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225 Praktična žena [Practical woman] promoted practices totally different from those that were analyzed by Praxis. —Leksikon YU mitologije, 2005 AlthoughmostofthosewhoexpressedmisgivingsaboutYugoslavia’s consumerist orientation drew on a decidedly left-wing and cosmopolitan tradition, Marxism did not occupy the entire critical field. Even frank conservative reactions against market culture and consumer society also marked the public discussion of the issue on occasion. Along these lines, for example , Roman Catholic theologian Franc Rode turned to his institution’s long history of anti-materialist teaching in mounting a traditionalist critique of both the global phenomenon of consumerism and the socialist practice that, he claimed, had willingly embraced it. Rode, a highly influential cleric with strong Vatican connections who after the Yugoslav breakup was installed as the archbishop of Ljubljana, implied that the inculcation of consumerist values was, in fact, completely in accordance with the Communists’ desires . No one should have been surprised, he suggested in the midst of the domestic controversy, that Yugoslav policy had generated a socialist version of consumer society, for socialism, at its heart a materialist political philosophy, could ultimately promise nothing more. “We talk a lot about the construction of socialism, about a humanistic society, about progress,” Rode observed. “But if we leave these abstractions behind and step onto the ground of reality and ask ourselves what this really means, we may perhaps recognize that in the end, and in the best case, this is all a matter of a higher form of consumer society.” Ultimately such efforts could only prove empty, Rode contended, as they were grounded not in spiritual values but in the fleeting satisfactions of material experience: If we pull back that illusory veil in which we constantly wrap socialist society, we will see that this ultimately boils down to the fact that [when we live in such 6 FightingIt New Left Attacks on the Consumerist Establishment and the Yugoslav Dream Source for the epigraph: Iris Adrić, Vladimir Arsenijević, and Djordje Matić, eds., Leksikon YU mitologije, 2d ed. (Belgrade, 2005), 320. 226 冷 Chapter 6 a society] we will all eat well and drink well, we will live in beautiful surroundings , we will live in brotherhood and friendship with everyone, we will freely create our cultural and aesthetic values. That is all fine, but is this enough for people and civilizations that are slated for death? What is the sense of all this, if death has the last word?1 Such formulations obviously share a great deal not just with the familiar anti-Marxist line of the Roman Catholic Church but also with the broader Catholic critique of consumerism, an anti-materialist perspective that has had considerable impact elsewhere in the world. Catholicism in the late twentieth century had found itself struggling against materialism of two stripes, marketist and Marxist, and in the Yugoslav case it seemed that, perhaps worse still, the two could coexist. The events of 1989–1991 would largely settle one side of the matter among the Yugoslavs and their neighbors in Eastern Europe, but the worldhistorical debate remains unresolved. After the collapse of communism in Europe, Catholic opinion would continue to struggle with the relationship between socialism and consumerist values, as evidenced, for example, in Pope John Paul II’s warnings during his 1998 visit to Cuba in which he suggested that Cuba’s experience of material deprivation could make the prospect of consumer society dangerously seductive.2 Marxist materialism, in this view, may through its failures serve to make the marketist version all the more attractive. Even in the comparatively mild ideological climate of Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s, tough anti-materialist approaches such as these had few prospects for success. They asked for too much, and asked it of too many. Rode’s theologically inspired attack clearly went too far for Yugoslav officialdom : while the Communists typically used a rather light touch when it came to censorship, the publication of this particular text was forbidden, though several excerpts were apparently published abroad in the emigrant journal Naša luč [Our light].3 Although communist party leader and consumption critic Franc Šetinc obviously felt compelled to address these claims as part of his defense of state policy—and, perhaps perversely, republish them for a far broader Yugoslav audience—Rode’s perspective and others like it appear to have had little influence outside narrow Catholic circles, and such explicitly spiritual arguments did not figure prominently in the mainstream debate over market culture. Whether it was a matter of eagerly exploiting the...

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