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Josip Broz Tito had been General Secretary of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia since 1939, then led and won a civil war against the fascist collaborators with the Nazis during the Second World War. After the war, he became Prime Minister and President for Life of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and supreme commander of the Yugoslav people’s army – hence the military honorific, “Marshal.”

Dear Marshal Tito,

The international community of scholars and scientists feels increasingly concerned about the news of repressive measures against intellectuals and attempts to curtail academic freedom in Yugoslavia. Particularly shocking is the recently introduced law for the Republic of Serbia, abridging self-management of universities … It is understood that the introduction of the law is part of a concerted attack on a number of internationally known and respected Marxist philosophers …

We are friends of the country, who admire Marshal Tito’s achievements for the liberation of the Yugoslav peoples and the building of a new, democratic, and humanist socialism. We should hate to see these achievements ruined by a return to authoritarian and reactionary forms of political management.³³⁴

The first signatory was A.J. Ayer, professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford. A grandson of the Dutch-Jewish Citroën^§MS1.2.2d automobile family, Ayer had gone to Vienna to study with the Vienna Circle^§MS1.1.3i in the mid 1930s, just before the Circle was scattered asunder by the Nazis. Ayer brought their Logical Positivism back to England.³³⁵ One of his best and brightest students in the 1950s was a young Yugoslav who had served bravely in Tito’s army of liberation, Mihailo Marković. Also signing the letter were Jürgen Habermas^§AS2.0a and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s^§MS2.1.1a friend and translator, Georg Henrik von Wright.

The members of the group to which the letter referred were mainly based at the Universities of Belgrade and Zagreb. Marković, by then a professor of Philosophy in Belgrade, was to become their most widely published and best-known representative. They came to be known as the “Praxis Group,”³³⁶ named after the academic journal that they had created in 1964. Published in Serbo-Croat and English editions, Praxis attracted considerable international interest.³³⁷ Its annual summer schools were attended by leading thinkers from around the world.

We attended the last of these schools at the University of Zagreb’s Inter-University Center for Postgraduate Studies in Dubrovnik, in April 1981, a full eighteen days. The theme for the seminar was “Philosophy and Social Science Theories of Modernity: Normative and Empirical Perspectives.” Marković was there, a prominent and captivating speaker and persistent discussant. At this meeting, the journal was relaunched under the banner Praxis International, co-edited by US philosopher, Richard Bernstein. This was a new beginning.

We walked each morning to the Center from the state-owned, sharply modernist Hotel Lero. Catching in our eyes the blue glint of the Adriatic, it would have been hard to believe that this was an end, not a beginning. Nor could anyone have had an inkling that things would end as badly as they did, for the Praxis Group, for Yugoslavia, and perhaps still for modernity.

This was a turning point, a time of intellectual responsibility, Bernstein and Marković said in the editorial of the first issue of Praxis International. It was the immediate aftermath of “the defeat of the leading military superpower in Vietnam, the Prague Spring, and the military invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union, workers’ demands for participation and self-government, the growth of the women’s liberation movement, and the recognition of the rights of ethnic minorities. All of these events and movements shared in common a demand for human emancipation, and a refusal to accept unjust, oppressive and authoritarian forms of social life whether labeled ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’.” So, the philosophical questions to be discussed in the journal were to include “the crises of post-industrial society, the global consequences of the ecological crisis, alternative technologies and the humanization of work, … and the analysis of new social movements.”³³⁸ These were the things we talked about for those eighteen days. We have continued to talk about them since.

