Summer used to be a break, a time of relaxation when you read good literature and do things that a person, due to obligations during the year, postpones for moments that can be devoted to personal interests. U Serbia It hasn't been like that for a long time. However, climate changes, which will eventually kill the idea of humanity as we know it, have a good side as well, they forced us to shut up, think about what it is we are doing, make a little distance and seek the help of the old masters for some "burning questions of our time". Of course, they do not have the answers, but they warn and give warnings, because, neither geographically nor temporally, our problems are not so specific.
DEPTH OF TRENCHES
In the short work What is Enlightenment, Kant talks about self-inflicted immaturity, the comfortable state of being unable to use one's own reason without the guidance of someone else. This immaturity is self-inflicted because it is not the result of incompetence but the comfort of the state on the one hand and instilled shackles and fears on the other. This writing is essentially not revolutionary, but it is strongly anti-paternalistic, it warns of the dangers of various forms of guardianship, guardianship and tutelage, as well as how difficult it is to get out of that state. The majority of people, in addition to being difficult, consider this step dangerous because the tutors "prevent these peaceful creatures from taking even one step" and "indicate the danger that threatens them if they try to go alone."
Kant was only interested in the public use of reason (mind), the one that happens in front of everyone (in his case the reading public), and not the private one, where guardianship, such as parents, teachers or priests, is in many cases welcome. But the guardianship of the public use of the mind is never justified and permitted neither to the king nor to teachers and priests. Without the free use of the mind in the public, there is no free society, but a comfortable letting ourselves be guided by the Book, rules, formulas, doctors, teachers, priests or various experts, which often turns into uncomfortable and dangerous political leadership.
That is why we watched the spectacle with "moral elation in our hearts" and participated in the growth of rebellion and protests in Serbia in the previous, symbolic, nine months. After a series of less successful attempts and many years of silence, teachers and professors, students, students, military veterans, bikers and many other ordinary and anonymous people across the country raised their voices publicly and rebelled, people who were fed up with the tutelage of an "innocent" government that oppressed them in the name of its profitable vision of the future.
How big everything has become can be seen by comparing it with the first years of the reign of Aleksandar Vučić, when the number of those who publicly oppose the authorities was equal to the number of sect members. One well-known editor of (this) weekly, after the first few years of the government, counted about two hundred criminals on duty who publicly spoke out against the government, while the weekly New economy In 2017, he published a collection with the indicative title "I will not be silent", in which fifty vocal critics of the government were interviewed. During the protests against the construction of Belgrade on the water, in 2015 and 2016, it was an almost impossible mission to find publicly recognizable speakers, although the protesters came out en masse. Only later does this number begin to grow, but nowhere near the number and breadth of those who publicly opposed themselves during blockades and student marches.
Moral exhilaration, after the magnificent and never-larger rally on March 15, also awakened political hope, the smell of victory. The question of the so-called "political articulation" or, in older vocabulary, the question of "what to do?" arose. All of them, for different reasons, rejoiced at the political subjectivization of the student movement and its entry into the political scene. It is not by chance that it awakened the "ghosts and symbols of the past", called on duty actors who were the ladle in every soup, cleaned overgrown trenches and renewed established "victorious" political practices. In the circumstances of multiple, deep and less deep divisions, the movement had to face these challenges, because it is not outside the society in which it emerged. He fell into dug trenches, of which the deepest, but not clearly defined, is only one, the one facing the government. The rest are fluid, but equally combative and uncompromising. In such circumstances, both language and arguments followed the dug trenches.
MORAL HIERARCHY
Perhaps the most dangerous, according to the way it is defined, is the one between the spokesmen of the so-called student list and the so-called party opposition. In this place, "so-called" stands in front of both, because both are imagined abstractions into which everyone loads what they want, although no one has seen them yet. Regardless, we heard that the student list will be "the best list in the history of Serbian parliamentarianism" or that it will be made up of pure and moral professionals without the burden of the past. Unconditional support is expected without public questioning and confirmation of the correctness of the positions, otherwise you will be treated as "enemies of the people", as stated in an appeal to the opposition signed by the citizens. In a better case, you will be accused only of stealing mandates from students who somehow belong to them without election and regardless of the fact that they will not get them because they decided not to be on the list, and that those who want, according to the current interpretation of the RS Constitution, have free mandates. The fight for the custody of public qualifications not only deepens the trenches but introduces insurmountable obstacles, because the difference is not strategic or tactical, but a moral hierarchy is introduced.
As far as the opposition is concerned, as a member of a party, I have never joined the opposition and I do not know how one becomes a member and ceases to be a member of such an entity. There is a history of opposition activities of various parties, various alliances and coalitions, which were also victims of the struggle for control over the use of the opposition or the attempts of guardianship of larger parties over smaller ones. Such attempts and struggles prevent criticism in the name of scheming, dominance and control.
In this case, too, it is not about criticism that can be debated, but about interested positioning that has been exploiting the government for a long time, in which the qualifications and classification of parties depends on the current constellation and interests of the actors. How then to explain the campaign about the "thirteen-year unsuccessful action" of the opposition against the government, and that the only party that existed all that time, the Democratic Party, is excluded from this body and declared the real opposition, although due to its history of division and personnel decisions, all opposition parties suffer different verbal experiences; the latest example is its president until 2018, who was recently appointed ambassador to the United States of America. All others from the opposition, as claimed by those who touch the bottom of this argument, are fighting for seats, salaries and privileges and are not ready to give them up for the sake of regime change.
