Tomorrow a huge protest will be held in the capital of Serbia, Belgrade, protesting the government’s refusal to accept the demands made by the students, as well as protesting against general incompetence and corruption. From the student to the teacher, worker and pensioner, war veterans and children all around Serbia will gather together in this protest.
Is this really it? Some policemen announced that they won’t be going to work tomorrow and that they have no intention of beating up children. This might be the only chance that the opposition gets to forcefully remove the president from office.
The implications are obvious; a color revolution is in the works. Unlike the protests in Greece, the Serbian protests have no class character. The left is very weak, and the protest attendees range from neonazis to liberals and communists (most likely due to the fact the protests have been organized “apolitically”). The situation in Serbia is very volatile, and the validity of these protests need to be questioned more seriously, since no matter how much they deny it, this reeks of liberal infighting. Only time will tell what the consequences of these past few months will be, and whether this will be another October 5th or just a failed mass movement.
322 posts and 58 image replies omitted.>>2200857>have you wondered why there is no general strike? because it's illegal to strike in Serbia. only the highest syndical instance in Serbia has the right to declare strike across branches. so if you want workers to join you'll first have to appeal the law on strikes.How do you think strikes became permissible in the first places? Workers went on illegal strikes until the state legalised striking, as in promising not to punish striking workers with live ammunition. If you have a trade union that doesn't do strikes and can't even threaten to strike, it's not a trade union, it's an NGO. Maybe a lefty NGO, but an NGO. Submitting to strike laws is basically carrying water for the liberal opposition, because if they don't go on a strike, striking will remain illegal, but forming stupid libshit parties and boosting them with CIA funded propaganda will stay legal and as such remain the only avenue to express discontent, to the benefit of SNS.
I don't want to be overly cynical, especially as a foreigner, but if the unions remain passive for whatever reason (corruption or just lack of worker support), then this is going to end in a liberal victory which will lead to an SNS victory.
The tensions continue to rise.
I have a hot take, I came to this understanding as I began to think more about our circumstances in Serbia.
Serbia has a "kulak"-like problem. In the sense of, this is not a standard worker vs bourgeois struggle.
What is the problem? Liberals call it corruption, but the word "corruption" actually obfuscates the graveness of the situation. Maybe that's why some anons here don't understand why this is not typical political corruption like say in the US.
We essentially have a class of people who have all taken, individually, a "slice of the pie" for themselves. The pie in question? The very capital of the state - the resources like money and property. This class of people is not, mind, exclusively the politicians and oligarchs at the top - it in fact includes the incompetent nepotistically-employed state employees. As we say in Serbian, "preko veze" (I know a guy who can help you…)
It is literally in their interest as a class of people for the continued robbery of the state to continue. At the expense of everyone else living here and paying already high taxes even at the lowest income brackets. The Serbian people are collectively being robbed by these people. Not just robbed, slowly killed. And not in the sense of some ancap shit like "taxation is theft", to avoid misunderstanding, but in the sense that the capital from the taxes isn't even being used for what it would be used in a liberal capitalist state. Rather, it is directly used for self-benefit.
Uhleb. How to translate this word? Parasite? Hleb means bread. U means in. In-bread? Hand-in-bread? Bread-taker?
Here is an anecdote. My grandma lives very poor and receives social security (not a pension, she doesn't qualify for one, but literally social benefits). One recent winter, she told me, she went to the opština (local center or however you would translate it) to get wood, as wood is given out for free to people like her for heating. She told me, they refused to give her wood, because she wasn't a member of SNS. The uhlebi did that. The very same uhlebi we are supposed to feel sorry for, according to rightists. I can't express by text how furious I was when I heard that from my grandma.
This is class conflict and the lines are clear - uhlebi versus the rest of Serbia.
Yugo-flag anon, I have to disappoint you. These are not serious communists. What is this performative radlib shit?
<In the book "Lenin" by Lev Danilkin, we find the passage:
>"Lenin, who in everyday speech often used the phrase 'only Allah knows' (Arabic: Allahu a'alam) to mean 'there is no information and there cannot be any.'"
<When we use Arabic terms like *"insha'Allah"* and *"alhamdulillah"*, we do so akin to the bygone Native American chant *"hoka-hey"*, for Arabs are to imperialists the Native Americans of the 21st century. Moreover, there are no words that can quite "upset" liberals, so we won’t waste time unmasking them.
Firstly, citing a literally who author? And I can't even find on Google Lenin's usage of this phrase.
Secondly, who the fuck are they kidding? Are we going to pretend now that Serbs via Bosniaks, Bosnian Muslims, who literally speak the same language and lived alongside Serbs in the same freaking country, have never heard of "inshallah"? Or that Serbs themselves don't literally use the Arabic borrowed phrase "mašala"? That our language doesn't have loads of Arabic loanwords via Turkish? No, this all seems very foreign gentlemen, this will surely own the libs.
This both glows ("here let me quote literally who J. Sakai to sound coincidentally inflammatory" energy) and is somehow miraculously out of touch with Serbian/Yugoslav culture and history.