Chomsky’s reason for writing to President Tito came as much as anything from his sense of affinity to Yugoslavia. Flawed though they were, he pointed to “the experiments with workers’ councils in Yugoslavia” and “the effort to awaken popular consciousness and create a new involvement in the social process which is a fundamental element of Third World revolutions, coexisting uneasily with indefensible authoritarian practice.”³³⁹

After the break with Stalin, Yugoslavia vowed to take a different path from the Soviet Union. One of the pillars of the Yugoslav difference was self-managing public enterprise.³⁴⁰ In his introduction to Chomsky’s 2018 book on Yugoslavia, the editor quotes Milovan Đilas, one of the architects of Yugoslav self-management. On re-reading Marx, Đilas had “discovered many new ideas, most interesting of all, ideas about a future society in which the immediate producers, through free association, would themselves make decisions about production and distribution.”³⁴¹

Another Yugoslav achievement was its leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement, initiated jointly by Tito and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru at a meeting in Yugoslavia in 1956. The movement consisted of postcolonial states which did not want to align with either the United States or the Soviet Union.³⁴² Its first meeting of heads of state was held in Belgrade in 1961. Today it has 120 member-states.

In a rare connection between his social views and his linguistics, Chomsky invokes linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt and his “concept of human nature: … Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied.” So, to society, “We have, perhaps, reached a point in history when it is possible to think seriously about a society in which freely constituted social bonds replace the fetters of autocratic institutions.”³⁴³

Chomsky’s letter to Tito came from a disappointed sympathizer. Whether the letter had any effect on Tito or not, Marković and his Praxis colleagues never lost their jobs. In the scale of academic travesties, their fate was no cause for excessive concern. They were allowed to remain as fully paid internal critics of Yugoslav socialism.³⁴⁴

From intellectual roots that might be traced via Ayer back to the Vienna Circle, Marković embarked on a prolific and eloquent career as world-renowned social philosopher. His magnum opus, Dialectical Theory of Meaning,³⁴⁵ is similar in scope to the pair of volumes we are writing here. However, the way we frame our argument is quite different – our transpositional grammar can be traced more to Halliday than to Marković’s roots in Logical Positivism and Analytical Philosophy.

Then there was the Marx side of Marković’s thinking.³⁴⁶ Key here was the rediscovery of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,^§AS2.3.2b “a rediscovery of a profound and sophisticated humanist philosophy … It became clear that the problems the young Marx was dealing with – praxis, the conflict of human existence and essence, the question of what constitute the true needs and basic human capacities, alienation, labour and production … underlay all his mature work, and furthermore, even now the living, crucial issues of our time.”³⁴⁷

Or, in Marković’s words, the main question for contemporary philosophy was “How can man realize himself and create himself in a world which he accepts as his own?” Or the question, what are the conditions for “the transformation of an alien, reified world into a humane one?” For instance, in relation to work, how does one go from alienated labor, working under the compulsions of hierarchy, to praxis, where work is self-initiated, self-realizing activity, fulfilling and pleasurable for its own sake, in collegial association with co-workers?

This had been the hope for worker self-management in Yugoslavia, realized only in part. In the new “era of cybernetics,” he forecast, the “clashing of particular interests – of various enterprises and economic branches, various regions and nationalities,” a “technological revolution” would lead to the “dissolution of all artificial barriers and the integration of small, relatively autonomous economic systems into big ones.”³⁴⁸ This was how it might be possible to bring to a close an era, not only of the hierarchical enterprise, but the bureaucratic socialist state.

Marković calls his Dialectical Theory of Meaning an ontology, a term we also use to describe our transpositional grammar. “The starting point for this ontology is neither being nor conceptual thought … – it is praxis. We immediately and with full certainty aware that we act, make efforts to realize certain purposes, meet resistance from external reality and, as a result of our action, experience changes both in the objective situation and ourselves … establishing the link between subject and object, mind and matter.” Against the “humanization of nature by the attribution of symbolic meanings,” there is “the opposing tendency to alienation of symbols from man … Instead of informing, transmitting a clear message evoking a definite feeling; instead of uniting people, symbols often misinform, divide, activate an emotive resistance, become barriers and agents of disunity. Instead of being instruments of freedom and of control over natural and social forces, symbols become hostile forces controlling man and preventing him from seeing clearly himself and others.”³⁴⁹

Then, the fall. Tito died in 1980, and the IMF, the World Bank, and Western lenders imposed their insistence on the market in the guise of “structural readjustment.”³⁵⁰ Yugoslavia fell into disunity and ethnonationalist war in which 140,000 people were killed and four million refugees were displaced. One country dissolved into separate countries, uneasily, impossibly, ethnically-defined.

