The collapse of state socialism in 1989 has led to a global decline in the analytical currency of class for understanding social and political dynamics. In intellectual inquiry, and consequently in the field of music studies, the relevance of the historical materialist approach, the focus on class and the relations of production has been deemed as obsolete in a world which has supposedly moved beyond class struggle and facing new forms of inequalities.

In this talk, I advance a class perspective in order to critically discuss how we listen for (in)equality today. I offer a historically-informed theorization, situated in the former Second World and the legacies of its state-socialist project. My position as a scholar coming from the post-Yugoslav region allows for an insight into the willful silencing of the knowledge production that questions the ideological premises beyond the dominant Western-Anglophone liberal paradigm as a universal way of knowing in the music research. Thus, the main purpose of this talk is to revisit the historical commitments to theorizations and experiences of the capitalist relations of production as the primary source of inequality, as they can offer a new ground for understanding the ongoing social fragmentation, individualism, and commodification that shape contemporary struggles for equality by, through and with music.

My discussion focuses on the amateur-professional nexus that has been one of the key grounds for musical actualizations of the ideas of class struggle worldwide. I offer a multi-site overview of the relationship between amateur and professional music-making, not as a dichotomy, but as a complex continuum shaped by the material conditions of the class (re)composition and division of labor. Concentrating further on the (post-)Yugoslav case, I show how the systemic nurturing of amateur musical activities in the second half of the 20th century decentered the creation, circulation, performing of and listening to music as a way of building the new social relations. This transformation had a strong class dimension that presupposed an active participation of all people in musical activities, regardless of their social background or level of education, including vocational artists and the uneducated and illiterate peasants, the working classes or women, youth and minorities. Through the vast socially-owned cultural infrastructure, musical activities were envisioned as constitutive of the new forms of social organization against social stratification, fragmentation, and commodification.

Finally, I use my findings to offer a theoretical reflection on the discourse of music and social justice, which focuses almost exclusively on identity-centered concept of difference, and to pose critical questions for the broader fields of music and sound studies. First, the shortcomings of fighting inequalities by uplifting underprivileged individuals and communities through and with music in a context shaped by the capitalist modes of production and a class division. Second, the integration of class in the research of (in)equality as yet another identity marker, without considering its historically situated processual and relational notion, in other words, moving from class as a subject position toward class as a process of social stratification and struggle.

Ana Hofman is a senior research associate at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her research interests include music, sound, and politics in socialist and post-socialist societies, with the focus on memory, affect, and activism in the present-day conjuncture of neoliberalism and post-socialism in the area of former Yugoslavia.

She has published numerous articles and book chapters, including two monographs, Staging Socialist Femininity: Gender Politics and Folklore Performances in Serbia (2011) and Music, Affect, Politics: New Lives of Partisan Songs in Slovenia (2015), dealing with contemporary musical recuperation of the World War II Yugoslav antifascist resistance.

She served as a co-editor (with Federico Spinetti and Monika E. Schoop) of a 2020 Special Issue of Popular Music and Society, titled “Music and the Politics of Memory: Resounding Antifascism across Borders.” She recently edited the volume (with Tanja Petrović) Affect’s Social Lives: Post-Yugoslav Reflections (2023).

Dr. Hofman teaches at the ZRC SAZU Postgraduate School, Ljubljana. She was a Visiting Researcher at the Music Department of the Chicago University; the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center for Balkan studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, and the Centre for Southeastern European Studies, the University of Graz, Austria. She has been appointed as a Fellow of the State of Rio de Janeiro Research Foundation in 2015 and Postdoctoral Fulbright Fellow at the Graduate School of City University of New York in 2018. The same year, she received the Danubius Mid-Career Award from the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Research and the Institute for Central Europe and Danube Region.

Her latest book, Socialism Now: Singing Activism after Yugoslavia on strategic amateurism, politics of leisure and musical afterlives of socialism is forthcoming from the Oxford University Press.