Critique

Journal of Socialist Theory

ISSN: 0301-7605 (Print) 1748-8605 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcso20

The Rift in the Praxis Group: Between Nationalism

and Liberalism

Mira Bogdanović

To cite this article: Mira Bogdanović (2015) The Rift in the Praxis Group: Between Nationalism
and Liberalism, Critique, 43:3-4, 461-483, DOI: 10.1080/03017605.2015.1099850

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03017605.2015.1099850

Published online: 04 Jan 2016.

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 Critique, 2015
Vol. 43, Nos. 3–4, 461–483, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03017605.2015.1099850

The Rift in the Praxis Group: Between

Nationalism and Liberalism
Mira Bogdanović
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During the Cold War the praxis school of critical Marxism had been a showcase of
Yugoslav anti-dogmatic alternative to the Soviet Marxism. In the process of
disintegration of Yugoslavia, the Serbian praxis scholars turned into nationalists and/
or liberals. Both renounced their Marxist and communist past. The latter see in the
classical liberalism the historical left. In accordance with the new ideological position
they engage in historical revisionism denying modernization achievements of socialism.

Keywords: Praxis Marxists; Liberal Converts; Left and Right

Transition to political pluralism and market economy has led in Serbia (and elsewhere
in the region) to widespread conversion in the intellectual caste. The choice was
between (neo)liberalism and/or nationalism. Ex-Marxists and communists had prac-
tically overnight turned coats and offered their services to the new establishment.
Moreover, they also substantially contributed to its installation by paving ideological
ground for the radical change and subsequently to its stabilization and maintenance by
rampant historical revisionism. The question inevitably arises whether their previous
and present political and ideological profiles were nothing but conformist and oppor-
tunist adjustment to the ever-current status quo. In the present article I shall scrutinize
the division within the Belgrade group and the later career of the once outstanding
members of the well-known praxis school of critical Marxism.
The break with Stalin in 1948 had in Yugoslavia far-reaching consequences in many
fields. An attempt was made to abandon the Soviet model of economy in substituting
centralism by decentralized self-management and introducing the self-management
model in all speheres of society. However, what concerns us here is the change in
the underlying philosophical paradigm. In order to part with the received scholastic
Marxism–Leninism, Yugoslav ideologues, a post-Second World War generation of
communist intelligentsia, active (age permitting) in the communist partisan resistance
1941–1945, went back to the source of the doctrine. They re-discovered previously
neglected early works of Marx from 1844. The focal point of economic–philosophical

© 2016 Critique
 462 M. Bogdanović
manuscipts was the theory of alienation. Much attention was given to re-establishing
continuity between the ‘young’ and ‘mature’ Marx denied by the Soviet dogmatists,
and to strongly affirm the humanist character of Marxism. Philosophers of this orien-
tation, concentrated primarily in Zagreb and Belgrade, found a common ground in the
journal Praxis founded in Zagreb in 1964. The journal was thus dubbed after the
central concept they dicovered in Marx and Gramsci’s cryptic name for the philosophy
of Marxism to mislead the prison authorities. The same year they started Korčula
Summer School (an island in the Adriatic), which attracted notable contemporary phi-
losophers of various orientations from East and West, among others Ernest Mandel,
Karel Kosík, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, Henri Lefevbre and Thomas
Bottomore. The critical method praxis adopted from Marxism not only was directed
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against Soviet Marxism and Western capitalism, but was also applied in the analysis
of their own society. This stance brought praxis members into conflict with
their own Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Mutual irritations had lasted for years
and led in 1974 to termination in a neo-Stalinist crackdown of both the journal and
the School.
The Belgrade section consisted of eight scholars, purged from the Party in 1968 in
the wake of student upheavals and suspended from the University of Belgrade in
1975.1 For years they contested the Party’s ruling and challenged it at the highest Com-
munist Party levels, professing their allegiance to Marxism and communism.2 In 1981
the Party found a solution in setting up especially for them the Institute for Philosophy
and Social Theory as a part of Belgrade University.
When Yugoslavia started to disintegrate in the 1990s on the wave of natonalist
mobilization, the Belgrade Eight went through a dramatic development: Mihailo Mar-
ković (1923–2010) and Ljubomir Tadić (1925–2013)—with less prominent backing
from Svetozar Stojanović (1931–2010) and Trivo Inđić (1938)—ended as Serbian
nationalists; Zagorka (Zaga) Golubović (1930), Miladin Životić (1930–1997), Drago-
ljub Mićunović (1930) and Nebojša Popov (1938) chose the side of anti-Milošević
camp and took on an anti-communist liberal option. Mićunović was co-founder of
the Democratic Party (1990)—a formation simultaneously (neo)liberal, clerical,
nationalist and social-democrat, whose leader was Zoran Đinđić (1952–2003). Miću-
nović, by now octogenarian, still sits in the Serbian parliament for one of numerous
splinters of the Democratic Party (DP). Vesna Pešić (1940), one of the characters in
this account, became a coopted member of the Institute for Philosophy and Social
Theory staff. Later, when the war in ex-Yugoslavia started, she became a distinguished
anti-war activist and through her anti-nationalist Civic Alliance, a prominent advocate

1
They were never fired, kept their status of full professor ‘and received salaries all the time at the level of 1975,
without salary raise other staff members received’. Mihailo Marković, Juriš na nebo, Knjiga druga (Beograd: Pros-
veta, 2009), p. 166.
2
Nebojša Popov, Contra fatum: slučaj grupe profesora Filozofskog fakulteta u Beogradu (Beograd: Mladost,
1989).
 Critique 463

of liberalism. She sat in parliament for the most extreme neo-liberal party, the Liberal
Democratic Party, a splinter from DS. The Zagreb praxis section proved resistant to
the charms of nationalism and liberalism.

