As the history of the 20th century shows us, drowning in the collective Self ends in a totalitarian order with an anti-human nature that we need not discuss. The reducing of political messages to mere slogans and banners causes them to resemble meme tweets and deprives them of serious political ideas and possible directions towards a new future
In his notion of a rebellious man, philosopher Albert Camus implied man’s struggle for self and for others, but also man’s struggle against his own passivity. If we were to search for a deeper reason behind the mass rebellion underway in Serbia, we should seek it in the euphoric rejection of an existence of complete stupefaction or, more precisely, a life that boils down to purely surviving “from one day to the next”. New generations have been born and raised for decades in such a state of social nihilism, in which notions of the future have been eradicated, which is why they are – this time around – the initiators and conveyors of the rebellion that’s shaking the state and the entire society.
However, it is here that we reach a specific “but”! After six months, this protest of mass solidarity, manifest in marches through the cities of Serbia, has started to resemble a post-modernist political performance. There is no individualisation, no political addresses, no articulation of a new future for them and others. There is even a resolute rejection of the characterising of the student rebellion as political and thus any attempt to categorise them by placing them in the same bracket as the political opposition. Politics has itself become a dirty word, which isn’t at all surprising, of course, under conditions in which the future in its entirety depends on politicians who can’t be trusted – not only when it comes to moral categories, but also in terms of their ability to make common sense decisions. That’s why the revealing of their place in society shows all the signs of a possible antagonistic concept of the future.
The word politics is derived from the Greek word politikos, which means ‘of citizens or the state, civil, civic’, which conceptually describes every label we could attach to the current actions of Serbia’s students. As such, politics is not a dirty word!
Anti-individualism leads them seriously towards Mikhail Bakunin’s concept of social anarchism: “I don’t want to be Me. I want to be We”. As the history of the 20th century shows us, drowning in the collective Self ends in a totalitarian order with an anti-human nature that we need not discuss. The reducing of political messages to mere slogans and banners causes them to resemble meme tweets and deprives them of serious political ideas and possible directions towards a new future. The word politics is derived from the Greek word politikos, which means ‘of citizens or the state, civil, civic’, which conceptually describes every label we could attach to the current actions of Serbia’s students. As such, politics is not a dirty word!
To conclude, let’s turn to the man proclaimed publicly as being the main culprit for the current crisis: Aleksandar Vučić. The skill to rule in a crisis is his top talent and a continuous feature of his political prowess. Is that just because he is manipulative and amoral, because he “lies honestly”, or because no real articulated political alternative has been offered on the other side? It is no longer possible to list all the elections that have marked his 12 years in power, but he nonetheless remains at the top. Regardless of how much we could accuse him of ideological alchemy in his fusing of pro-Europeanism and national chauvinism, his perseverance on Serbia’s political scene says more about us than about him. Wars, sanctions and marginalisation led to the loss of our nation’s foundations, with our fate causing uncertainty and anxiety. We must reconstruct value systems and utilise such newly laid foundations to build projects for our future that will be based on a belief in self. And that’s why, no matter how much political romanticism coloured the student protests, we were nonetheless part of that spiritual conversion that was an absolute necessity for us.
