Hello, I'm not 100% sure if this post fits here, but I figured it might be interesting and (possibly) of use to some people. Namely, for those who don't know, there are major protests going on in Serbia since November, which has caused monumental changes to the society here, and I feel like many aspects of these events align strongly with anarchist principles. With that in mind, I'd like to give a brief rundown of what happened just to give some context, and the effects it had on the society in terms of self-organisation, given that these are real events with real people participating.
- Corruption and deaths
I'll be brief here. The Serbian government since 2012 has been run by the mafia. By that I mean both things like that the government exerts huge power over everyone employed in the public sector (and abuses it constantly) and things like the fact that the biggest illegal cannabis plantation in Europe was accidentally discovered in Serbia, and the officer who discovered that got suspended and nobody was prosecuted. After dozens upon dozens of scandals, each of which would be enough to bring down a government in any sane country, the general populace basically gave up on the idea of having a country at all, it is taken for granted that every single institution is in service to one man (Aleksandar Vucic, the current president), and the opposition in the parliament was and still is a joke.
On the 1st of November 2024, the canopy above the train station in the city of Novi Sad collapsed, killing 15 people (initially, one more person was confirmed dead last week). The train station was renovated and reopened that same year in July. Students of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade started blocking the roads for 15 mins (1 minute for each killed), when they were attacked by a group of hooligans (who are often used as a sort of a paramilitary for the government).
- The students revolt
As the police did not move a finger, the students from the faculty took over the faculty building and announced that the faculty is blocked. Studets from other faculties and universities soon followed, and soon all universities in Serbia stopped working, as the students took over. They announced 4 demands that they want to be met before things can return to normal. The demands are ingenious in their own right, but the thing I want to focus on here is how the students organised themselves.
First of all, nobody is allowed inside the university buildings except other students, you get checked when entering. They have transformed every building to include places to eat, sleep, and have formed teams, each with their tasks. Food and supplies are given as donations, as the students have overwhelming support from the general populace.
Every major decision is made in a plenary session (or plenum). Every student can participate, make proposals, and voice their opinion on the topic at hand. After the discussions end, the question is decided by voting. If a decision passes, working groups are formed and the decision gets executed. The most important thing here is that there are absolutely no leaders. Every time someone needs to appear in public, the decision is made inside a plenum, and every time the representative is someone else to avoid any one person being perceived as a leader. This has made it insanely hard for the government to battle against the students, as they cannot target a signle person or a small group, and it also made so that the students are receiving support from everyone, from ultranationalists to vegan anarchists, as the movement is based purely around the concrete demands (that can be simply summed up as: "We want the institutions to function as intended"), and not any specific charismatic leader or ideology.
- Actions taken
The students and people together started regularly blocking the roads all over Serbia every day for 15 minutes at 11:52 (the time when the canopy collapsed). While this went on without incidents most of the time, there were notable moments when thugs came out of a car and started attacking people, and a number of times people rammed the crowd with their cars. Each of these incidents caused more people to join the protests.
Education workers in primary and secondary schools went on strike in support of the student demands, as did the lawyers. Soon, the students started calling for mass protests. They blocked an important highway in Belgrade by staying there for 24h, a few weeks later all 3 bridges in Novi Sad across the Danube were blocked, 2 for 3h and the biggest one for 24h. After the 24h expired, a "citizen plenum" was held, where it was put up to a vote for all present whether the blockades should be extended for 3 more hours (it was just symbolic, but I would call it a notable event). 2 weeks later another mass demonstration was held in Kragujevac, then 2 weeks later in Nis. These three cities are respectively in the norther, central and southern part of the country. The students thus motivated people from all over the country to join in, as most protests have historically been only in Belgrade and Novi Sad, the two biggest cities. Then, two weeks ago, protests were held in Belgrade, the biggest ones in Serbian history.
Also worth noting is that for the protests in Novi Sad, students from Belgrade walked 80km for 2 days to get to Novi Sad, even sleeping out in the open in the middle of winter. They were greated as liberators in every place the passed, and this walking of insane distances became a regular thing thereafter. All this caused more and more people to become involved.