The Curse of Milošević’s Rule

Slobodan Milošević (1941–2006) came to power in September 1987 in a party putsch.
A more or less anonymous apparatchik gained unprecedented power and an appeal
that few could resist. His initial success formula was to make political profit from
the plight of Serbs in Kosovo. Then he skillfully fused the old (socialist/communist)
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heritage, and the new—nationalist mobilization. In this way he could raise a broad fol-
lowing: on the one hand the nationalist anti-communist intelligentsia in the Serbian
Academy of Sciences and Arts, prominent nationalist writers, the top of the Serbian
Orthodox Church, and the mass of clients of really existing socialism, soon to be tran-
sition losers, on the other hand.
While the regimes in Eastern Europe were collapsing, Milošević was getting stronger.
Those praxis (nominal?) Marxists who did not support Milošević and could not identify
with nationalism, saw socialist regimes dissolving before their eyes. They identified
‘communism’ and nationalism seated in one person, Slobodan Milošević, searched for
another ideological anchor and found it in liberalism. Their slogan was Modernization.
It was at first sight stripped of ideological connotation and identified with liberal democ-
racy: political pluralism, human rights and market economy. Nobody was talking about
capitalism. The backdrop was the theory of totalitarianism: nationalism and commun-
ism (fascism) are the same, the natural development to Modernity was violently arrested
by communist takeover in 1945 and Milošević, a communist, was arresting it again.
Since fascism is rightist, liberalism is on the left. The corollary of this reasoning is
that the Communist Party was not a modernizing force. This simplistic view still com-
mands mainstream political thought and action in Serbia.
Before returning to extensive presentation of praxis liberals’ views, I shall present
the position of Mihailo Marković, the most prominent Serbian praxis philosopher.
To general shocked surprise he chose the Milošević camp. After having been out of
politics for 25 years and teaching abroad, he became Milošević’s ideologue, party offi-
cial and activist. The year 1990, when he became deeply involved in politics, is accord-
ing to him the golden age of socialism in Serbia.3
Marković’s reminiscences elucidate the split within praxis and his unfortunate
choice. In 1990 the wave of party pluralism reached Serbia. All new parties came
forward with anti-communist programs, some nationalist-traditionalist, bent on
restoring the historic past of Serbia, like the Democratic Party (1990) with its
program of restoring past Serbian pre-communist democratic tradition and connect-
ing it to new European developments: political party pluralism, rule of law, human

3
Marković, Juriš na nebo, op. cit., p. 272.
 464 M. Bogdanović
rights and market economy. Milošević had to answer these challenges and ’modernize’
too. He simply took over the infrastructure of the existing Communist Party and its
front organization, Socialist Alliance, re-named it Serbian Socialist Party (SPS) and
recruited Mihailo Marković to write a new party’s program.
Why did Marković, a gentle sophisticated spirit, fall prey to vulgar stereotypes, mix
with careerist upstarts and third-rate bureaucrats, accept the challenge and approve of,
even ask for, belligerent policy even after it had been abandoned by its instigators?
The answer is nationalism. He was mysteriously urged to answer a (to me personally
inconceivable) call of nature, in this case his previously ignored ethnic identity. He was
overwhelmed by the tragic destiny of his nation and saw parallels between Turkish
conquest in the Balkans, the demise of the Serbian medieval state and, as it was
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called in Serbia, the New World Order emerging after the debacle of really existing
socialism. He joined in the chorus of nationalist propagandists who at that time ideal-
ized Serbs as being before the Turkish rule ’superior in material and cultural sense to
many present-day developed nations.’4
In his memoir Marković praises the SPS because it distanced itself from the mono-
polistic communist power, from the Yugoslavia created in the Second World War,
from repression directed against creative intelligentsia, and from the ‘bourgeois ideol-
ogy’ of cosmopolitanism. ‘Nowadays we call it “mondialism” and we have a critical
attitude to it. He who does not love his nation, is not capable of loving anybody.’5
Apparently Golubović did not share Marković’s love and was stigmatized by him as
‘interationalist’. ‘The other members of the group made a certain shift as time went
by … Since other nations [in Yugoslavia] were abandoning the Yugoslav idea and
the country [Serbia] was more and more threatened, evolution towards a more sensi-
ble and justified leftist patriotic position was natural. Zaga [Golubović] called that
“national-socialism”. Estrangement was inevitable.’6 Marković does not hide his dis-
appointment with his former ‘dearest comrades’.7 ‘It seemed to me that they all
were truly steadfast leftists from early youth if not from childhood on, even from
the house where they were born—that played an important role in their future
life.’8 But it was not so. In hindsight Marković reveals that the endurance and cohesion
of praxis in the face of ideological persecution was not based on deeply rooted
common ideas. Rather it was a common front against common enemy. ‘Most
members of Belgrade praxis group ended up in the Democratic Party which had an
explicit program of accelerated and forced privatization and transition from socialism
to liberal capitalism—thus, a program that was in stark contradiction to any possible
interpretation of Marxism.’9 While he sided with the Milošević regime in an effort to
save socialism, they cared more for their dissident image, their status of regime

4
Ibid., p. 246.
5
Ibid., p. 306. Italics M.B.
6
Ibid., p. 50.
7
Ibid., p. 271.
8
Ibid., p. 48.
9
Ibid., pp. 233, 234.
 Critique 465

