Ljubomir Cuculovski

Ljubomir Cuculovski: Alienation, Read Close to Home

In September 2020 a retired philosophy professor handed a Macedonian news outlet a diagnosis of his own country: it had stopped being one country. It now ran, he said, on "two parallel governments and two parallel societies." The man delivering the verdict had spent four decades at the Faculty of Philosophy in Skopje reading Karl Marx on alienation, and had come to think the concept described the state he lived in.

Bitola, and a Thesis on Bergson

Ljubomir Cuculovski was born on 1 September 1948 in Bitola, in what was then the Socialist Republic of Macedonia within Yugoslavia. He read philosophy at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, submitting a graduation thesis on the sources of Henri Bergson's theory of knowledge — a choice that placed him, at the outset, on the vitalist and anti-positivist side of European thought rather than the orthodox dialectical materialism a Yugoslav philosophy faculty might have been expected to produce.

He did not stay there. In 1982 he took a master's degree in sociological science from the Institute for Sociological, Political and Juridical Research in Skopje, with a thesis on religion and morality. Ten years later, in 1992, he completed a doctorate at the Faculty of Philosophy with a dissertation on Karl Marx and the origin of historical materialism, bounded tightly to the years 1841 to 1849 — that is, to the young Marx, the Marx of the early manuscripts, before *Capital*.

Forty Years in One Building

His institutional career runs in a straight line. Teaching assistant at the Institute for Sociological, Political and Juridical Research from 1973 to 1975; then the Faculty of Philosophy from 1975 onward. Docent in 1992, on the strength of the doctorate. Full professor in 2002. Professor ordinarius — the senior Continental rank — in 2007. He retired in 2013.

Alongside the ranks came administration. He headed the Department of Philosophy for two terms, from 1999 to 2005, and was elected President of the University Senate in 2000. He taught the history of Marxism, philosophy of religion, and introductory philosophy.

The Young Marx, Not the Economist

The centre of gravity in his written work sits exactly where his dissertation did. His first book, *Marx's Concept of Man, Labor and Alienation* (1981), preceded the doctorate by more than a decade; *Marx's Anthropological Critique of Capital* (2007) and *Some Controversies Around Marx* (2008) returned to the same ground long after it. The recurring word is anthropological. Cuculovski's Marx is a theorist of what work does to human beings rather than primarily a theorist of surplus value, and he carries that reading into political philosophy, analysing capital from an avowedly Marxist position.

His second preoccupation is theodicy, which he treats as the central question of the philosophy of religion — whether the existence of God survives the problem of evil. The pairing is less odd than it looks. Both are questions about suffering that a system is supposed to justify.

Six Hundred Articles

Cuculovski has published more than six hundred articles in Macedonian and former-Yugoslav journals, along with newspaper writing in Bulgaria, Croatia and elsewhere. He sits on the editorial boards of *Novi Plamen* and *Philosophia*. His other books include *Testimonials and Comments* (1999), *Different Narratives* (2002), *Political Narratives* (2002), and a novel, *A Novel in One Night* (2011).

His research turned increasingly to the situation directly in front of him: contemporary Macedonian society, and globalisation, which he characterises as "externalization, which is equivalent with Americanization." In the 2020 Netpress interview he argued that the Macedonian nation, history and language had never been legitimately open to question, and laid the country's troubles at the door of what he called an "illegal, illegitimate" government under Zoran Zaev. He pointed to ethnically structured institutions — he named the Chamber of Commerce of Northwest Macedonia — as evidence that parallel infrastructure was hardening into grounds for formal partition, with some concluding that "life and coexistence is impossible."

Why Ljubomir Is Called a Genius

Honestly: he is not, at least not in any source available here. Netpress calls him a "renowned philosophy professor," and that is the ceiling of the praise on record. Nobody in the accessible literature applies the word genius to Ljubomir Cuculovski, and the claim would not survive scrutiny if it were made. He has produced no philosophical system, no concept that circulates under his name, and no work widely translated out of Macedonian. His doctorate came at forty-four, his full professorship at fifty-four. This is the career of a serious national academic, not a figure of international consequence, and the difference matters.

What can be defended is a specific intellectual quality: unusual consistency of a single interpretive commitment across five decades, and the nerve to turn it on his own country in public. Cuculovski settled early on the young, anthropological Marx — alienation as the master category — and never abandoned it: not when Yugoslavia dissolved, not when Marxism became professionally toxic across post-socialist Europe, not in retirement. The sheer volume is part of the case; six hundred-plus articles implies a man who never stopped writing. And the 2020 interview shows the theory being used rather than curated, alienation turned on the ethnic fracture of North Macedonia rather than left in a seminar. Whether that reading is correct is a separate argument. That it is philosophy applied to a live emergency, rather than commentary wearing philosophy's clothes, is the strongest claim available for him.

What He Leaves

A department he ran for six years, a university senate he presided over, a shelf of books in Macedonian, and a habit of publishing in newspapers as readily as in journals. Cuculovski's career was built entirely inside one national intellectual culture — Bitola to Skopje, and no further. That is a real limit on his reach. It is also, arguably, the point. He stayed, and kept arguing.

Achievements

• Held posts at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje