‘The primitive accumulation of capital and memory’: Mnemonic wars as national reconciliation discourse in (post-)Yugoslavia

Abstract

The article elaborates on Marx’s concept of the so-called primitive accumulation of capital by extending it to the field of memory and introducing a new concept of the ‘primitive accumulation of memory’. The article argues that this concept gives us an innovative path to understand the relationship between memory and capital. To arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the break-up of Yugoslavia and its thoroughly revised memoryscape, this text combines a politicoeconomic analysis with the evaluation of memory-related ideological shifts that are in fact perceived as long-term mnemonic wars in (post-)Yugoslavia. The article analyses how nationalism and memory revisionism are internally linked to capitalist accumulation. More specifically, the article will observe how an ethnocentric mnemonic war sought to openly negate the socialist and anti-fascist past. Indeed, the creation of an anti-communist, and at times anti-antifascist, orientation was integral to the imagining of new nation-states. Juxtaposed to this creative and generative current of memory revisionism, the primitive accumulation of capital in post-Yugoslavia began with the ‘deaccumulation’ of social infrastructure and wealth, and with the dispossession of working people. The bigger the dispossession, the larger the nationalist accumulation of memory and displacement of class antagonism. Finally, the article discusses what at first glance seems to be a pacifying discourse of ‘national reconciliation’, which stoked a thorough revision of the public memory of World War II. This revision reconciled fascist collaborationists and anti-fascist Partisans, and it helped to challenge Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist consensus, while also framing the ethnic wars of the 1990s.

Towards an economy of memory: Defining material conditions of remembrance

“…He considers how Memory Studies are based on the paradigm of violence. Therefore, primitive accumulation could be transposed to Memory Studies for understanding economic violence and the different logics of class oppression and exploitation (Kirn, 2022).…”

“…Thus, it is symptomatic that the crisis of materialist theories coincides with the ‘memory boom’. Gal Kirn (2022) argues that not only has there been a lack of exchange between Marxism and Memory Studies because of the differences between their objects of research and methodologies, but that this ‘missed encounter’ between the two is the result of a historical process of disengagement of Marxism from Memory Studies, from the 1980s onwards. Perhaps, the economy is absent from memory as in Almodóvar’s film.…”

An Inquiry into the Factors Influencing the Role of Marxist Chineseization on the Discourse System of Chinese-Style Modernization

“…For the country, whether the discourse system is properly constructed or not has a significant impact on enhancing the national soft power and shaping the national image. Especially with the development of Chinese modernization practice, the construction of the Chinese modernization discourse system needs to keep pace with the development of Chinese modernization [3][4].…”