enemies, and joined the side of the enemies of socialism.10 Apparently, for Marković
nationalism was compatible with Marxism. He identified himself with ‘my Serbian
people that was struck by the Yugoslav tragedy more than anybody else’.11 Marković
is what Hungarian–Serbian novelist László Végel recently in general terms and
another context aptly called an ‘ethnic communist’.12
According to Marković the SPS program contained ‘a clear patriotic platform con-
cerning the parts of Serbian nation living out of Serbia’.13 Thanks to Milošević, Mar-
ković writes, ‘the socialist ideology took a very popular patriotic direction’ owing to
external pressures and civil war in the republics of the former Yugoslavia.14 On
closer inspection, however, Marković’s patriotism does not differ from the chauvinist
propaganda in written and electronic media at that time, denigrating other nations
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because they did not comply with Serb interests. His gall is directed primarily
against Croats, Slovenes and Albanians. ‘The chief components of [Croatian] resent-
ment have been envy and Serbophobia towards a more numerous and more successful
Serb nation whose dominant role in Yugoslavia Croats could not bear.’15 Croats are
collectively labeled as ustaše, a fascist movement that took power in 1941 under the
protection of the Italian and German occupation power. He refers to Albanians as
Šiptari, a soubriquet Albanians hate. On a visit to Israel he tacitly approves of
dubious statements on Albanians made by an Isreaeli colleague to the effect that
nobody knows where the Albanians came from to Kosovo.16And Kosovo is sacred
Serbian soil. In addition, he takes conspiracy theories for granted since they ‘corrobo-
rate’ widely held belief about Serbs being victims of Germany, Austria, the Vatican,
Free Masons and Tito.17 The communist slogan of ‘brotherhood and unity’, launched
during the fratricidal war of 1941–1945, was reduced by Marković to a new substance:
ethnic brotherhood and unity of Serbs only.
Quite in a style with his patriotism, Marković is very worried about the numerical
status of his nation. The birth rate among Serbs has been decreasing and the number of
Albanians and Muslims in Serbia is growing. In order to bring national goals to fulfill-
ment it is necessary to take appropriate measures and encourage Serbian women, bent
on hedonism and comfort without children, to produce more offspring, taking simul-
taneous official steps to check alien propagation. The chief motive for this drive is the

10
Ibid., p. 271.
11
Ibid., p. 95.
12
Sve češće zatičem sebe na ničijoj zemlji, www.danas.rs/dodaci/nedelja.26.html
13
Marković, Juriš na nebo, op. cit., p. 361.
14
Ibid., p. 443.
15
Ibid., p. 318.
16
Ibid., p. 110. In the time of heaviest nationalist mobilization, Ljubomir Tadić was a co-founder of the
Society of Serb and Jewish friendship, recruiting several prominent Jews in Serbia in an effort to covince the
world that Jews and Serbs have both been victims of holocaust: Jews in Germany and Serbs in Croatia.
17
Defamation of Tito is based on dubious publications that cannot stand the test of serious historiography
that started appearing at that time and still do. Marković again underlines Tito’s (a Croat) alleged anti-Serb
bias. Marković, Juriš na nebo, op. cit., pp. 123–141.
 466 M. Bogdanović
need to strengthen Serbian defense capacity. Sisters suddenly emerge in a world that
seemed populated by brothers, male warriors, alone.18
Marković was drawn into Milošević’s embrace owing to the populist mixture of
leftist and ‘patriotic’ policies that Golubović ungraciously called national-socialism.
It seems, though, that the ‘patriotic’ part played a more important role. Marković
was active in politics on behalf of Milošević from 1989 until 1995. He was kicked
out of the SPS while in Greece, in November 1995, during a 10 minute session of
the SPS heads in Belgrade presided over by Milošević. The reason for his dismissal
Marković saw as being the critique he voiced in August 1995 against SPS policies.
Two principal points of disagreemenent deserve mention. The first one concerns Milo-
šević’s socialism. ‘This incredible symbiosis of alleged leftist ideas and the practice of
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predatory, corrupt early capitalism penetrated all institutions and pores of society
including the family of Milošević himself.’19 It took Marković five years to see it. He
dates back the degeneration of Milošević’s socialism to 1995–2000, after he was
purged from the SPS, while all that urged him to criticize Milošević had accumulated
before 1995. It was evident to everybody, except Marković: he was blinded by his
nationalism and love for his ‘brothers’. Yet Marković keeps an ambivalent attitude
towards Milošević and remains full of understanding for the collusion of state and
mafia that was ‘imposed’ on Serbia by international embargo. The ends, the defense
of ‘brothers’ in Bosnia and Croatia, justified the means. Marković seems surprised
that these illicit dealings (smuggling of strategic goods needed to lubricate the war
machine under international boycot) have of necessity created a class of new rich
that he abhors. Moreover, Marković shifts the blame to Milošević’s wife: she had
her own political party JUL [Jugoslovenska udružena levica, Yugoslav united left], con-
sisting of tycoons, without representation in parliament but with cabinet ministers.
‘One cannot deny that Milošević was sincerely on the left, a socialist, even a commu-
nist from early youth on. But he did not feel an instinctive repulsion from corruption.
His wife convinced him that one could simultaneously be both rich and on the left.
Even worse, he decided to turn war profiteers into his allies. … These new rich who
naturally have to be class enemies of any form of organized left, had to be turned
into allies.’20 They should have been expropriated and/or progressively taxed
instead.21 But still they had been indispensable.
The second, and I believe the crucial, point of critique concerned Milošević’s war
policy, or in Marković’s words, Milošević’s attitude towards ‘brothers’ in Bosnia and
Croatia. In the summer of 1994 Milošević was forced by the international community
to boycot secessionist Serbs in Bosnia in order to clear the road for the Dayton peace
agreement in 1995. In May 1995 the Croatian army stormed the secessionist ‘Serb

18
Mihailo Marković, ’Načela srpske nacionalne politike’ in Vasilije Krestić (ed.) Srpsko pitanje danas: Drugi
kongres srpskih intelektualaca, Beograd, 22–23 April 1994 (Beograd: Srpski sabor, 1995), pp. 86–92.
19
Marković, Juriš na nebo, op. cit., p. 347.
20
Ibid., p. 286.
21
Ibid., p. 346.
 Critique 467

