Background
Stojanovic, Svetozar was born in 1931 in Yugoslavia.
Stojanovic, Svetozar was born in 1931 in Yugoslavia.
At the University of Belgrade from 1964. Suspended from teaching for political reasons in 1975, along with the seven other members of the Belgrade 'Praxis’ group. From 1981, Professor in the Centre for Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade.
From 1989, frequent Visiting Professor at the University of Kansas.
Stojanovic's early interest in analytic ethics of the Anglo-American variety, expressed in his first book, Savremena metaetika (1964), gave way by the late 1960s to the sympathetic but critical development of Marxist social theory that has occupied him ever since. His interest in Marxism has a strong ethical component, inasmuch as his attachment is to Marx's humanistic ideals rather than to communism as a social structure. Stojanovic believes that major corrections are needed in classical Marxist social theory. One such correction, originally proposed in his book Between Ideals and Reality (1969), is the addition of what he calls 'statism' to Marx’s social typology. Stojanovic regards the Soviet Union, for example, as representing a type of social structure not accommodated in Marxist theory—a socio-political rather than socio-economic formation, or one in which a class rules through a monopoly on political power rather than economic ownership, creating a new type of class oppression. A second needed correction is the introduction of a distinction between a ruling class and a dominant class. Stojanovic argues that Marx failed to recognize that the bourgeoisie is the first class in history that can dominate society without ruling it. Capitalism was thus a new form of class society—one that permits the broad development of democratic institutions while at the same time the bourgeoisie retains its dominance. Stojanovic elaborates the distinction between ruling and dominant classes in his book Perestroika (1988), arguing that many of Marx’s theoretical weaknesses can be traced to overlooking it. Stojanovic’s positive social ideal is a society in which no class either rules or is dominant—a democratic socialist society, which he thinks can evolve from democratic capitalism. He calls it ‘socialism with a civil and bourgeois face’, meaning a society in which democratic planning and public ownership of major economic facilities are combined with private ownership of ‘non-strategic productive means', market competition, and production for profit by private, cooperative and self-managed public enterprises. In his 1995 book, examining the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the collapse of Communist statism, he ascribes only a ‘regulative-critical’ rather than a ‘constructive-operative’ significance to Marx’s ideas and advocates a ‘post-Marxist’ programme of global cooperation to avert an apocalyptic end to the human species.