Marković chose Serbia as his country. In 1986, he co-authored a memorandum from the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts complaining that Serbs had been discriminated against in the Yugoslav Constitution. “In the spring of 1981, open and total war was declared on the Serbian people,” it said. The memorandum was referring to the first volley of the war, “the physical, political, legal, and cultural genocide of the Serbian population in Kosovo.”³⁵¹ This was the subject of Marković’s last article in Praxis International, in 1989.³⁵²

In 1990, Marković joined the successor in Serbia to the Yugoslav League of Communists, the Socialist Party of Serbia. From 1990–2 he was vice-president to Slobodan Milošević, and wrote the party’s program. He remained active in the party during some of the most vicious years of the war, until 1995.³⁵³ Milošević was extradited to the Hague in 2001, put on trial for war crimes, and died in prison without a conviction.

Kosovo had been the site of the beginning of the end, and in 1999 it was where the war entered its last stages. This was also when Chomsky rejoined the Yugoslav fray. In numerous interviews, articles, and two books, Chomsky opposed the NATO bombing of Serbia and Serbian forces in Kosovo as illegal causes of the humanitarian crisis, and not the solution that they purported to be.³⁵⁴ The “humanitarian” case made by the US in justification of its aggression, was, for Chomsky, pure “propaganda.”³⁵⁵ Marković would not have disagreed. Nor did Habermas, who called the Western military intervention in Yugoslavia “bestiality.”³⁵⁶

Writes Marković of the overthrow of Milošević, “What happened on 5 October 2000 … threw Serbia six decades back into weak, greatly stagnant liberal capitalism … It was also a road to unprecedented plunder of wealth of the nation created in the course of the past six decades … [I]t was the first step in the process of losing national sovereignty and in becoming a protectorate of neocolonial global powers.”³⁵⁷

Once upon a time,

there was a country …

and its capital was Belgrade.

April 6, 1941 …

I’ll kill them, my friend!

These are the opening lines of Underground, winner in 1995 of the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or. The film begins with the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia, then enjoins a civil war on economic principles, traces the surreal history of the coming of the League of Communists, and comes to a close with the country’s dissolution in another civil war in the 1990s, this time fought on the recessive principles of ethnonationalism. The film ends:

here we built new houses

with red roofs

and chimneys where storks will nest.

With wide-open doors

for dear guests.

We’ll thank the soil for feeding us

and the sun for warming us.

And the fields for reminding us

of the green grass of home.

With pain, sorrow and joy,

we shall remember our country,

as we tell our children

stories that start like fairytales:

Once upon a time,

there was a country …³⁵⁸

When we attended the Praxis seminar in Dubrovnik, we were living in Greece. The day after it ended, we started the long drive home, through the endless mountains of Croatia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, then Northern Greece. Nearing Pristina, capital of Kosovo, we were stopped by the police; the road was closed. This was the beginning of the end, the April 1981 Kosovo riots.

In December 1991, the Inter-University Center in Dubrovnik, where this last Praxis seminar had been held, was destroyed in shelling by Milošević’s – and Marković’s – “Yugoslav Army.”

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³³⁴ Alfred J. Ayer, Noam Chomsky et al. 1975, “Letter to Tito,” New York Review of Books, February 6.

³³⁵ A.J. Ayer, ed. 1959, Logical Positivism, Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.

³³⁶ Mihailo Marković and Robert S. Cohen, 1975, Yugoslavia: The Rise and Fall of Socialist Humanism, a History of the Praxis Group, London: Spokesman Books; Gerson S. Sher, 1977, Praxis: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia, Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Oskar Gruenwald, 1983, The Yugoslav Search for Man: Marxist Humanism in Contemporary Yugoslavia, South Hadley, MA: J.F. Bergin; Christian Fuchs, 2017, “The Praxis School’s Marxist Humanism and Mihailo Marković’s Theory of Communication,” Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 45(1–2):159–82.