Kant may have been an optimist regarding the fact that the enlightened and public use of the mind can resolve social and political dilemmas, he did not know about electronic media, social networks (except for churches and associations), about elections, parties, lists, media manipulation techniques, but about the king, etc., but, like Marx, he was aware that a revolution or a change of regime can bring about "the fall of personal despotism and greedy oppression that craves power", but that new prejudices, just like old, they can "serve as a rope on which to lead the crowd". Sacrificing the "public critical power of judgment", i.e. the demand for voluntary renunciation of a free and publicly expressed opinion is neither necessary nor good, unless it is an election campaign that is conducted before we have received a complete answer to the question "what to do?".
WHAT TO DO?
Books and texts with this title were written by the most diverse authors: Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy, Lenin, and later, from the most diverse angles, Altisser, Walzer, Graeber, Badiou and Gaucher, Lefort, Charles Taylor, even one of the founders of the neoliberal movement, Rothbard, writes a secret memorandum with this title, inspired by Lenin's text. Not to mention countless pamphlets by lesser-known or anonymous authors. The most famous and relevant is Lenin's pamphlet, not because of the answers he gives, which caused a lot of polemics within the socialist movement, but because of the way he asks the question, which inspired many other authors. Unlike his predecessors who asked this question as a question of the realization of almost utopian projects and ideas, Lenin understood it as a question of the direction of political action at a given moment, and answered it through questions about the essence and content of political agitation, organizational tasks and building a political organization capable of presenting revolutionary goals. Translated into the Serbian political framework, this would mean answers to the questions of what kind of campaign the actors should lead and how they should organize themselves in order to achieve the goals: calling elections, winning the elections, liberating society from the tutelage and oppression of the ruling regime and starting a new direction of political development, directed towards a fairer and more democratic society.
There is one dominant answer and several different interpretations and variants of this answer. That answer is a single front, but when the question is raised about how to reach a single front and how it should be organized, we get different answers. There are more options on the table.
FIRST OPTION
The most frequently mentioned and the most defended is also the strangest option. It means that the opposition parties give unconditional support and make all their resources available to the student list. The main arguments are that students are currently the most powerful political force and that they are the only ones with a chance of success if a referendum atmosphere were to be created. This list would derive its credibility from the fact that the people on the list were elected by student plenums free from any interests other than the general, which is why it deserves unconditional support. All that needs to be done is to be in readiness and await further instructions on how to form the front, who should guard it and how to fight. The biggest weakness of this strategy is its custodial approach towards other actors, because little or almost nothing is known about this list, except that the students will form it. Not only is it not known who is on the list, it is not known in what format it will go to the elections, how it would function, how the government would be formed and what kind of mandate it would have, what program it would implement, how the "chairs, privileges and resources", as they are now called, would be distributed, or if they would become uncomfortable chairs and unpaid hard work by decree. While waiting for the answers to these questions, it is difficult to make any big decisions and it is impossible to evaluate arguments about independent chances of victory, despite this or that research, because we do not yet know when the elections will be and what complications await us. And many more questions await clearer answers.
SECOND OPTION
Another option is to have more lists, preferably two and at most three, within the same front. In an ideal layout, this strategy might even have a better result than the first one. The problem with it is that it requires agreement and coordination about who does what and who defends which front line, in order to prevent individual free shooters from shooting each other in the back. The current situation is such that we are not close to defining the relationship between the student list and other actors. Another problem that affects both strategies is the proliferation of lists, especially fake ones, whose goal is not to pass the census but to steal a percentage of the votes from each non-regime list. We have seen this in many previous election cycles, and it is difficult to find answers given the practice of the regime abusing the electoral process. It is not difficult to imagine a large number of student, professor, right-wing and left-wing lists whose names will appear on the ballot in order to confuse voters and reduce the possibility of creating a referendum atmosphere.
THIRD OPTION
The third option is a loose front in which everyone would independently defend their part of the front with an unknown number of lists and without strategic agreement. This is an option whose weaknesses do not need to be considered separately and which many are rightly afraid of. This does not mean that, in the absence of any public discussion, she is less realistic than others.
The spokesmen of each option that aspires to success have the obligation to publicly convince other actors of the success of their strategy for the achievement of goals that are considered common. And everyone will decide for themselves how they will act and bear the burden of responsibility for their actions. Everything else is guardianship, guardianship and tutelage, or bringing other actors to face the fait accompli, which is not the most democratic and honest political tactic: it has burdened the relations between different political actors and spoiled them.
But this is not the end either. It is also necessary to win the elections. In the famous book of the British quantum physicist Ken Bray How to score a goal the author deals with soccer tactics and the contribution of science to soccer, especially how goals are scored. In order to score a goal, according to him, two things are crucial, but not sufficient: how to cover the field and how to transfer the ball to the attacking third of the field. This requires the functioning, cooperation and coordination of all lines in the formation, both in terms of controlling the field and controlling the movement of the ball. Developing special tactics and actions must be adapted to the opponent. In this regard, it is easy to spoil and miss the chance. In that case, we will find ourselves, as in the Russian joke, in the position that after the question "what should be done?", we ask the question "who is to blame?".
