In France, organized by trade unions, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Paris and other cities and this has been going on for almost a month now. Germany, at the invitation of the trade union, was paralyzed, a similar venture is planned in Italy, in Israel the trade unions have called for general strike and stopped the country.
In Serbia, on the other hand, where there are a hundred times more urgent reasons for citizens to fight for themselves - nothing. The French are protesting because the president wants to raise the retirement age and he provides, let's add, very convincing reasons for that. In Germany, the workers simply believe that they deserve more money for their work, and since the government does not share their opinion, they have decided to let the government know who is truly sovereign. In Israel, they are opposed to judicial reform that, they believe, would turn the country into a theocracy in which the executive power would be placed above the independent judiciary.
In Serbia, on the other hand, we are dying from polluted air, a group of shameless characters overthrew the republic and kidnapped the state, workers wear diapers at their workplaces because the clients of the team from the previous sentence do not allow them to leave even to pee, the mafia in power is wantonly looting the country, but - it doesn't matter, everything is fine.
In this commentary, we do not go into the content of the demands in France, Germany, or anywhere else, but about the power of association and organized resistance to the authorities. So, about the conditions of freedom.
The paradox of trade unions in SFRY
The history of strikes, including rebellion against the government in Serbia, is not glorious. Admittedly, we will discover with some surprise, in the study of sociologist Neca Jovanov, that in socialism there were much more "work stoppages", as they said then, than we even suspected, but the communist comrades played a dirty game and knew very well what they were doing. Regardless of the fact that, formally, workers were in power in socialist Yugoslavia, there were strong trade union organizations, and one of the main buildings in Belgrade (to remind you) was called the House of Trade Unions.
The paradox, however, is that it is completely mysterious what the trade unions serve in an order in which the workers are the owners of the means of production, i.e. the employers, but are, at the same time, employees? Why would labor organizations unite workers for trade union struggles - including strikes - against themselves?
According to the jargon of the time, the Communist Party was the vanguard of the working class, which meant that it also belonged to the working class, only that it was the head. Since there were no other parties, it meant that she was also the body. So the unions would be the ones to advise and organize the body against the head, which is absurd. In reality, however, the communist elite ruled, and this story, plus Marxism, served as an opium for the people, and especially as a justification for suppressing even a hint of rebellion.
Bloody struggle for labor rights in the west
During that time in the rotten West, including America, workers fought bloody for their rights for more than a century. Trade union struggles were difficult, dangerous, often hopeless, but new generations of workers continued where previous generations had left off, kept what they had won and expanded the space of freedom. Fighting against cruel exploitation, workers gained awareness of the importance of association. The workers were becoming a political force.
Our workers, however, were given power. They did not conquer it, they never constituted themselves as a class, that is, as a political force. They did not reach freedom. The rest, when we talk about Yugoslavia, and especially about Serbia, are just a mass suitable for nationalist sales of fog, a corrupt multitude suitable for large-scale killing, but, if necessary, also for carrying out unpleasant works.
That is why the trade unions, here, were and remain only a service that deals with the organization of the delivery of flour and pork halves, and not a locomotive of a single composition that grabs the rails of freedom. This is why Serbia is, finally, a profoundly unfree society, without a past and without a future.
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