The following is a response of a Marxist historian from Serbia to an inquiry sent by a comrade from Turkey asking for his impressions of the current anti-government protests in Serbia as well as the broader implications of this movement. Given that both the author and the recipient are Marxists, meaning their primary political goal is a global socialist economy, their horizon of expectation may diverge significantly from that of the vast majority of protesters on the ground. Nevertheless, we found the arguments interesting and worthy of publication.
My view is basically that the protests started for good reasons and that I am not going to shed any tears if Vučić falls, but what comes after him will not be much of a change. Maybe, in a very parochial Serbian sense, things will get slightly better if Vučić gets overthrown (but that is a big maybe). In the world-historical sense that interests me, and which would be oriented towards the abolition of class society, this protest movement lacks the organizational and political knowledge to produce anything more than perhaps a sprout of something that could develop into relevant class-based politics (I hope I am not overly optimistic there).
It started off, as is known, with the collapse of a piece of facade in Novi Sad's train station which killed fifteen people. From there it developed into a standard "anti-corruption" protest of the type that Serbia has had at least once a year for the past ten years, based on anti-politics and a vague pre-political idea: "Vučić bad." Frankly, I thought nothing would come of it and it would just dissipate after a month of vague repetitive protest walks with no end, as had happened with every single protest so far. However, now I do think this actually has the potential to overthrow Vučić, due to several factors.
First, the students began blockading the university in response. Several people who were killed in the train station collapse were university students. They are frequent commuters who I think were emotionally hit particularly hard by what happened, because they all felt this tragedy very personally. As did lots of young people, myself included. Since this is the second busiest railway station in the country, on the de facto only functioning railroad in Serbia, we all use it a lot. The party of Vučić, usually level-headed about this kind of stuff, began responding very frantically. This includes intensifying the already tested tradition of driving cars into protesters. They escalated this with several students getting severely injured in the past few weeks after getting hit by cars obviously driven by people related to the ruling party. Of course, this backfired and only made more people protest. Moreover, the students have recently been joined by a lot of Serbia's otherwise meek labor unions, including teachers, public transport drivers, even white-collar workers in the private sector. Everyone has been hit pretty hard by increasing costs of living over the past few years, so I think that also makes for fertile ground for dissatisfaction. The government is responding with ever-increasing repression, which to me is a sign that they are seriously losing control over the situation. They even began doing bizarre stuff such as arresting random Croats in Belgrade so the government-controlled media can claim that "Croatian secret services" are organizing the overthrow of the Serbian government.
Some left-wing students have successfully astro-turfed the slogan of a "general strike" even though most of their peers and people on the streets have only an extremely vague idea of what this means. The "general strike," which took place on January 24th, was basically defined by those organizing it as "general civic disobedience." I am still not quite sure what that was supposed to mean, but again, the fact is, there have been workers going on strike as well as blockades of major thoroughfares in Belgrade and Novi Sad. All of this contributes further to the destabilization of the regime. In any case, I think people have more of an idea of what a "strike" means now and it is no longer confined just to the ones who had been unionized. Of course, ongoing strikes are led by union bureaucracies (those that are actual organized strikes, not the "I called in sick on Friday" actions of atomized disorganized individuals).
The strategy of most left-wing groups is "intervening in the protests" which basically means that they come to the student protests. After all, all these groups are heavily composed of students and the few white-collar workers who for whatever reason stay members of these organizations after graduating. So they try to find people who are politicized like them so they can expand their organization of twelve people to about fourteen or fifteen. Few people are actually engaging in workplace organizing and those who are seem less interested in giving political direction to organized workers anyway. In their defense and for it is worth, this has more often than not resulted more in alienating the unions than bringing them closer to Marxist ideas.
Most students themselves are as lost as the general population, so they would for instance argue against increasing scholarships and fighting for free education because, as they claimed, such demands are "selfish" and they do not concern the main "anti-corruption" drive of the protests. Others think the main goal of the students is to gatekeep the protests from the opposition and pro-Western NGOs. This would be a noble cause if it were not coming from students who are themselves brainwashed nationalists and think that people are upset because Vučić "sold Kosovo."
A lot of workers in government enterprises have engaged in outright disobedience and strikes. Not just teachers, who have not been averse to strikes, but also workers of the national television station or the national electric utility company. That is one of the last major state-owned enterprises which Vučić has been trying to sell off. So, all of this signals a very bad situation for him. The only thing that he has going for him is that, as with every protest so far, he has been able to count on open, multilateral support from the USA, Russia and China. There are even signs he is losing control of sections of the police and the military, which, of course, is all that matters. So, we will see, I think he might actually fall. At least, these are the first protests in almost thirteen years of his reign that show a serious chance of his party being overthrown. He does have football hooligans, drug dealers and other lumpen elements related to the secret police firmly on his side though. lumpen elemente koji su povezani s tajnom policijom.
