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

Kirn, Gal (author)

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.

• Language: English
• Keywords: mnemonic war, national reconciliation, primitive accumulation, capital, memory, facism, revisionism, Yugoslav wars, rehabilitation of fascism
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FF - Faculty of Arts
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2022
• Number of pages: Str. 1470-1483
• Numbering: Vol. 15, iss. 6
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-147078
• UDC: 316.7:94(497.1+497.4)
• ISSN on article: 1750-6980
• DOI: 10.1177/17506980221133724
• COBISS.SI-ID: 132050435
• Publication date in RUL: 22.06.2023

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Memory studies
• Publisher: SAGE
• ISSN: 1750-6980
• COBISS.SI-ID: 514930457

Licences

• License: CC BY-NC 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
• Description: A creative commons license that bans commercial use, but the users don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: spomin, kolektivni spomin, jugoslovanske vojne, postsocializem, narodna sprava, nacionalizem, fašizem, revizionizem, kapitalizem

Projects

• Funder: ARRS - Slovenian Research Agency
• Project number: J6-3144
• Name: Protesti, umetniške prakse in kultura spomina v postjugoslovanskem kontekstu

• Funder: Other - Other funder or multiple funders
• Funding programme: Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies
• Project number: 21-PR2-0015
• Name: Distrusting Monuments. War and Art in Former Yugoslavia