Đilas used this argument about property forms to indicate why the new class sought parades, marches and spectacles despite this activity lowering the levels of material productivity.
Đilas also heavily criticized Soviet imperialist practices for violating the national sovereignty of Eastern European countries and the unequal price exchange in trade between the USSR and these republics.
Robert D. Kaplan's 1993 book Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through history also contains a discussion with Đilas,[9] who used his model to anticipate many of the events that subsequently came to pass in the former Yugoslavia.
The new class does not perish despite attempts to moderate communist practices such as Yugoslavia’s workers' self-management or the reversal of Stalinist totalitarian policies of Khrushchev Thaw.
[10] Mikhail Bakunin had made a point in his International Workingmen's Association debates with Marx in the mid-to-late 19th century of bureaucrats becoming a new oppressive class in socialist states.
In 1911, Robert Michels first proposed the Iron law of oligarchy, which described the development of bureaucratic hierarchies in supposedly egalitarian and democratic socialist parties.
Mao Zedong also had his own version of this idea developed during the Socialist Education Movement to criticize the Chinese Communist Party under Liu Shaoqi.
[12] In fact, originating with James Burnham's famous discussion thereof,[13] there is a whole tradition that posits a purportedly very troublesome convergence between especially the Chinese and Western political order along such lines.
[14] Canadian-American economist John Kenneth Galbraith also wrote about a similar phenomenon under capitalism, the emergence of a technocratic layer in The New Industrial State and The Affluent Society.