Socialism Now

Overview & Synopsis

Socialism Now: Singing Activism after Yugoslavia traces the activities of the self-organized choirs that have emerged in the region in the twenty-first century. These collectives have been recuperating Yugoslav and international revolutionary, partisan, and workers’ songs and performing them alongside a contemporary socially engaged repertoire. Their singing activism demasks the privatization, dispossession, and political and social fragmentation that, instead of a promised capitalist dreamland, have shaped lives in the region after the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia. Combining historical and ethnographic approaches, the book offers a nuanced account of collective singing as a way of organizing against the adverse effects of neoliberal capitalism in its potentialities and limits. Taking a perspective on the politics of music and sound outside the usual understanding of social justice or social change, Socialism Now revalorizes the “lost” historical knowledge and lived experiences from the former Second World. The book’s central concept, strategic amateurism, proposes the key role of nonprofessional, communal leisure musical activities in building the structures for anti-capitalist organizing.