The Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory and the Faculty of Media and Communications invite you to the second talk in the lecture series “Yugoslavia within the World System: Theories of Dependence and Uneven Development”

Rade Pantić – Kingdom of SHS/Yugoslavia in the Classical International Division of Labor

The lecture will try to make a departure from the interpretations that observe the development of interwar Yugoslavia through the paradigm of delayed modernization, and to make a turn towards a historical materialist analysis that observes the underdevelopment of Yugoslavia as a result of its involvement in the capitalist international division of labor. The underdevelopment of interwar Yugoslavia is not interpreted as a consequence of the insufficient development of capitalist production relations or the lack of “real capitalism”, but as the effect of placing this country in a peripheral position within the capitalist world system, which structurally limited its development, making it dependent on the capital accumulation of the countries at the center of the world system. The lectures will try to show how the center’s foreign capital gained dominance in the energy sector and the extractive industry of Yugoslavia, so by controlling the key inputs of production processes, it systematically hindered the establishment of the domestic processing industry. In this way, foreign capital unevenly developed the economy of Yugoslavia, prevented the articulation of its economic sectors and adapted them to the needs of accumulation in their home countries, so that the surplus value produced by the Yugoslav productive classes flowed into the development of the center, while in Yugoslavia, as the periphery of the capitalist world system, remained underdeveloped.

Rade Pantić is an associate professor at the Department of Political Studies of the Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade. He is the co-editor of the collection Contemporary Marxist Theory of Art (Orion art/FMK, Belgrade, 2015) and the author of the book Art through Theory: A Historical Materialist Analysis (Zalozba /*cf., Ljubljana, 2019). He deals with historical materialism, theory of ideology, theory of art and film, and studies of urbanism.

The event will be photographed and recorded due to publishing on social networks, the website and other information channels for the purpose of promoting the event and activities of the Institute.