Republic of Western Slavonia’ and in August the secessionist ‘Republic of Serb

Krajina’. Only then did Marković start critcizing Milošević on account of his
leaving ‘brothers’ to their own resources. Marković persisted in his nationalist
views, condemning abandonment of Bosnian Serbs and armed defense of Croatian
Serbs, which would in plain text mean continuation of the war.22
We should not have permitted our brothers to become helpless minorities exposed
to persecution, revenge and genocide. We have consequently supported the idea of
peace, but also of equality, providing moral, political and material assistance to
threatened parts of the Serb people. We have forgotten about that last year
[1994]. We now talk of peace only. … That is in conflict with our program. Our
program of course stands by peace as one of our foremost lasting values. But it
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also maintains that peace for socialists is not an absolute, unconditional value.
Other fundamental human values such as freedom, social justice or equality of
nations cannot be sacrificed for peace. That is the difference between socialists
and pacifists.23
Nevertheless, Marković does not give up separatism, hoping for future unification of
diaspora Serbs with Serbia, their motherland.24
The end of the Milošević regime was spelled out after the defeat in Kosovo and bom-
bardment of Serbia by NATO forces in 1999. On 5 October 2000 the opposition took
over. The road to Modernization was open for the other, liberal, praxis wing. Marković
talked in 2010 about the results of the Serbian October revolution:
What happened on 5 October 2000 was not a glittering democratic revolution but a
violent counterrevolution, which undoubtedly opened Serbia’s road to European
and Atlantic integration with all good and bad consequences of it. But it also
threw Serbia six decades back into weak, greatly stagnant liberal capitalism of
pre-World War II society. It was also a road to unprecedented plunder of wealth
of the nation created in the course of past six decades of accelerated very
dynamic development. And finally, it was the first step in the process of losing
national sovereignty and in becoming a protectorate of neocolonial global powers.25
Who can disagree with him on this point?

Does the Left Exist in Serbia?

Milošević’s regime has compromised the left heritage in Serbia. It has also left its trace
in political science: Neven Cvetićanin writes that the division of left and right does not
apply any longer and belongs to 19th and 20th century.26 However, according to
Steven Lukes ‘the claim that the left–right opposition has had its day is neither new

22
Ibid., pp. 302–306.
23
Ibid., p. 305.
24
Ibid., p. 338.
25
Ibid., p. 446.
26
Neven Cvetićanin, ’Kritika ideološkog puritanstva—dekonstrukcija pojmova levice i desnice’ in Mirjana
Rašević and Zorica Mršević (eds) Pomeramo granice 50 godina (Beograd: Institut društvenih nauka, 2007),
pp. 153–170.
 468 M. Bogdanović
nor politically neutral. It has been made repeatedly in the course of the century in
various quarters and typically with political intent.’27 In Serbia left–right opposition
has undergone a peculiar interpretation whose protagonists are the former anti-
nationalist praxis philosophers, now liberal converts.
Nebojša Popov published in Republika28 an essay entitled ‘Does the left exist in
Serbia?’ The next issue of Republika29 carried a report from the panel in the Media
Center for a miniscule audience under the title ‘Does the left in Serbia exist at
all?’30 The audience was presumably so scarce because neither do liberals trust
Popov’s liberalism, nor the marginal leftists his leftism. Liberals already have what
they need, only expecting further gains, and the left does not need what Popov has
to offer. Popov, Golubović and Pešić share now a more or less explicit and systemati-
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cally developed view that the left has always been (original) liberalism.
Zaga Golubović has been persistently defending this vision burdened with many
contradictions and general confusion for a number of years. In her prime an ardent
communist, born into a communist nest, she now de-legitimizes from human-
rights-private-property-perspective socialism, the most important form of the
historical left (with all its faults), and promotes original liberalism as the only
genuine historical left. She negates the leftist character of socialism and even attributes
to liberalism achievements of socialism in, as she puts it, ‘the social sphere’. Her
implicit point of departure is the theory of totalitarianism. I have extensively analyzed
her views in another publication.31 Her historical revisionism leads her to nostalgia for
the pre-communist regime, typical of the new power holders and their intellectual
advocates. Her anti-communist vision logically ends in giving equal status to the com-
munist resistance in the Second World War and the anti-communist collaborationist
chetniks.32
In her contribution to the panel on Popov’s views, Golubović wisely avoided follow-
ing the historical path of the left, either because she does not know much about it, or
because it would ruin her construction of the past. At first sight Nebojša Popov starts
off in that direction, only to give up as soon as he starts. Instead, he follows the his-
torical path of Liberty, in fact of Serbian liberalism, the historical left as he sees it.

27
Steven Lukes, fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/244/cup.pdf, p. 2.
28
Republika, Br. 564–565, Beograd, godina XXVI (2014) (hereafter R1).
29
Republika, Br. 566–567 (hereafter R2).
30
This part of the article is a full and improved version translated into English of my essay published in
Republika, 582–585, a monthly journal founded by Nebojša Popov (now retired editor-in-chief), as a
comment on Popov’s essay published in his home journal, and a panel dedicated to his views held in Belgrade
Media Center on 10 January 2014. Pešić and Golubović, together with the author, elucidated on that occasion
his approach to the subject matter—history and present state of the left in Serbia. My article was crippled
before publication, extensively censored by the present editor-in-chief. Presumably it was a tribute to Popov
and his close allies Zaga Golubović, Vesna Pešić and other figures in the same orbit, who also appear in my
article. One-time fervent fighters against Stalinist censorship when they were victims employ now the same
methods when someone dares to criticize them.
31
Mira Bogdanović, Konstante konvertitstva—Hod u mjestu: Od Đilasa do Đilasa (Beograd: Centar za liber-
terske studije, 2013), pp. 177–190.
32
Zagorka Golubović, Moji horizonti: mislim, delam, postojim (Beograd: Žene u crnom, 2013), p. 213.
 Critique 469

