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In this paper the author briefly reviews the sociological research of social inequalities; more precisely, he deals with the research of class/strata structure of society. It is not disputable neither that this research is part of the sociological mainstream, nor that is the area with numerous disputes. It is also worth noticing that the notion of class itself experienced serious challenges. All of this influenced the Yugoslav and Serbian sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some recent anthropological accounts of middle classes centred on their indebted home-ownership. They stressed its two contrastive logics fitting a wider binary – exposing 'squeezed' middle classes in the global North to increasing risks, and supporting the ascent of their 'new' counterparts in the South. The genealogy of middle-class housing debt in Croatia presented in this article reveals another, post-socialist trajectory where mundane and opaque institutional practices regulating access to housing finance, such as bank credit scoring and the allocation of state housing benefits, were key in steering a middle class inherited from socialism towards mortgaged home-ownership. The latter was articulated as a middle-class experience only after the 2000s credit boom had come to an end and the consequences of rampant predatory lending became visible and subject to contestation. The resulting middle-class subjectivities are ambiguous and, as comparisons with other Eastern European cases suggest, accessible for a range of political projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article opens by situating the Yugoslav academic perspectives on class and politics within the framework of recent studies dealing with class in post-socialist Europe. It then presents the ways in which the first Yugoslav dissidents understood the "new class" (the embourgeoisement of the party elite), followed by a review of a large number of studies on the disintegration of workers' self-management project, students' protests, and workers' strikes. The diverse scope of research conducted between the 1960s and 1980s provided a corrective to the League of Communists' hegemonic perceptions of the growing social inequalities, the causes of the economic crisis, and the stalemates of political decision-making, showing the deepening, while "invisible," sense of powerlessness among workers and the opaqueness of the polycentric, increasingly fragmenting and clashing centers of political power. In the conclusions, changes in the perceptions of class in post-Yugoslav states are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]