- The people join
Protests started being held all over the country. Pretty much every place that has more than 1000 inhabitants had at least one protest. It became so insane at one point that a website was created to keep track of upcoming ones (kudanaprotest.rs).
Local groups started being formed based on the exact same organisation as the student ones (all participants are equal, every decision is made inside a plenum). People formed groups to block roads themselves, other groups were formed to collect supplies for the students, other groups were formed to cook and bring fresh food to the students every day, etc etc. When the government announced that teachers in strike will not be receiving their salaries, groups formed a system by which people can donate money that would go towards teachers that have not been paid.
- Local communities
As the students could not, and didn't even want to, be the leaders of any force, they asked the people to organise themselves by the way of public assemblies, or "zbor" in Serbian. A zbor is essentially the same thing as a plenum. Each city in Serbia is divided up into many 'local communities' or "mesna zajednica". They are not very influential bodies, and most are governed by the ruling party anyways, but they were identified as a perfect way to get people to organise themselves. Groups started popping out everywhere for each mesna zajednica, and thus entire neighbourhoods started connecting and attending zbors in their respective areas, with the idea that neighbourhoods could organise themselves and take over the mesne zajednice officially, and then they could all work together and start taking over the public positions in the cities. A decision made by a zbor can be taken to the city as a suggestion by the citizens, so it does have some limited value, but the main point here is that it made people all over the country come together with their neighbours to discuss how they can make their surroundings better.
- The rise in popularity of decentralized organisation and the influence of aesthetics on public opinion
Direct democracy is now the norm in the minds of many. Suggesting that anything else is almost contraversial. It came to a point where many people are saying that we don't need any politicians or the parliament, zbors should take over everything. While this of course won't happen, it is very interesting how this idea became so widespread, and how decentralized organisations with direct democracy at their core were widely accepted when everyone saw how far the students managed to get. Also worth noting is that this was all started by students, young people, which dispelled the myth that youngsters nowadays don't care about politics.
On the other hand, people did not suddenly become informed overnight. Very often it can be heard how we should be wary of both the "right wing" and "left wing", instead we should just focus on our problems and solve them, and later we can "divide ourselves". The left is mostly associated with people being "woke" and "hating their nation", so that we have people in decentralised organisations, who participate in plenums, who are talking about forming unions, bashing the left and saying that we should stay away from "ideologies". I think that this really speaks volumes on how the left is thought of by most people. Unless I severely misunderstood the left wing and anarchism, solidarity, equality, direct democracy and local communities are the very pillars upon which these "ideologies" stand on, and they have been shown to be extremely popular in Serbian society, and still if you mention the "left", people will cringe, and if you mention "anarchism", people will run away. We can see right here that the ideas we stand behind are tangible and popular, but that we have a serious branding problem. I guess the conclusion is that actions speak much louder than words, as 'preaching' decentralisation and equality will get your into bad faith debates, whereas the students have shown the way by personal example.
- Conclusion
Protests came and passed in Serbia many times in the last 13 years, but it is clear to everyone that this is something more. We are going through a change in society. The common people demonstrably can come together, organise, and fight a central authority and take matters into their own hands.
Huge protests were recently held in Greece, in Hungary, in Turkey, in North Macedonia, and other places, and there are many more to come. We still have a long way to go, but I hope that this can be of some use to inspire people in other places in the world. All this show of solidarity and community building was not forced, it formed organically as the students lead the way by personal example and sacrifice. Show people that they don't need a leader to keep them in line, show them that "the masses" are not stupid and can make intelligent decisions, show them how natural solidarity is, and show them how inequality has to be artificially created and upheld, and then they will come to understand.
Thank you for your attention.
This was partly explored in Erich Fromm's work "Escape from Freedom" and "The Anatomy of Human Destruction", but basically, if I understood correctly, sadistic personalities use it as a means of defence against loneliness and isolation. By exerting power over another, they temporarily lose the painful feeling of being alone. Abusive people tend to be miserable when their victims leave them and they have nobody to control.
Nobody gains anything from cruelty, it's a symptom that something's terribly wrong with the person in the first place. Even animals don't display acts of cruelty in the wild, they do so only when confined to cages and subjected to other inhumane treatment.