Democracy? In Serbia?
Despite my bohawk roots – Dedek, I’ve never paid great interest to Eastern Europe. Yet today, something very interesting is happening in Serbia. A quite extraordinary democratic experiment is being undertaken in a place you’d have to go back maybe thousands of years to find much real experience with democracy. Which goes to show, democracy, if put in motion and insisted upon, is as natural to the human condition as breathing.
I have to thank Ames for making me aware of this. He did a good show on how Serbia got to where it’s at today and sent me a couple of articles explaining what’s going on. One is titled, Serbia’s Student Plenums: A Blueprint for Renewing Democracy and the second, both worth reading.
The first article states,
“The movement has also provided a blueprint for renewal of that society – discussion and decision-making sessions known as ‘plenums’, held inside faculty buildings that the students have occupied.”
“The rules are simple: every student of the faculty has the right to participate, put forward a proposal, take part in discussions, and vote. A decision is passed by a majority vote of those present, usually after many plenary sessions. All important decisions are made in plenums, including on strategy going forward.”
The author adds,
“Plenums have become popular across Serbian society – among schoolteachers, parents of schoolchildren, public libraries, university professors, and local communities. Everyone has been encouraged by students to exercise direct democracy, either through zborovi in front of a city hall or through an informal Viber group.”
Exciting stuff. She then contemplates,
“In the revisited student conceptualisation, it is unclear whether plenums are a corrective to representative democracy or a revolutionary method to build a society of direct democracy; it seems that recent divisions in the student movement are related to the role of direct democracy in their fight.”
So, let’s make no mistake here, I wouldn’t use the word revolutionary, too unhelpfully romantic, but evolutionary, in a much more beautiful, realistic sense. If we are to revive, reform, and evolve democracy in the 21st century, creating participatory associations, processes, and institutions is essential.
The ruling Serbian knucklehead, Vucic, has come out against the plenums calling them “obsolete and Bolshevik.” Which is funny. The plenums are only obsolete in the sense democracy is obsolete and that’s not the case. Democracy isn’t obsolete, it’s been crushed or discarded. Even better is Vucic using Bolshevik shaming, which in Eastern Europe conjures up ever fading memories of national subjugation.
In regards to participatory democratic politics, the Bolsheviks were perpetrators of one of the greatest bait and switches in history. Against all the various revolutionary theories of the day, most especially Marxism, the Russian Revolution came out of nowhere. The great organizational structures of the revolution weren’t parties as modeled in decades of previous volumes of revolutionary doctrine, but the spontaneous generation of the soviets.
In Russian, soviet is simply defined as meeting. In 1917, these meetings, participatory councils, sprang up across Russia. The citizenry sought to take power into their own hands. Lenin, no political idiot, realized the power of the soviets when the Germans shipped him back to Russia after the February Revolution. Lenin led the Bolsheviks to infiltrate and manipulate the soviets, exemplified by the slogan, “All Power to the Soviets!”
Upon gaining power in October, the Bolsheviks immediately disenfranchised the bottom-up soviets, in their place came the centralized top-down control of the Communist party. So, whatever the current leader of Serbia’s claim against plenums, there’s nothing Bolshevik about them, except if they became impotent Potemkin institutions.
The article states the plenums are popular because, “Serbia’s ruling party has taken control of every institution in Serbia, at the national and the local level, from the parliament to student assemblies, school boards and professional associations. As such, these institutions have lost their legitimacy.”
In Serbia it’s illegitimacy through one party, in America it’s two.
Unfortunately, the author concludes the participatory plenums are only a method to “return to regular parliamentary democracy.” She doesn't explain and I won’t speculate to her reasons why. I'll just offer a disappointing sigh, adding she couldn’t be more wrong.
Hannah Arendt astutely recorded how such spontaneous citizen organization appeared at the founding of the US, the French Revolution, post WWI Germany, and as noted above in the Russian Revolution. Historian of American democracy, Lawrence Goodwyn, in his essential work Democratic Promise, showed how such participatory councils comprised the organizational strength of the great agrarian Populist revolt at the end of the 19th century. In another work, he documented their appearance in the Polish Solidarność movement a century later. While in two excellent histories, Many Minds, One Heart and I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, authors Hogan and Payne, respectively, show how essential such organization was to the American Civil Rights Movement.
In On Revolution, Arendt directly addresses the concerns of the Serbian author in regards to the plenums future. She notes,
“…with an utmost weird precision those councils, soviets and rate (Germany) were to make their appearance in every genuine revolution throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each time they appeared, they sprang up as the spontaneous organs of the people, not only outside of all revolutionary parties but entirely unexpected by them and their leaders. Like Jefferson's proposals, they were utterly neglected by statesmen, historians, political theorists, and, most importantly, by the revolutionary tradition itself. Even those historians whose sympathies were clearly on the side of revolution and who could not help writing the emergence of popular councils into the record of their story regarded them as nothing more than essentially temporary organs in the revolutionary struggle for liberation; that is to say, they failed to understand to what an extent the council system confronted them with an entirely new form of government, with a new public space for freedom which was constituted and organized during the course of the revolution itself.”
In mentioning Jefferson, Arendt is referring to his post-presidency idea of “ward republics,” participatory councils he considered the necessary next step in insuring democracy in America, which of course never happened, and yes, as a result, democracy in America withered.
Not surprisingly, if we look across the planet, every system of government based on modern republicanism that entered the world with the founding of the United States is failing. Whether in the Americas, Europe, Asia, or Africa, governments increasingly fail to address the concerns and challenges of the day. Yet, all talk remains simply about tweaking this and that or promoting the delusion of getting the right person in the right place to get things working. Any understanding of growing systemic failure is ignored by all parties, here party is defined literally.
It is in evolving democracy where the solutions lie. We need to think about and act on creating participatory structures, distributedly networked, while reviving the classical role of the citizen. The two and half century old agrarian system of representative republics never well served democracy in the industrial era. They become ever more archaic in this burgeoning quantum information era. Meeting together, face to face, is the most radical politics of our time, thus it's always been. All power to the soviets, this time for real.