I believe that there are enough elements that enable us to speak of the left, in spite of
the vagueness of the concept in the academic sense of the word. The most important
question for me is not who considers him to be on the left and presents himself as
leftist, but how he participates in the solution of some essential problems in a longer
span of time, to be precise, of two centuries that Serbia exists in modern times.33
Alleged ‘vagueness of the concept in the academic sense of the word’ allows him to
comfortably neglect anti-capitalism in various nuances regarding closer or more
distant targets and means in superseding capitalism or ameliorating its less agreeable
aspects as the essential trait of the left. Simultaneously Popov becomes his own victim
owing to his subjective-arbitrary-authoritarian interpretation of the left, a logical con-
sequence of his confused criteria. So, like in the case of Zaga Golubović, liberalism
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alone belongs to the left. Is Nebojša Popov himself on the left? In any case he has
always been in the vanguard: once of the working class, now of the capitalist one.
The whole period [two centuries, M.B.] runs in seeking a formula for the establish-
ment of a minimum normal state and normal society, different from that which one
understands as populus and what the populists mainly use as a concept that encom-
passes members of the ethnic community—ancestors, those now living and off-
spring—experiencing this community as a warm lap in which there is place for
all those who have a sense of belonging to the populus; there has been no affirmation
of the normal state of modern age, meaning the constitutional democracy.34
‘Normal state and normal society’, ‘constitutional democracy’ are not safeguards
against populism. Take for example The Netherlands, a country that meets Popov’s
idealized strict criteria in full, where both left and right populism (thoroughly compa-
tible with liberalism) happily co-exist and flourish. Moreover, this once backwater
country had also passed through a long and laborious process of modernization.35
This example alone demonstrates a complete absence of international comparative
perspective, which is typical of the works and views that will be considered in this
article. Both authors and readers lack an adequate orientation in the political and his-
torical context.
Popov writes that the formation of a modern state ‘in the elementary sense’ has not
been completed in Serbia until the present day.
Therefore one could say that like in every other such case when an immature min-
ority are at work, adolescence reigns, so that we can say that in all these periods ado-
lescence was in power. Figuratively one could speak of permanent circulation of a
very loud, dynamic and aggressive population, that we do not lack, which is
usually referred to as juveniles. Thus, we are under permanent pressure of that
what is colloquially called a teenage crowd.36

33
R2, p. 6.
34
R2, p. 6.
35
Mira Bogdanović, ‘Dopis sa izvorišta: uspon i propast konsocijacije u Nizozemskoj’, STATUS- magazin za
političku kulturu i društvena pitanja, broj 15, proljeće 2011, Mostar, 60–70. www.status.ba
36
R2, p. 6.
 470 M. Bogdanović
Zaga Golubović shares Popov’s arrogance regarding the citizens of Serbia. Actually
about the people, since she ironically puts citizens in inverted commas. Departing
from a misconceived theory of personality developed by Sigmund Freud, she sees in
the superego, as an external physical agency (equal with the Leader, the Party and,
of course, parents),37 the main culprit for the alleged frustrated modernization of
the Serbian society during the two past centuries. She psychologizes a complex multi-
faceted problem and the solution she suggests is education aimed at a complete, non-
authoritarian personality, (without superego?), capable of critical appreciation of
choice and of personal development. Yet who is going to educate the educators?
Golubović also neglects the fact that the first studies on the authoritarian personality
came from democratic and liberal states. Ivan Šiber writes: ‘The most frequently
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quoted work in social science is The Authoritarian Personality. On the problem of

authoritarianism over 2,000 works were published until 1990. Yet there is until now
no conclusive evidence on the [causal, M.B.] relation of authoritarianism as a personal
trait and functioning of democracy.’38 It seems that Golubović herself does not know
what to begin within this overblown mono-causal explanation and, without noticing
that she contradicts herself, she cites a rebellious character as one of the important
traits of the Serbian nation!39 If anything is anti-authoritarian, then it is rebellion.
Both Popov and Golubović uncritically idealize ‘original’ liberalism, forgetting that
the original liberals in the 19th and 20th centuries were against giving the right to vote
to the destitute adolescents. The scornful attitude of our ‘original’ liberals to the impo-
verished and dis-empowered majority leaves the question open as to who is supposed
to carry out the fundamental reforms: the elite has also been lacking the necessary
qualities apparently for two centuries now. Or are the ‘original’ liberals those
capable of doing it now?
Next to the neglect of comparative perspective, views such as these also completely
abstain from historical sociological and political analysis of social forces and their
inter-relations in the context of socio-political conflicts and struggles. Therefore
such views belong in the sphere of magic and religion, even more so since the
central point they share, as Zlatko Paković observes, is the taboo of private property.40
Popov sheds his ambivalent light on the glory of liberal heritage and fortunately
does not omit to mention its practical opportunism and tragic blunders.

37
Zagorka Golubović, ‘Autoritarno nasleđe i prepreke za razvoj civilnog društva i demokratske političke
kulture’ in Između autoritarizma i demokratije, Srbija, Crna Gora, Hrvatska, Knjiga II, Civilno društvo i politička
kultura, urednici Dragica Vujadinović, Lino Veljak, Vladimir Goati, Veselin Pavćević, CEDET (Beograd: CEDEM,
Podgorica, CTCSR, Zagreb, Izdavač CEDET, 2004), pp. 233–246, at p. 245.
38
Ivan Šiber, ‘Politička kultura, autoritarnost i demokratska tranzicija u Hrvatskoj’ in Između autoritarizma i
demokratije, Srbija, Crna Gora, Hrvatska, Knjiga II, Civilno društvo i politička kultura, urednici Dragica Vujadi-
nović, Lino Veljak, Vladimir Goati, Veselin Pavićević, CEDET (Beograd: CEDEM, Podgorica, CTCSR, Zagreb,
Izdavač CEDET, 2004), pp. 247–261, at p. 258.
39
R2, p. 7.
40
Zlatko Paković, Danas, 15 August 2014.
 Critique 471

