In his reaction to my review of Rade Dragojević's book about Stipe Šuvar, published on 13th September 2024 on the Annals of the CPSA blog, political scientist Marko Grdešić from the Faculty of Political Science in Zagreb put forth a series of criticisms against me, which I consider to be factually incorrect, ideologically tendentious and argumentatively unconvincing. Bearing in mind one of Grdešić's combative references from his reaction, it can be said that expecting dumdum bullets, I only witnessed a burst of blind fire.
To begin with, I understand Grdešić's objection to pedantry as an unintended compliment, because the term is not only defined pejoratively as pettiness, but also as "excessive conscientiousness and accuracy" (Hrvatski opći leksikon, 1996: 741). Conscientiousness and accuracy, no matter how excessive they may seem to some, are what distinguish a professional from an unprofessional, or unreliable, approach to research. Grdešić's animosity towards pedantry, otherwise not at all original for ideologically hardened and therefore almost proverbially careless interlocutors, was expressed precisely in this text. For example, I didn't write "[o]ne of the first reviews" but the first one, because the announcement by Vlado Vurušić, a journalist from Jutarnji list, that I mention in the review was just that – an announcement.
Referring to the terms that constitute the Marxist dictionary, Grdešić lectures me about my supposed ignorance of Marxism. Of course, it doesn't occur to me to convince him otherwise, even though he completely misses the point of my remark with his own semantic pedantry. Namely, not only is it unfounded at the basic level of evaluation to distinguish the dictionary of Marxism from Šuvar's dictionary because Šuvar is a Marxist, but Dragojević was using already outdated terms that, in contrast to the then more contemporary, i.e. neo-Marxist terms, were used by Šuvar who relied on orthodox Marxism and Leninism. At the same time, Grdešić unwittingly falls into the trap of his own argumentation because, if it really was "the vocabulary of the time and the vocabulary of the left", and it is present "[i]n today's Marxist and socialist discussions" (Grdešić, 2024), then this clearly implies a dogmatic continuity that it is not and cannot be productive and understandable outside the circles of like-minded people, that is, in the mentioned "discussions". Actually, the terms he cites in support of his argument best reveal his own understanding of Marxism.
If in this case we leave aside the petty (pedantic?) linguistic remark that mostly art and cultural goods are "restored", and not political and/or economic systems such as capitalism that are established, the phrase "restoration of capitalism" points to a crude ideological simplification of social complexities. In other words, according to this logic, did the collapse of the SFRY and the post-socialist transition ahistorically "restore capitalism" from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia or some other? Or maybe "capital-relationship"? Also, aren't there "variants of capitalism" (Hall and Soskice, 2001) and "worlds of welfare capitalism" (Esping-Andersen, 1990)? The very use of the term "restoration" strongly implies a negative view of the process regardless of its possible outcomes and the reasons that led to it. Capitalism is, in all probability, undesirable for Grdešić, wherever and whenever it is "restored" and regardless of its type, which results in self-censorship preventing reliable research. This is actually a self-defeating way of thinking if one takes into account the fact that the fundamental subject of Marxist research is precisely capitalism, which is usually joined by the adjectives "liberal", "monopoly", "state" and others. Finally, this term is not only Marxist but Leninist, because Marx and the Marxists could not talk about the restoration of something that had not disappeared anywhere until the fall of 1917 anyway. Otherwise, it originates from Lenin (1976 [1920]: 124-215) as the original source of the siege mentality of Bolshevism whose victim was Šuvar, and Grdešić can also find it in the writings of other exemplary Leninists (Stalin, 1981 [1928]: 232-234; Tito, 1982 [1948]: 348, 356, 412; Mao, 1968 [1957]: 27). As for the orthodox distinction between "use" and "exchange" value, it simply does not exist outside of "socialist and Marxist discussions" because it is the result of Marx's Hegelian interpretation of the concept of commodity within the framework of the discredited labor theory of value. If he does not want to take my word for it, I suggest to Grdešić to try to participate in some contemporary discussion about political economy and economics using this distinction, so that he can be convinced of the accuracy of my claims.
The Marxist approach is indeed legitimate, but its characteristic jargon can be useful for describing the real world only with a "more detailed explanation of the meaning of its use" (Pandžić, 2024: 2). More precisely, Dragojević does not state a reason for its use and is therefore not able to achieve even a minimal distance in relation to the subject of his research, that is Marxist Šuvar, which equally strongly reinforces the bias of the analysis and makes it difficult to read for a modern consumer of political journalism who is not used to outdated jargon of orthodox Marxism and Leninism. The question therefore arises: who is Dragojević's book really intended for, a wider readership or experts? By bringing Bourdieu's "field" into the discussion, Grdešić makes a mistake similar to Dragojević's because he presents a specific sociological term to a diverse audience as self-evident, although it is anything but. Finally, comparing Dragojević with the "super heavyweights" of Marxist humanities and social sciences is, at the very least, distasteful, knowing the quality of their expertise, regardless of their ideological mark.
Speaking about the methodological problems of Dragojević's book as alleged, which implies that they do not exist, Grdešić takes away any meaning of my remarks. However, he once again overlooks that the problem is precisely that Dragojević is not a scientist, but he nevertheless received a scientific legitimation of his book, with which, in a hypothetical case, he could be competitive for a scientific position in the field of history. By justifying Dragojević's book, Grdešić further humiliates historians due to its comparison with the high-quality historiographical biography of Bakarić. In that sense, relatively young historians as pretenders to scientific and scientific-teaching professions need to invest years of hard work to achieve results that, unfortunately, will be equally valued as Dragojević's. Finally, I am not sure how much the Croatian reading public would benefit from another book about Bakarić, but it is therefore quite certain that there is no shortage of titles about "significant figures from Croatian and Yugoslav politics" in the Croatian biographical production. Books about "figures" described in this way are not necessarily "political biographies" but rather biographies about politicians that become "political" simply by choosing the subject of the research and focusing on political careers. The number of over 50 biographical titles published in the past three decades about politicians, and not just the book with the subtitle "political biography", points to Grdešić's striking ignorance of the mentioned production. Even if it is a "poor academic field", this book represents a disservice to that same field because it is not academic, and pretends to be one.
