either mobilized for war or prepared to migrate. What the post-Yugoslav context experienced could be described as a major case of underdevelopment (Frank, 1967). Let me conclude this part by quoting Dedić, who insisted that nationalism was the pivotal force within the capitalist transition, but that this nationalism should also be seen as a consequence of capitalism:

Nationalism is not a phenomenon that is separate from the ‘logic of transition’. On the contrary, nationalism made room for the establishment of neoliberalism, and genocide is a radical consequence of the privatization that began in the 1990s. Afterward, with the empowerment of ‘democratic’ transitional governments and privatization laws (which most of the former Yugoslav states adopted in the late 1990s and early 2000s), genocide was finally legalized. Genocide, ethnic cleansing and nationalism, therefore, served as the basis for the accumulation of surplus value, and paved the way for the integration of the former Yugoslav societies into the system of global capitalism. (Dedić, 2016: 184, an emphasis added)

I would suggest tweaking Dedić’s argument, namely, his comment that genocide and ethnic cleansing were a logical consequence of privatization. First, at that historical point in time, as demonstrated above, the nationalization of social property took place (not privatization per se), and second, I would argue that the wars were a result of the primitive accumulation of both capital and memory. In other words, the transition did not follow a simple formula: economic changes necessitated politico-legal, ideological and cultural changes. Rather, to understand the early stage of the transformation, we need to reverse the order: an ideological memory-related level dominated the break-up of Yugoslavia: that of the primitive accumulation of memory by the state. This means that society was guided and mobilized by democratically elected parties with a great amount of assistance from the media and cultural apparatus. Instead of the old and emptied-out socialist slogan of brotherhood and unity, national unity reigned supreme across the post-Yugoslav space. Mobilizing people for war, should that be required, was done in the name of one nation in one state, and it did not follow any rational economic formula. The disintegration, break-up and following wars all had a major negative impact on the economies of these new countries. The early 1990s were marked by extreme economic hardship, the illegal arms trade, war profiteering and clientelist networks that appropriated and managed the once socially owned companies. From the perspective of a national political economy, the transition and the wars were not economically ‘rational’: major companies lost their former markets and lines of economic cooperation. Most were brought to their knees and were eventually sold off cheaply or closed while entire countries had to deal with high(er) unemployment and emigration as a result of this, along with the sometimes gradual, sometimes abrupt restructuration processes. This highly irrational and violent process was often perceived, in transitology discourse, as ‘catching up with the West’ (Buden, 2020: 158). It was only after all this utter destruction that we can speak of the subjugation of nationalism and states to the logic of capitalist economy.

The primary site of mnemonic war: national reconciliation does not pacify disputed memory, but rather it accumulates violence

This part thematizes how the official memory politics of the socialist Yugoslavia was seriously challenged during the mid-1980s, and how the new politico-commemorative strategies of national reconciliation and the rehabilitation of local fascism in relation to World War II prepared the ground for the capitalist transition and ethnic wars. It was the mnemonic wars that gave the ethnic wars their dominant frame with capitalism’s horizons. The primitive accumulation of memory tells a story of the imposition of a long-term ethnonationalist narrative of a specific heroic and, in many cases, victimized nation. Indeed, this parallels the story of the entrepreneur Robinson Crusoe in Marx’s critique of capitalism’s origin myth. In the context of late-socialist Yugoslavia, the accumulation of nationalist memory moved between an openly negative and even iconoclastic view of anything linked to the Yugoslav, socialist, anti-fascist past on the one hand, and a more generative view that established the imaginary glory of one nation in one state. The mythologization of the national past took on epic dimensions in various contributions and declarations of the reactionary intelligentsia, politicians and church representatives from the mid- to late 1980s (and beyond).

The most important treatises that openly embraced a nationalist imaginary and a legitimizing narrative for one nation in one state were the memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986 and the 57th issue of the literary magazine Nova revija in Slovenia (Hribar, 1987). Speeches that appropriated specific memory events and helped establish new nationalist sites of memory were given by leading politicians from the League of Communists (e.g. in Slovenia, the most important commemoration between antifascists and fascists took place in Kočevski Rog in 1990 with Milan Kučan; a Serbian example was Slobodan Milošević’s speech in Gazimestan in 1989). A reference to Yugoslavia and socialism became part of the empty ritualized ending to an article or a speech, while the core message was focused on the defence of narrow national interests amid proclamations of new nationalist memorialization projects. The cultural intelligentsia, together with liberal currents in the socialist political apparatus, formed a counterhegemonic bloc (Kirn, 2019) that defeated the older pro-federal and pro-Titoist cadres in the branches of the League of Communists, while in the new democratic civil society, conservative forces within the Church became involved in the process of ‘totalitarianism from below’ (Mastnak, 1987), pushing for economic and ideological changes. It was these forces – very much part of the emerging political elite – that embraced the project of one nation in one state, which had emerged on the capitalist horizon.