My predictions on possible scenarios based on whether Vučić is overthrown or not are the following.
First, he does not fall. People get demoralized, the disorganized opposition gets even more disorganized than before, and Serbia gets more authoritarian than before, basically taking the Turkish path in terms of both internal and external politics. Until a year ago, it was virtually unimaginable in Serbia to get arrested for political reasons. Now I think we could see much more of that if Vučić manages to stay in power. Support for Vučić from USA, Russia, EU and China gets stronger, perhaps also involving new forms of cooperation of repressive apparatuses. This is something all four actors have been happily doing with the Serbian state for years now.
Vučić's foreign policy, I think, is hoping that Trump disengages from Europe as he has been signaling. That would give Serbia more bargaining power and potentially a renegotiation of borders in the Balkans (which would affect Bosnia and Herzegovina, i.e. Republika Srpska, Montenegro and Kosovo). It is hilarious that delusional nationalists who see him as a "traitor" do not recognize this and think their best bet is to overthrow Vučić, for reasons I will outline below. However, I think Vučić is equally delusional, since this Trump gambit may make sense for Russia, which can take on the EU without the USA, but not for an unimportant dependent territory like Serbia, which cannot take on the EU with or without the USA. – niti sa SAD-om, niti bez njega.
Second, he falls. The fact that the aforementioned "Big Four" supports him is I think irrelevant if he loses his grip on power domestically due to general mismanagement and increasingly erratic behavior (similar to Bashar al-Assad). In that case, there is going to be a brief period of a free-for-all. The dominant view of the protesters, which I think can be described as a horisontalist-technocratic fantasy of a "transitional government of experts" is of course stupid and will not hold for long even if it happens. What would happen is that the most well-organized force would then eventually take power. That means that the broadly defined "pro-European opposition" would most likely be in charge. So, geopolitically speaking, the country loses the maneuvering space it had and has to finally choose sides, introducing sanctions to Russia and tying itself more closely to the European Union. This would continue the endless cycle of empty promises of EU integration, probably without NATO membership since it would be unconstitutional and generally too much for Serbs to swallow. China and other players such as Turkey or the Gulf states with economic stakes in Serbia are not too interested in its geopolitical or internal direction as much. And Russia, despite EU liberal and Russian nationalist fantasies, lacks both the soft power and the organization that would actually make Serbia into any kind of "pro-Russian" bastion in the Balkans.
The caveat here is that this second scenario has been the argument of more intelligent nationalists and various "anti-imperialist" leftists for not supporting the protests. I do not agree with that, and I think the claim that various leftists are, in this way, de facto putting themselves on the side of Vučić is correct. It is kind of miraculous that the Vučić regime has been able to keep Serbia neutral for the past three years, and that is probably the only genuinely impressive act of politicking on his behalf. But in any case, Serbia is not, by any metric that matters, an independent state. It is not very important which capitalist power this unimportant capitalist country decides to attach itself to. If he falls, let him, this whole regressive dystopian period of the past thirty five years deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of history anyway, Vučić's reign included.
Will it get better internally if Vučić is overthrown? I think the only legitimate argument is the one made by one of my intelligent liberal friends. The main concern, from a liberal perspective, is that the state is engaging in violence by using para-state structures and this is why Vučić must go. If he is overthrown, that might end and will definitely be one of the demands. So, Serbia can get a more standard liberal rule of lawIs the country going to get less corrupt or richer? Highly doubtful, the system is not broken, it works exactly the way it is supposed to work in a dependent peripheral capitalist country.
I see some hope for reconstituting proletarian class-based organizing based on the fact that some of these actually important concepts, such as a strike, have become prominent in the minds of the general public for the first time in decades. I hope those comrades who are engaging in actual organizing on the ground (not just gathering groups of weird students and calling them "parties") will be able to make something out of it. Moreover, there has been a highly successful initiative to boycott supermarkets all over former Yugoslavia due to rising costs of living. This solution is obviously very individualist and consumer-oriented rather than class-based, but at least it shows some rising awareness that people’s problems are caused by concrete socio-economic phenomena and not abstract hazy concepts such as corruption.
Finally, there have also been plenums "plenums" as the preferred knee-jerk student form of organizing. Apparently, due to the low level of political education and organization of the students, no one has been paying attention to anything that has happened over the past sixty years. The plenums mostly engage in standard time-wasting, direct-democratic endless discussions which ensure that all decision-making processes of students, including something as banal as who should speak to the media, take as much time as possible. I assume they have helped Vučić at least somewhat to put the brakes on the student movement by their very virtue of existing. But I think everything that has been happening has outgrown tenfold in importance this primitive, superficial, and pre-political form of quasi-organizing for bored hipsters.
