What does the term “post-communism” mean for the countries that made up former Yugoslavia?
The term “communism” or “post-communism” can produce misunderstandings. Communism could be the desired content of a socialist society, but was not lived out. After the Second World War, communism stayed on as a pure vision that had to be filled with images. Even if communism as a classless society was never achieved in practice, one can maintain, like Ivaylo Ditchev (Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Sofia University), that communism is a “state of mind” and socialism is a “state of facts”. For this reason, we speak of “post-communism” in connection with a particular way of thinking, and not as a historical phenomenon. In relation to a utopian promise, the term “post-communism” is an ideological invention that proclaims the end of all universal projects, a sign of some post-historical or post-ideological situation. Yet, this notion of a post-ideological realm has already crumbled. You also talked about socialist consumerism, a peculiarity of Yugoslavia. I spoke about the term “soci