Conservative memorial revisionism in Yugoslavia found its purest expression in the old romanticist model of one nation in one state. I now want to analyse a memory strategy – national reconciliation – that at first seems dignified, in that it appears to ‘pacify’ the ideological struggle in public memory debates. This slogan and strategy became very popular in the mid- to late 1980s in Slovenia and for its later central state memorialization project, while in other former Yugoslav countries, it became more important in the first decade of the new millennium after the 1990s wars (for a good international overview of this reconciliation strategy, see Imler et al., 2012). Slovenia has long prided itself on the most democratic transition, and as being a ‘model’ transition that has also involved ‘properly’ dealing with the past in a cultural landscape synonymous with ‘disputed memory’. However, I argue that this image is false and that what was seemingly a pacifying discourse – that of national reconciliation – actually started a mnemonic war that has recently led to the rehabilitation of (local) fascism and has openly participated in the nationalization and ethnicization of society.

In Slovenia, the moral philosopher and dissident Spomenka Hribar initiated the discussion of national reconciliation. She was one of the key dissident intellectuals who published in the biggest journals of that time. Most importantly, in 1987 she was published in the aforementioned 57th issue of the literary magazine Nova revija, in which she proclaimed an anti-communist programme for the national independence of Slovenia. ⁴ Her interventions became popular semantic anchor points (for detailed criticism of Hribar, see Šumi, 2015) that served to create new sites of memory and public memory on World War II. The major thrust of national reconciliation involved initiating a process of appeasement between fascists and Partisans:

Reconciliation should be understood as agreement about our history. It would enable us to ultimately see both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries as unlucky ‘sons from the same mother’, that is, from a perspective that recognizes them as people (of one epoch). This does not mean that we accept their ideology! Errors are human, but one need not accept and perpetuate them. But rejecting ideology does not also mean we must excommunicate its bearers; we need, then, to distinguish between the man AND his ideology. (Hribar, 1987: 100)

The moralizing common sense definition of national reconciliation becomes buried in a ‘national soil’ argument that claims that reconciliation is an excavation of the ‘soil, where love and memory grow’ (Hribar, 1987: 101), which can only happen ‘between us as human beings’ (Hribar, 1987: 100). Reconciliation draws a symbolic equivalence and relativizes the past: victims of all wars are the same. The discourse thus presents itself as a moral high ground that is seemingly anti-war. In a second step, within and after reconciliation, everyone – no matter if fascist or antifascist, nationalist or internationalist – belongs to the same ‘national being’ and are only ‘brothers from the same mother’. The basic formula of reconciliation is the equation of all victims and their nationalization. Hribar argues that fascist occupation resulted in many civilian and Partisan victims, but then also Partisan crimes and especially the post-war extrajudicial killings of fascist collaborators should be accounted for (for historical details on the post-war killings see Tomasevich, 2001; Troha et al., 2017). For Hribar then, only when all crimes shall be recognized and worked through by forgiveness or punishment, can we hope for reconciliation of the Slovenian nation (Hribar, 1987).

Hribar managed to greatly popularize the national reconciliation in the mid-1980s and openly called for a mnemonic war with the official discourse of antifascism and the public memory of socialist Yugoslavia. After she published a series of articles, major political actors started calling for national reconciliation, which culminated in declarations made by the Catholic Church and the Socialist Assembly of Slovenia in early March 1990. A few months later, in July 1990, multiple political forces, communists, and the Catholic Church, prepared a major and joint commemoration event on the 45th anniversary of the post-war killings enacted by fascist collaborators. The commemoration event saw the Catholic bishop Alojzij Šuštar shake hands with the head of the League of Slovenian Communists and later the first president of independent Slovenia, Milan Kučan. Milan Kučan held a speech in which he acknowledged post-war crimes on the side of the communists and Partisans, while Šuštar held a mass that sought to reconcile the dead with the living. This was the first official public apology and display of recognition of past crimes that was encapsulated in the symbolic gesture of the oppositional camps shaking hands.

The commemorative event took place in Kočevski Rog, a site of memory in which the Slovenian Partisan command had been based during World War II, and which had long been associated with the activities of the Partisan Liberation Struggle in Slovenia. From this moment on, it became the central commemorative site for mourning the post-war killings of fascist collaborators who were returned from Bleiburg (in southern Austria) to the Partisans by British forces. Some fascist prisoners of war were imprisoned, some were exiled, while a substantial number (estimates range from 15,000 to 30,000) were executed by the communist secret police and parts of the Partisan army (Troha et al., 2017). These were war crimes for which nobody was held responsible, and they remained a dark spot in the aftermath of the Partisan Liberation Struggle. However, what started as an ethical call for reconciliation and for working through the tragic events of the past became politically manipulated by the emerging extreme right-wing forces and Catholic Church. What was supposed to be a reconciliatory discussion between the (former) Partisans and their associations on the one hand, and the Catholic Church and new state party representatives on the other, remained entrenched in cultural warfare and did not in fact deal with the past. Rather, the logical consequence was to rehabilitate fascist collaborators as the equal – if not more morally dignified actors – of World War II (Kirn, 2020). Such a constellation obfuscates asymmetric relations and the cause of fascism, and it also avoids addressing the issue of antagonism in the present and of how new elites profited from the transition.

