What Can Marx Teach Us About the Restoration of Capitalism?

The article talks about an epochal regression, seeking to avoid the social science melodrama. Situating its reflection upon the conceptual level, it examines the restoration of capitalism in social formations with a socialist project in the Marxian and Marxist terms, to test their theoretical capacity at historical analysis but mainly to show what the alternative movements and theory in Yugoslavia could have done, but did not do, when there was still time to intervene. More precisely it tries to extricate the locus where, in the socialist past, theoretical insights have come out to be disconnected from political commitments (i.e. the title should be understood: ‘What we should have learned from Marx and have failed to take into account in our practice’). In front of the principal contradiction between socialist processes and the political bureaucracy (indirect effects of the latter being capitalist processes), the alternative movements, neglecting the top managerial groups and their great influence within political bureaucracy, found themselves theoretically unprepared and practically powerless when the joint forces of reaction performed a top-down counter-revolutionary coup and, in fire and blood, destroyed socialist federation.