Sinful Tottenham and the aporias of the left

If you want to found a left-wing party in Serbia, all you have to do is to use some subtle hypnotic method to persuade the editors. Times - so that they remain convinced that they are actually persuading you - to interview you and push you to the front page, and with some a password that sounds terrible. And then your fifteen minutes of fame are guaranteed, all with appropriate polemics (in a tiny but shrillly loud bubble of ideologically like-minded, but interestingly-practically opposed social networkers) that only raise your price - at least while the market is open. Wasn't that the case with Borko Stefanović? You remember him, that's the leftist who today is everyone's girlfriend at Djilas' or Jeremic's, who would tell the difference. So the new hope and superstar of the party's sloppily organized and barely existing left is Jovo Bakić, a man who in public is always two or three levels more agitated than banal political composure requires, but that's how it is with modern leftists: their fuel is emotions, and so overheated that they are already starting to feel overcooked.

Jokes aside, whatever one thinks about the (un)seriousness of Bakić's short-lived engagements, this occasion once again brought to light what many interpret as a painful and harmful absence of truly left-wing parties, projects and ideas in Serbian society, especially in the so-called . the political scene. Relatively a lot has been said and written about it these days, and the most serious thing was done by Srđan Milošević on Peščanik. One of the points in which the author is perfectly right is that it is too easy (and therefore somewhat cheap) to make fun of the state of the left in Serbia (and the surrounding area), although it should also be taken into account that some of the most visible mother-of-my-leftists they contribute to such a state much more than their imagined or real critics or, far from it, their ideological opponents.

Anyway: if the left is practically absent from the political and public space of Serbia, the real question is: how and why did it happen and how could it be changed? For a long time, so much so that over time it began to imperceptibly turn from lucid and accurate insight into mental laziness, we based this local anomaly on the fact that Serbia was led through the agony of the dark and shameful nineties by the nominal left, while the right-wingers (radicals and other "Chetniks" ) there were only grotesque, unimportant, often pre-hysterical extras, at best adjutants. This resulted in a complete confusion of concepts and values: if the SPS, JUL and various secondary criminal organizations that crawled out from under the rock erected in the early nineties are something "left", then every reasonable and decent person instinctively chooses something "right", so what does it cost . But these, of course, are "not the real left"? Okay, I agree, but the point is not to convince me, I was convinced before...

To make matters worse, the problem with the left, and the fundamental, identity problem, has meanwhile escalated globally, so that it is no longer just our local folklore peculiarity. Look at our surroundings, closer and wider: who are they voting for today despised in the world? For whom does the heart beat with the remnants of the declassified urban proletariat? Mainly for the Orbans, the Kachins, the Trumps, the Johnsons, the Salvinias, the Le Pens... In the end: the wolves... Most of those calculated destroyers of everything that was good in the so-called to liberal democracy they present themselves as outsiders, counter-establishment people, even though the core of their politics is ultra-conservative in a hundred imaginable ways. To this left analytical sentiment he usually reacts with a kitsch statement of screaming patronage: ah, poor people, they are disoriented because they have been left in the lurch by the old left, so they vote for the supposedly anti-systemic right because they are disgusted by the political center... Nice and touching, meguto, only as long as we abstract the enormous significance that in political orientations have a set of cultural-identity values ​​to which the individual adheres. And what are those that the noticeable and sensitive majority hold, not only in these regions, and across all verticals and horizontals of society, from educational to class-material? Such that a typical "contemporary leftist" would get dizzy from them and start to vomit...

So, what does this gap look like in immediate practice, and on this ground? The serious and responsible left is deeply anti-nationalist - with all the sometimes radical consequences of that attitude, such as "they would recognize Kosovo" or "they say the Serbs committed genocide" - but all the parties that advocated such a policy failed miserably in the elections, and it the little popularity and votes they gained were mostly with the more intellectual part of the middle class; likewise, that left, they say, should be consistently anti-capitalist, however, anti-capitalism is a completely marginal and extremely unattractive doctrine here, and perhaps even especially among supposedly natural subscribers of the left: as far as they are concerned, capitalism is OK if I have a lot money, and it's not if I don't have it, but even then I don't intend to fool around with the proletarian revolution, but I'm hoping for a win in the betting, if Tottenham doesn't screw up again. And if the left, crushed by the impressive lack of not only support but even basic curiosity for its program, gives up on revolutionary goals, then it will be accused of not being the left anymore, and here we are in a vicious circle. And this is just the beginning of the doubts. It will continue, sometime.