ers of Ranković, and even Ustasi and Chetniks. In the new situation brought about by the economic reform the above mentioned groups used the atmosphere at the universities to their advantage and took the offensive: the Leage of Communists was unprepared to deal wiih «h':; threat.
With this we have, morę or less, delineated the battlefront between students and the bureaucracy, or to be morę precise, between the de-monstrators and government administration. But, as has already been pointed out, we propose that for the understanding of the conditions and possibilities of left radicalism, it is of the greatest importance to explore, always in concrete situations, how this radicalism affects the aspirations of the middle class. We recognize that this is especially important in the most developed capitalist countries in which, because of their privileged position in the world division of labor, a great part of the working class has acquired a way of thinking and behavior which is typically middle class. This represents the main barrier which limits new left ideas to student campuses and to those groups which are linked with them in so called intellectual communities. However, it does not follow that the investigation of the above mentioned relation is important in only the most developed countries that have large middle classes. Experience shows that this is important in countries like ours. The crux of the matter is that the new middle class and nouveau riche are far less tolerant than those who have held middle class status for a long time. These people make up for their lack in numbers by their greater agressiveness. Our owner of an automobile and a summer home is a greater enemy of a leftist trend than his American or French counterparts for the very reason that he is a newcomer to this way of life, that he still feels insecure and fears that the trend which madę him what he is might come into question, resulting in the loss of what he has acquired. For him the June events with their demands and aspirations represent »a Mao Tse Tung, Sta-linist, Centralist pot of slogans«.8 Having reacted spontaneously and sincerely, he has a second thought and says that from this pot we must separate that which is positive and that which is a spontaneous revolt against the »bureaucratic Gods«. Just to show that their ver-balizations are so many words, being that they cannot circumvent Tito’s appraisal of the situation, is shown by the fact that when the »bureaucratic Gods« are mentioned even in a casual manner, their whole wrath turns against the students. To show how great their fear was and the extent of their wrath, a certain Zagreb newspaper published reports of the killing of Sharon Tatę for weeks on end. It was elear to every politically aware person that the spectacular judi-cial process surronding this event was staged by extreme rightists who wished to draw attention away from the events of Song My and My Lai in order to psychologically prepare the American people for a pogrom against left-wing students. We do not wish to imply that newspapers were in any way connected with the shady intentions of Californian right-wingers, but that the serialized publishing of the
' VUS, June 16, 1968.
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