>>2220902yeah, and the machinery of the SNS system still manages to oppress the people through their tactics, which one way or the other successfully forces people to support them. In other words, were there magically a referendum now which would determine the future of the party, with all the fraud and corruption aside, there would still be a big turnout on the side of the government.
The people take sides on the basis of surviving or on the side they think is the best. I don't think there is any diehard Vucic fan. Your " 0.2% of the population" stance is so far removed from the material conditions of the serbian workers and is laughable.
>>2206783>>2206790The expert government thing is gaining a lot of steam, I've heard that the proposal had majority support on the Great Meeting of Delegates of each town except Belgrade, and that it's quite shaky in Novi Sad too, because the biggest FTN was against. Hopefully the Belgrade faculties can figure out a good opposing idea.
I've also seen the criteria for experts that some of the pro-expert government faculties posted, and they're absurd. There's probably like less than 10 people who fulfill the criteria in the whole Serbia, I can't think of anyone. It is such a shit idea.
>>2248799It's official, it passed in the Great Meeting of Delegates of each town, meaning that the students are asking for parliamentary elections and forming a representative list for those elections, but that doesn't mean they're going to happen before 2027.
The students themselves aren't actually going to be on the list. They agreed to allocate a number of spaces on the list to each faculty in the country, then the plenums of each faculty will vote on people they want on their part of the list. The list will probably contain a lot of university professors.
>>2256373Actually, the talking point now is that the majority of students in blockade are good (they mean liberal) students but that a small minority of Khmer Rouges are derailing the whole movement.
There's also that Vucic's "bolshevik plenumers" quote from a few weeks ago.
>>2267292It's not that EU flags were banned. We just have a lot of fascistic "patriotic" nutjobs attacking people for the slightest "provocation". Hence the pro-EU libs stopped trying to carry EU flags when they realized they might get their heads caved in by thugs.
And before anyone says "based", I hate the EU as much as anyone, but I don't think we should be rooting for fascistic violence (violence directed at people who have nothing to do with big capital). They can hate libs like us, doesn't mean we should be encouraging them to continue their policing of "traitors" (which, if you were not naive, would realize includes us here on leftypol, if you aren't foolish enough to think they wouldn't direct the same violence against communists, "enemies" of their beloved church among other things.)
>>2274119As far as I'm aware not a single student social media account ever singled out EU flags as banned.
>>2274132>bat for the EUI neither bat for the EU, nor do I bat for "patriotic" nutjob thugs. Sorry that being a communist is too complicated for you.
>>2286982That is valid critique, students need more resolve and less of that embarrassing shit (biking to Strasbourg, running to Brussels)
It is truly sad how protests are kinda fizzling out, unironically only truly effective protest happened on 3rd November (like first protest of the bunch) when protesters actually did shit (stormed SNS hq in Novi Sad and stormed city hall) but after that they got watered down into whatever this is rn.
>>2289462the actions of the first wave of protests were universally condemned and the attackers were labeled provocateurs and agents of the SNS
>>2289465I have said this many times over the course of 2 months on this thread that the working class truly have been neglected by the protestors. Not even the Zbors (correct me if im wrong) had any actual influence over the events of the protests. Politically, the movement is bankrupt (see that cunt of a pro-israeli professor on hunger strike everyone is freaking out over). Not one truly progressive demand was demanded. We are utterly fucked.
>>2284458Not a Serb, but I can confirm this. I was walking around late at night in Beograd, and suddenly I saw a bunch of tents blocking a critical road intersection of the city, and a shitton of cops.
So I went to the supermarket that is still open at this time of the night, got some snacks and beer, and when I got out, I saw a bunch of people who looked like students, so I asked them what was going on, and they confirmed to me it was a teacher protest.
They told me the government passed a law or decree reducing the time spent on research by teachers from 50% to 5%, which means it limits their pay to 50€. While Beograd is a relatively cheap city by Western standards, this is an unliveable situation.
They told me the government passed this decree basically illegally or almost, it's a weird legal situation. I told them it's unsustainable for a country to stop doing scientific research, especially when Serbia is more or less known for having very good education, but it's basically a power play.
More importantly, they told me the teachers will stay there for as long as needed to get what they want. To me, this sounded kinda funny at first, but this is actually ballsy. The protest seemed rather peaceful, because in several other countries, they would have been kettled and suffocate in a cloud of tear gas. But then, during another day when I wanted to see a few buildings bombed by NATO (holy shit, can't describe how I felt when I saw this), I passed by the camp, and damn, it's hot as fuck in this country, and they were still there, and the camp was much larger than I initially thought. And when you have 5000 dinars for the month, well you better spend them well collectively. I think some students offered them food, mutual aid stuff.
The students confirmed another few things discussed in this thread: the use of a LRAD, the sketchy contract regarding the canopy in Novi Sad. And it's true that a couple of public squares were blocked with tents with almost no one in there, what a weird sight to behold. One in particular had barriers coated with some strange orange substance that is probably a kind of glue. A few people were hanging around in this one big park, but they had to pass a police check I believe.
I also saw students in front of an university building, but I didn't feel like asking them questions, cops were fucking everywhere and I had bigger problems to deal with, but they did have a PUMPAJ sign indeed lol.
What a fucking intense city goddamn, I could talk about it for hours.
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