I regretfully admit to Grdešić that I am not aware of a doctoral program where doctoral students are given a list of obligations related to successful writing of biographies. However, presenting my listing of rudimentary guidelines for writing a consistent and coherent biographical reading as "super-rigorous" is a comical exaggeration of my effort, the real source of which is Grdešić's lack of information. Dragojević's book is simply not of good quality, among other things, because it suffers from methodological flaws of the most fundamental kind, and therefore it cannot even be useful because, due to its handicap, it hides more than it reveals about Šuvar. There really are no methodological standards in the writing of political biographies, but this is not, or at least should not be, a justification for rejecting useful guideposts with the help of which the book will not take the form of a hard-to-read "hodge-podge".
As for my alleged camouflage of the political controversy with "intellectual" and methodological controversy and the disqualification of "leftist ideas", Grdešić, due to his inexperience with this type of literature, and obviously not shying away from ideological labels, only proves that he is not used to comprehensive, and even meticulous analysis that I wouldn't even have approached if the review work had been done well. He obviously cannot or does not want to understand that ideological simplifications in Dragojević's case are complementary to his lack of expertise because they are only possible in such a version of biography. The rehabilitation of the Yugoslav communist rulers that I mention at the end of the review refers to works that suffer from approximately the same ailments as Dragojević's book.
Unlike Grdešić, I consider the issues of language and style extremely important. Especially in political journalism. Accordingly, it would not be out of place to carefully read the position that is being criticized. Namely, I wrote that "[t]he frequent use of the first person plural seems inappropriate for an intimately intoned political biography" and "contributes to confusing the reader because ... the book also contains Dragojević's considerable autobiographical lines in the first person point of view" (Pandžić, 2024: 4). The author of a political biography who does not have the reader in mind should not even undertake such an enterprise, unless it serves to feed his own vanity. Long quotations, on the other hand, indicate an irrational "stuffing" of the book with irrelevant statements, which makes reading even more difficult. This remark also applies to Grdešić's informally written "things". Namely, when neighborhood teenagers finance the publication of political biographies in Croatia, I promise that I will turn a blind eye to them. Interestingly, of all the things he criticized, Grdešić did not mention the numerous listed errors and omissions. I assume that they are unproblematic or funny, if not acceptable to him as by-products of Dragojević's enormous effort invested in writing the book.
Quarrels between Šuvar and individual members of the Department of Sociology of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb were mostly quarrels within the same ideological family, and the Department does not need my defense in 2024. I would not even try something like that, because I by no means consider myself a spokesperson for a relatively large and ideologically heterogeneous group of teachers. Grdešić's facile ideological generalization was typical of the intolerant Šuvar. I reject the story about (neo)liberal links as the fruit of collectivist imagination that robs the members of the Department of their individuality. After all, what if we are talking about some kind of (neo)liberalism? Should anyone really worry today if they are declared a (neo)liberal, i.e. "bourgeois" or "petty bourgeois"? Such disqualifiers say incomparably more about those who use them than about those to whom they are addressed. All the same, the truth is quite different: it was the doyens of the ultra-left Praxis who opened the gates of the Department to Šuvar and supported him until the mid-1970s. You don't need to be an insider, it is enough to read the relevant, publicly available texts about what Grdešić did not do in Dragojević's manner, and the reason why facts give way to ideological confabulations. Although the conflict between Šuvar and sociologists had been "simmering" ever since the closing of Praxis in 1975, it escalated in 1979 with the vehement opposition of Praxis members, at first by Rudi Supek, and then by Milan Kangrga, to Šuvar's election as a full professor, among other things because of his pretensions to the position of lecturer in the sociology of education at the time he was member of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia and "Minister of Culture" responsible for the disastrous school reform (see Horvat, 1985: 238-246). Bakarić's demonization of the department as a "conglomerate of anti-self-governing society and ideology" (quoted in: Dossier Šuvar, 1982: 94) is an additional reason for the escalation of criticism on Šuvar's part. However, many of his fiercest opponents and challengers in the 1980s were themselves Marxists. Moreover, one of them was also the author of a textbook on Marxism and socialist self-management. In this case, liberalism is a legitimate expression only in the form of neo-Stalinist identification of the "ultra-left" with "anarcholiberalism" as an ideological deviation and factionalism. Besides being a part of the repertoire of incriminations used by powerful party members, this "characteristic" was present in the list of categories of "internal enemies" employed by the Yugoslav State Security Service in its actions.
Grdešić is only partially right about my wishes: of course, a book about Šuvar is desirable, as well as about any person who has had a comparable influence on modern Croatian history, but definitely not a book like this one. For this reason, I finally welcomed the forthcoming doctoral dissertation on Šuvar, which, bearing in mind the necessary research discipline of doctoral students, will be a product much less burdened with the problems of Dragojević's book. And, whether Grdešić believes me or not, without the infamous checklist.
References
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Grdešić, M. (2024). “Response to Josip Pandžić’s review”. Blog of The Annals of the Croatian Political Science Association, September 13th. https://analihpd.hr/en/reakcija-na-recenziju-josipa-pandzica/
Hall, P. A., and Soskice D. (eds.) (2001). Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Pandžić, J. (2024). I poslije Šuvara – Šuvar! Anali Hrvatskog politološkog društva, 21(1): 0-18. Advance online publication.
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