‘The founding fathers’ of modern age constitutions, leaning on religious beliefs and
liberal principles, had tried to found them on firm convictions regarding natural
rights of men to freedom and equality, security of personal property and pursuit
of happiness. Upon these foundations of constitutional democracy … as is well
known, there have been many sediments of concrete events which call them into
question, even brutally negate them: let us only mention wars, colonization,
slavery, genocide, ruthless exploitation of man and nature, but it cannot be
denied that they are after all part of the history of modern age. These ideas and prin-
ciples have survived the cruelty of Fascim, Nazism and Stalinism, and even now, in
the chaos of forced globalism, they appear as regulative ideas in seeking an alterna-
tive to this state of chaos.41
The same holds for the socialist ideas and ideals carried out in practice, but Popov
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chooses liberalism in spite of all, without asking himself where it can possibly lead
again. He even mentions totalitarianism of the neo-liberal turn. So, we now got
three of them: the left one (communism), the right one (fascism) and the libertarian
one (neo-liberalism). However, the ‘original’ liberalism can also be authoritarian, as
I shall try to demonstrate by the example of historical Serbian liberalism, re-vitaliza-
tion of which should save Serbia from disaster, and whose historical failure should
explain the miserable situation in which Serbia now withers.
Protagonists of ‘wild capitalism’ are now creating an order that sharply differs from
classical capitalism, by absolutizing private property and market, which is quite
favourable for some kind of totalitarianism. Even if we could believe in the possi-
bility of miracles, the prospects that the miracle will indeed occur are nil. One of
the greatest wonders would be that ‘wild capitalism’ could renew the whole of capit-
alism and liberate it from ever deeper crises.42
Even ‘tame’ capitalism could not do it. Popov regrets lack of unity on the left (meaning
primarily liberals)—however, on the platform he proposes, the genuine left can never
be united. He is craving normal, friendly capitalism, normal society with normal and
happy private property owners on a massive scale, capitalism that has never existed
and cannot exist, capitalism as Utopia. Once upon a time he was a communist and
the exchange of one Utopia for another should not be surprising.
‘If a genuine left existed, there would not be so many jobless, poor and hungry, and
the society would not be decaying as quickly as it does now, not only due to wars, but
also due to plunder and foul privatization.’43 One would expect Popov to find salvation
in some sort of a new socialism, but he sticks to basic principles of liberalism. The
central piece of his essay is a new Constitution and private property, the Holy Grail
of converted communists: ‘private property is the basis and stimulus of entrepreneur-
ship not of public authority. On the contrary, it is the stronghold safeguarding citizens’
autonomy, for its [public authority, power, M.B.]) limitation and its degeneration.’44

41
R1, p. 16.
42
R1, pp. 17–18.
43
R2, p. 6.
44
R1, p. 17.
 472 M. Bogdanović
(Note a charming lapsus, emphasis M. B.), and how much constitutions in Serbia had
been worth and how long they had lasted, knew Jovan Skerlić. After the regicide, when
King Aleksandar Obrenović was brutally murdered in 1903, Skerlić wrote that consti-
tutions in Serbia were eaten for breakfast. After all, it is common knowledge how much
respect the letter and spirit of constitutions and laws in general enjoy in the region.
Vesna Pešić elucidates and develops further Popov’s fixation in her contribution.
She praises Popov because
he has excellently grasped and stressed … the role of private property. Earlier, too,
when we were in those dissident circles, we have always talked about the citizen not
being able to have independence from political power, if he does not possess at least
a minimum of some kind of economic independence. Such economic system is the
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system on which independence if founded and a way to limit state power.45

In other words, a pauper cannot be a ‘citizen’—is that why Golubović has put them in
inverted commas? That is why the historical original liberals had limited rights of non-
possessing individuals. In short, she confuses economic security and private property.
Incidentally, our peasants have been for decades sole proprietors of well nigh the
whole of agricultural land, but this has not led to their political independence.
What measure of private property is necessary to gain political autonomy? An apart-
ment? A car? Or should every citizen, in order to outgrow puberty, acquire his own (in
this case flour and pasta) factory, as did Vesna’s ex-party boss? Who would in that case
pull spaghetti—members of the political council of the Liberal Democratic Party, acti-
vists and supporters like Vesna Pešić, Latinka Perović, Vuk Drašković, or perhaps the
uncrowned king of the NGO scene Miljenko Dereta, who, incidentally, was also LDP
parliamentarian? Or is the spaghetti production to be left to the plain property-less
authoritarian paupers who will smoothly adjust to the authoritarian factory order?
Zaga Golubović will have to admit that any kind of liberalism, original or otherwise,
stops at the factory gate and that the authoritarianism she so abhors still has some
indispensable practical purpose and value. The question to Vesna Pešić and Nebojša
Popov is: do in the constitutional democracies members of the populus possess any
significant amount of property so that they can master not only their own, but also
the destinies of many others? I would say they do not. If Popov and Pešić have relevant
data regarding this matter, why do they hide it?
Zaga Golubović is also very generous in praising Popov. However, she presents his
views in a very confused manner. As a member of the panel Popov did not protest.
Why not? Golubović said: ‘Instead of “neoliberal concept of property, [it is necessary]
to define clearly principles of property relations on the basis of the new structure of
society”’. I do not understand this. Can anybody help me? And worse: ‘In ever
more aggressive onset of neoliberal ideology of the consumer society, original liberal-
ism (of Kant’s Categorical Imperative and theoretical principles of J. S. Mill) is cast
away and instead of proclaiming the principle of greater importance of personal

45
R2, p. 7.
 Critique 473

property over social property, domination of private property is being inaugurated and
therefore a society with extreme inequality and growing poverty of the lower social
strata in the “modern consumer”—“fluid” society.’ Has it not always been so, except
in the period of strong welfare state which is now undermined and abolished? A
little more of Golubović prose: ‘[It is necessary] to find those responsible for the
bad consequences of privatization and for mass unemployment and hopelessness’.
In other words: privatization is in itself good, it only has bad consequences. The
topping is: ‘Analysis of structural and political conditions due to which “the
working class, who had for decades enlarged the value of social property, … is now
massively pushed away into superfluous people”’.46
Yet neither Popov, nor his prophet Golubović point their fingers in the direction of
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private property and privatization as such. That is why their lament sounds false and
hollow. As we have seen, privatization is a sine qua non, only it produced, as Popov
says, a state of chaos. Is Zaga Golubović deep in her heart against privatization and
therefore produces this gibberish and gets completely lost in the chaos she has
partly personally produced? Or do we have here to do with bad conscience (good
old superego): as a communist, Golubović must have been against private property
and for nationalization/socialization of the means of production; she now wants a
return to the status quo ante, which was violently interrupted by communist dictator-
ship. It is so pathetic to follow her effort to place herself on the left without under-
standing that she has chosen the wrong side.
Nebojša Popov again:
The Constitution, as a fundamental act of a community not only determines organ-
ization of the state, but the foundation of economy and society as well. In that
respect a remark of economics professor Ljubomir Madžar is essential: [he] finds
that the present Constitution [2006] has been a huge step forward by eliminating
social property as the foundation on which the [previous] order rested, but this
has not been done radically enough, so that there are still powerful remnants of
the ‘egalitarian syndrome’.47
Fourteen years ago, in an article Hot chestnut of trade unionism and the authoritar-
ian neoliberalism, I analyzed various views on the role of trade unions in the Serbian
transition. Ljubomir Madžar took at that time the most radical anti-trade union pos-
ition. He advocated free capitalism in which private property had to be liberated from
any restriction and constraint so as to motivate property owners for rational use of
resources.
‘It is in the nature of things’ that trade unions have a ‘particular interest’, they artifi-
cially raise wages and decrease employment. Besides, the collective character of
trade union decisions makes a flourishing of strictly personal tastes and prefer-
ences—‘individuals do not fit into them’—impossible. The law of demand and
supply will solve everything by itself. In other words, everybody has to cope

