Marx on the beach: the forgotten story of Yugoslavia’s rebel communist summer school

Lapped by the velvety waters of the Croatian Adriatic, the walled town of Korčula is best-known for its yacht-filled marinas, bijou boutiques, and eye-watering prices. It’s hard to believe that this quaint Mediterranean holiday trap once attracted a very different kind of tourist: some of the most high-powered international Marxists that Europe has ever seen.

From 1963 to 1974, the Korčula Summer School hosted ten-day gatherings of philosophers, sociologists, and students, that mapped out the development of the European left during one of the most turbulent periods in its history. Despite being considered dangerously heretical by Yugoslavia’s communist leaders, the summer school was a unique intellectual salon attended by influential thinkers from both East and West. Blending beachside holiday with an energising sense of intellectual freedom, the summer school provided its participants with an utopian setting in which sun and socialist comradeship were guaranteed — until the authorities finally tired of its heresies and pulled the plug.

The idea of a summer school grew from the increasing importance of the Adriatic coast in Yugoslavia’s leisure scene, and the inescapable fact that everyone wanted to get away to the seaside over the summer. Zagreb university professors and Praxis founders Milan Kangrga and Rudi Supek both had summer houses near Korčula, and decided it was the ideal place in which to combine theoretical debate with more sybaritic pursuits. The first few years of the school were largely restricted to university teaching staff, but Korčula quickly became the place to be for left-wing academics and students eager to sunbathe, drink wine, and discuss the meaning of life.

Not for nothing did French Marxist Henri Lefebvre tell Grlić’s mother Eva (after one particularly wine-lubricated excursion) that the summer school represented “dionysaic socialism” in action — a perfect synthesis of progressive theory and the good life it was supposed to lead to.

Summing up Korčula in a memoir published in 2007, sociologist Ivo Kuvačić described the summer school as “a hive buzzing with young people from all corners of the world… Sessions took place both indoors and in the open air, and discussions carried on in surrounding cafes and restaurants, or on the beach until late at night… It was the continuation of what had happened in the university campuses of Berkeley, Paris and Berlin, just on a smaller scale.”

The fact that Praxis had the aura of forbidden fruit — a phenomenon tolerated by a regime that disapproved of much of the detail — helped Yugoslav students feel that, just like their Western counterparts, they were engaged in some kind of revolution. Several nonconformist intellectuals from the Eastern bloc also came to the summer school in its early years (including Czech philosopher Karel Kosik, Hungary’s Àgnes Heller and Poland’s Leszek Kołakowski), although Praxis’s elastic view of Marxism was viewed with profound suspicion by Eastern bloc governments. Moscow in particular hated Praxis’s attacks on Soviet dogma, and suggested to Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito that it might help (the frequently turbulent) relations between the two countries if he closed Praxis down.

Something of a turning point came in May 1968, when unrest in France had an electrifying effect on the global left. As left-wing students took over the streets of Paris, and striking workers downed tools in factories, it momentarily looked as if the anti-capitalist revolution was at hand (although conservative president Charles de Gaulle soon regained control). A student strike in Belgrade later that June revealed widespread dissatisfaction with Yugoslav communism’s lurch towards market economics. Many of the Belgrade academics associated with Praxis joined the protests. The subject of that year’s summer school, titled “Marx and Revolution”, looked set to capitalise on what promised to be a long-awaited epoch of change.

Such optimism suffered a serious blow when news arrived on August 21 that the Warsaw Pact had intervened in Czechoslovakia, where Czechoslovak communist party leader Aleksandar Dubček had unleashed a programme of liberal reforms in the so-called Prague Spring. The changes, however, displeased Moscow, and a military force was swiftly dispatched. The invasion served as proof that in the Eastern bloc at least, any attempt to democratise socialism was likely to be punished by Soviet tanks. It came as a particular shock to Rajko Grlić, who was back home in Croatia after spending time studying at Prague’s famous FAMU film school. “I remember the moment very well. I was woken at about five or six in the morning by my father, who said ‘the Russians are in Prague!’ Within a few hours the leaders of the summer school had put together an open letter of protest, and I remember there was a long line of people waiting to sign it. And there I was standing right between Bloch and Lefebvre! I always joked that this was my closest connection to the history of philosophy. Later that same day, I hurried back to Zagreb to see if I could get a flight back to Prague.”

Participants from Eastern bloc countries found it increasingly difficult to attend the summer school in the wake of 1968. For the western left however, Korčula grew in importance as the place where the post-1968 generation networked and discussed ideas. The people of Korčula continued to welcome the summer school because it took place at the end of August, when the regular tourist season was coming to an end. An influx of amiable wine-guzzling leftists was more than welcome.

“The reaction of local people, as far as I can remember, was very positive,” says retired economics professor (and Korčula native) Ante Lešaja, who has dedicated his retirement to archiving the Praxis movement. (That archive has since been digitised thanks to younger-generation Zagreb thinker Tomislav Medak). “I knew university students from Korčula who would come home for the holidays and follow the summer school sessions with great enthusiasm. Even when higher authorities suggested that the summer school should be cancelled, the town’s mayor always rejected any attempts of the kind. The Yugoslav security services almost certainly sent their observers to Korčula, but the local police behaved with great discretion and never showed any particular interest in monitoring the work of the school.”