How does the primitive accumulation of memory connect to the primitive accumulation of capital in this case? The Catholic Church, encouraged by the historical developments of independence in 1991, moved from an initially defensive mourning position to a search for ‘new truth’. Once the killings of fascist collaborators had been officially recognized as crimes and the search for the victims’ graves had been institutionalized in the commission financed by the parliament, the time was ripe to demand the recognition of damage and the ‘unjust’ expropriation of property from the former regime (Cmrečnjak, 2016: 398). The move to (re)nationalized memory politics came at the same time as the demand for the ‘nationalization’ of social property. Unsurprisingly, the highest stake in this transfer of property and power was for a small layer of former capitalists, part of the former ruling class, for whom the Church was the hegemonic actor. It is no secret that the largest landowner (of forests and real estate) became the Catholic Church which, besides regaining ideological power, also profited the most economically. The new state budget has included payments of clergy’s wages and the return of church property that the socialist state had expropriated. The project of ‘national reconciliation’ became, strictly speaking, the central ideology of the ruling class and a major feature of the Slovenian nation-building and reconciliation process. What was initially seen as a pacifying appeasing discourse was considered valid by the emerging political class, but not at all by Slovenian society in general, even less so when we evaluate its active role in dismantling the antifascist consensus in the Yugoslav context. The mnemonic wars already helped to define the ethnoreligious lenses of the 1990s wars.

Conclusion

New state creation and capitalist transition typically come with various levels and degrees of violence, which I described as the process of the ‘primitive accumulation’ of memory, state, and capital. I argued that Marx’s concept of the so-called primitive accumulation of capital speaks of an under-theorized relation between capital and memory, which rather than on memory of violence and economic antagonism promotes a venue of cultural signifiers and ideologies. In the case of the (post-)Yugoslav transition, these ideological changes were challenged the dominant retrospective triumphant narrative that posited 1989 as a peaceful process that did not challenge nationalism or the capitalist transition. Also, if we look more closely, the openly violent transition is not limited to Yugoslavia, but is also visible in Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya, Abhasia, Georgia and – at the time of writing – Ukraine (for a critique of postsocialist area studies, see Müller, 2019).

This article contributes to the study of the post-Yugoslav transition and changing memoryscape by introducing the elaborated Marxist concept of the primitive accumulation of capital. The transformation and destruction of the socialist, federal and anti-fascist Yugoslavia entailed a set of multilevel violent processes. The primitive accumulation of nationalist memory was quintessential in challenging the antifascist consensus in the historiography and public memory of the former state. Such primitive accumulation found its purest manifestation in the discourse of national reconciliation and the rehabilitation of local fascist collaborationism. This process was accompanied by both organized and spontaneous commemorative actions from below in the early 1990s: from the iconoclastic destruction of Partisan and socialist monuments to the renaming of streets and the destruction of books. In short, this legal and memory-related cleansing of the recent past intensified the dominant policy of the early 1990s – one of ethnic cleansing – which was centrally inscribed in the specific capitalist transition of the post-Yugoslav context. Those who did not properly belong (in terms of ethnic identity) to and conform to the newly imagined nation-states were mortally threatened. The mobilization of people for war, if need be, was done in the name of the ‘one nation, one state’ ideology.

The wartime accumulation of nationalist memory had an extremely negative impact on the economy of the new countries. What was perceived as rational capital accumulation, enacted through neoliberal reforms and shock therapy in the former East to catch up with West, was ultimately a real catastrophe in the former Yugoslavia. I have pointed out that it is more correct to speak of the primitive deaccumulation of capital, which meant that the destructive part of transition needed to be forgotten. Wars are the ultimate form of destruction, and in the case of Yugoslavia what unfolded was the veritable deaccumulation of socialist wealth, and destruction of infrastructure, people and emancipatory ideas (nonalignment, socialist self-government, gender equality and national equality). It was in this space of violence and war that I located the generative dimension of the mnemonic wars during the mid- to late 1980s. The mnemonic wars in the late-socialist Yugoslav context strengthened the foundations for the invention of national traditions and competitive national victimhood while also obfuscating class antagonism and the expropriation of working people during the capitalist transition. The mnemonic wars were a (counter)avant-garde of the coming wars in the 1990s.

This article has concluded with a short analysis of what was seemingly a pacifying discourse on public memory in the Slovenian context: national reconciliation. By the end of the 1980s, it had already become a major national memorialization project that equated fascists and antifascists in the name of a reconciled nation. Amid contradictory developments, violent episodes were not interpreted as the crystallizing and radicalizing of systemic developments and political and economic antagonisms, but rather as a moral and therapeutic laboratory that aimed to heal the nation. Despite the note of appeasement inherent in the discourse of national reconciliation, it was actually a battle cry, a vital part of the mnemonic wars, with their intellectual and political champions from the mid-1980s especially active in Slovenia and Serbia. The dominant revisionism was characterized by an openly negative attitude towards the Yugoslav, socialist and Partisan past. This attitude contributed to a mnemonic shift that dissolved already-unstable solidarity between peoples and nations in the socialist and federal Yugoslavia.