46
R2, p. 6.
47
R1, p. 13.
 474 M. Bogdanović
alone, without interfering with free entrepreneurship, which is elevated to the height
of supreme common interest. ‘In a system in which all power in an enterprise was
formally placed in the hands of the employed, and where full sovereignty of decision
making was located in the labour factor in production and all other business pro-
cesses—it was difficult to find out who it is against whom trade union defends its
class interest.48
The only way out of this trap, which is simultaneously logical and functional, is a
real and unadulterated insight into the interests of the employed, who in the long
run and due to their numerous representation in the community as a whole,
cannot essentially differ from the broadly conceived societal interest. That means
that the trade unions should in the first place renounce opportunistic strategies of
representing narrow professional and class interest49 … Trade union action will
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have most success when it leans on the platform of authentic societal interest,
which today means the fastest and most consequent possible transition to market
economy and systematically institutionalized parliamentary democracy.50
What is the difference then between one time trade unions as despised party trans-
mission belts of the authentic societal interest and the present-day trade union as a
transmission of the authentic societal interest? I guess only in the expectation that
trade unions should now defend the interests of capital and thus eliminate their
own reason for existence.
In contrast to Madžar, Vukašin Pavlović writes in the same volume:
trade unions have to represent persistently and continually present interests of the
workers and all those employed, disregarding immediate or further promises offered
to it. Only in that way trade unions fulfill their task of interests representation in the
civil society with respect to the state policy.51
Popov and ‘original’ liberals, no wonder, do not pay much attention to trade unions.
All that Popov mentions is that the ancien régime did not allow articulation of trade
union interests. Does he think that in the opposite case unions would support ‘original’
liberalism?
The pitiful present condition of Serbia, Popov rightly observes, can only be grasped
by following its genesis.
Any serious consideration of alternatives to the present state of affairs presupposes
above all solid knowledge of past and current events both in Serbia and in close and
more distant environment. Something like that, as we know, is not easy at all due to
powerful barriers piled up in petty and grand narratives of mostly dynastic and
party literature. The framework and results of general and political historiography

48
The author alludes to the legitimation formula in socialism of the working class being the ruling class. It
could not, for example, strike against itself.
49
The concept of class has all but disappeared from political discourse. Madžar refers here to stalež, which
means social layer.
50
Mira Bogdanović, ‘Vruć kesten sindikalizma i autoritarni neoliberalizam’, Nova srpska politička misao,
VII:1–2 (2000), pp. 317–329, quotation on pp. 323–325.
51
Ibid.
 Critique 475

are too narrow for broader and thorough studies, especially in the field of culture,
which is the broadest field of emergence and development of views on already rea-
lized and possible directions of historical development.52
It is not at all difficult to engage in historical research, neither do powerful barriers
exist. Everything is accessible, even that what the communists forbade, sometimes
with good reason. Or is what we are dealing with here actually idleness of mind? If
‘the populus’, who does not engage in the study of history at all, is dejected, somnolent
and drugged by the Balkan variety of capitalism and/or propaganda of capitalism
better than the present one that is expected to dawn, this should not affect the
world of critical intelligentsia. However, the wakeful critical intelligentsia had uncriti-
cally taken on the ‘original’ liberalism.
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‘The breakup of socialist Yugoslavia represented a major cultural and material

setback for the working class. Inside the impoverished country, left isolated on the per-
iphery of the EU, the social dynamics of the last two decades were necessarily inter-
preted as a lag behind the alleged global prosperity. This worldview opened wide
space for the influence of liberal ideology.’53 In the critical circles of ex-Yu there is for-
tunately some resistance against historical revisionism regarding rehabilitation of col-
laborationists and fascists, only because they were anti-communist. However, there are
also other acceptable forms of historical revisionism, like for example the history of
Serbian liberalism.

The Authoritarian Original Liberalism: Our Past is our Future?

Nebojša Popov recommends reading recent historical studies, among others those of
Latinka Perović and Olga Popović-Obradović, in order to follow the genesis of ‘the
ravel’ and ‘the state of chaos’ in which Serbia has been languishing for 200 years.
When one reads the recommended literature one can see a projection of liberalism
into the very beginnings of Serbian history as a modern state and its debacle then
and in a straight line until a century later, when the ‘liberal’ wing of the Communist
Party of Serbia lost against the authoritarian option: that was, according to Perović and
Popović-Obradović, the cause of the present misery. Little attention is paid to the
impossibility of that project owing to a lack of liberalism’s driving force, the so-
called middle classes. Popov himself goes even further back in history, to the beginning
of 19th century and cites a whole row of supporters of ‘constitutional constitution’
(pleonasm is his). He did not go into the views of these two historians and I shall
present them in short.
In her foreword to the posthumously published works of Olga Popović-Obradović,
Latinka Perović sees in Serbia after bloody dynastic change 1903 a black-and-white
clash of two political philosophies: pro-Western and Slavophile, individualist and