³³⁷ Mihailo Marković and Gajo Petrović, eds. 1979, Praxis: Yugoslav Essays in the Philosophy and Methodology of the Social Sciences, Dortrecht: D. Reidel Publishing.

³³⁸ Richard J. Bernstein and Mihailo Marković, 1981, “Why Praxis International?”. Praxis International 1(1):1–5, pp. 1–2, 4.

³³⁹ Noam Chomsky, 2018, Yugoslavia: Peace, War, and Dissolution, Oakland, CA: PM Press, p. 152.

³⁴⁰ Branko Horvat, Mihailo Marković, and Rudi Supek, 1975, Self-Governing Socialism: Volume 2, White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press; Hans Dieter Seibel and Ukandi G. Damachi, 1982, Self-Management in Yugoslavia and the Developing World, New York: St Martin’s Press.

³⁴¹ Noam Chomsky, 2018, Yugoslavia: Peace, War, and Dissolution, Oakland, CA: PM Press, p. 23.

³⁴² Slobodan Lukić, 1979. The Nonaligned Movement and National Emancipation, Belgrade: Socialist Thought and Practice.

³⁴³ Noam Chomsky, 2018, Yugoslavia: Peace, War, and Dissolution, Oakland, CA: PM Press, pp. 152–53.

³⁴⁴ Mira Bogdanović, 2015, “The Rift in the Praxis Group: Between Nationalism and Liberalism,” Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 43(3–4):461–83, p. 462.

³⁴⁵ Mihailo Marković, 1961 [1984], Dialectical Theory of Meaning, translated by D. Rougé and J. Coddington, Dordrecht: D. Reidl Publishing.

³⁴⁶ Mihailo Marković, 1974b, The Contemporary Marx: Essays on Humanist Communism, Nottingham, UK: Spokesman Books; Mihailo Marković, 1981, “New Forms of Democracy in Socialism,” Praxis International 1(1):23–38; Mihailo Marković, 1982, Democratic Socialism: Theory and Practice, Brighton: Harvester Press.

³⁴⁷ Mihailo Marković and Robert S. Cohen, 1975, Yugoslavia: The Rise and Fall of Socialist Humanism, a History of the Praxis Group, London: Spokesman Books, p. 18.

³⁴⁸ Mihailo Marković, 1974a, From Affluence to Praxis: Philosophy and Social Criticism, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 21, 63–65, 227.

³⁴⁹ Mihailo Marković, 1961 [1984], Dialectical Theory of Meaning, translated by D. Rougé and J. Coddington, Dordrecht: D. Reidl Publishing, pp. xiv, 6.

³⁵⁰ Naomi Klein, 2007, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

³⁵¹ www.trepca.net/english/2006/serbian_memorandum_1986/serbia_memorandum_1986.html

³⁵² Mihailo Marković, 1989, “Tragedy of National Conflicts in ‘Real Socialism’: The Case of Kosovo,” Praxis International 9(4):408–24.

³⁵³ Mira Bogdanović, 2015, “The Rift in the Praxis Group: Between Nationalism and Liberalism,” Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 43(3–4):461–83, pp. 464–66.

³⁵⁴ Noam Chomsky, 1999, The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo, Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press.

³⁵⁵ Noam Chomsky, 2018, Yugoslavia: Peace, War, and Dissolution, Oakland, CA: PM Press, pp. 145–46, 177–81, 191–92.

³⁵⁶ Jürgen Habermas, 1999, “Bestiality and Humanity: A War on the Border between Legality and Morality,” Constellations 6(3):263–72.

³⁵⁷ Mira Bogdanović, 2015, “The Rift in the Praxis Group: Between Nationalism and Liberalism,” Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 43(3–4):461–83, p. 467; Božidar Jakšić, 2010, “Praxis – Critical Thinking and Acting, 2009 Interview with Mihailo Marković,” Filozofskom Društvu 2010(1):1–16.

³⁵⁸ www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=underground

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 292–298. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Noam Chomsky’s Yugoslavia §AS2.4.2a