52
R1, p. 18.
53
Goran Musić, Radnička klasa Srbije u tranziciji 1988–2013 (Beograd: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast
Europe, 2013), p.74.
 476 M. Bogdanović
collectivist, liberal and populist, capitalist and socialist, reformist and revolutionary,
modern and patriarchal. It is clear which one is desirable and why Serbia has been floun-
dering in blind alleys until the present day. From the very beginning, even before the
Liberal Party had been founded, the future liberals saw the thorough modernization
as the task of the young independent state (from 1878). ‘Rule of law, personal and pol-
itical liberties and responsible government—these were the principles which the Liberal
Party consequently upheld in its history, both when it enjoyed the support of the royal
court and when the court turned its back on the Liberal Party.’54
Živojin Perić, (allegedly) discovered and very affirmatively presented, as Latinka
Perović writes, by Olga Popović-Obradović shows the authoritarianism in all its
glory of the ‘original’ liberalism of those times and provokes amazement at the admira-
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tion it now enjoys in the writing of these authors, and indirectly also Popov’s, since he
recommended reading of these studies.
According to their [liberals’] conviction, the foremost task of Serbia was internal
modernization, whose inseparable aspects were strict rule of law, personal and pol-
itical liberties and responsible government. At the same time they brought to light
strong reserves regarding democracy, not only the one that originated from the
spirit of the French revolutionary tradition, but also regarding democratic ideas
of European liberalism of that age, which had in terms of doctrine and in the prac-
tice already accepted broad, even universal franchise, and which had conceived of
parliamentary regime as a political system where the monarch lost tangible political
power. That is why they, advocating the principle of division of power and parlia-
mentary government, rejected the dominance, even total power, of Parliament, for
which Serbian Radical Party was struggling. Instead, liberals insisted on the active
role of the Crown and particular political significance of upper layers of society
which would be safeguarded by limited franchise and upper house in parliament.
Defined in this way, liberals’ political ideology rested on the principles of liberal
democracy. … Although consistent with the principles of liberal democracy this
political ideology carried a conservative imprint.55
What do we see here? In the first place we see that Serbian liberals at that time were
lagging behind their European counterparts. That concept was outdated not only
when it reached Serbia, but especially now, when Živojin Perić is being awakened
from the dead. Is this ‘original’ liberalism the left, now advocated by Popov, Pešić,
Golubović and Popović-Obradović? The difference between Popović-Obradović and
the aforementioned scholars is that she indeed sees that something here in not
quite kosher. She seems to be puzzled how it is possible that liberal principles
(Popov’s and Golubović’s left) are actually conservative = rightist, since there are
already at that time movements that call them into question from the left. Popović-
Obradović does not write about that, and the Serbian Radical Party at that time,
against which Perić fulminates (with apparent approval from his present-day

54
Latinka Perović, ‘Predgovor knjizi Olge Popović-Obradović’ in Kakva ili kolika država: Ogledi o političkoj i
društvenoj istoriji Srbije XIX—XX veka (Beograd: Helsinški odbor za ljudska prava u Srbiji, 2008), pp. 23, 29.
55
Olga Popović-Obradović, Kakva ili kolika država: Ogledi o političkoj i društvenoj istoriji Srbije XIX—XX
veka (Beograd: Helsinški odbor za ljudska prava u Srbiji, 2008), pp. 302–303.
 Critique 477

admirers), is closer to the then progressive and now conventional meaning of democ-
racy than the authoritarian, aristocratic Liberal (alternatively named Progressive!)
Party, which practically denies popular sovereignty seated in Parliament.
However, this is not all to it. Liberalism and fascism in every form share common
hatred of the left. Who can then be surprised by Živojin Perić’s sympathy for the Nazis,
whose name, in the revisionist revival, adorns now the elementary school in his native
village of Stubline? Olivera Milosavljević has written on the collaboration of this man
with the German occupation power in 1941–1944. As early as the beginning of June
1941 he was appointed member of the Legislative Council of the Ministry of Justice,
in charge of legislation.56 In other words, he must have participated in passing and
authorizing as well as linguistically supervizing racial and anti-semitic laws.
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In contrast to Olivera Milosavljević, Popović-Obradović writes that Perić continued

to live in Belgrade after German occupation (April 1941), and was employed as a legal
expert in the collaborationist government of Milan Nedić. In May 1943 he was
appointed to preside over the Council for linguistic supervision of laws, attached to
the Ministry of Education and Religion. At the close of the war Perić ‘left’ Serbia
and joined his family in Switzerland, where he died 1953.57 In plain text, he fled the
country after the partisan forces entered Belgrade on 20 October 1944.
Živojin Perić’s political vision, with its contemptuous attitude towards the people,
inevitably leads one to associate it with the similar ‘antipopulist’ and aristocratic
stream of thought presented by Popov and Golubović. In addition, the Liberal
Party’s orientation, much praised by Perović and Popović-Obradović, towards the for-
tress of conservatism on the European periphery, the Dual Monarchy (as against
Radical Party’s orientation to Russia), geographically the closest ideal of liberalism
and individualism (as against Radical Party’s collectivism), cannot explain how it is
possible that Croatia, a part of Austria–Hungary at that time, without something
like the Radical Party, the culprit for all Serbian misfortunes, has had a similar histori-
cal career until the present day.
Popov does not stand still at the nature of ‘original’ liberalism and pays more atten-
tion to culture under socialism, a system, according to him, of almost total repression.
He presents many manifestations of the liberated spirit (interpreted in a liberal sense,
other freedom does not exist and cannot exist under socialism), ‘liberation of spiritual
creativity from the restricting limits of the ruling ideology of Marxism–Leninism’, for-
getting that all those examples of creative breakthrough were financed by socialism. He
himself had as a communist also participated therein and profited from it. In this
context Golubović, suffering like Popov from memory loss and forgetting her praxis
critical period, stresses in Popov’s Republika essay the need for settling accounts

56
Olivera Milosavljević, Potisnuta istina- Kolaboracija u Srbiji 1941–1944 (Beograd: Helsinški odbor za
ljudska prava u Srbiji, 2006), p. 140. For general context see also Olivera Milosavljević, Savremenici fašizma 1,
Percepcija fašizma u beogradskoj javnosti 1933–1941 (Beograd: Helsinški odbor za ljudska prava u Srbiji, 2010)
and Olivera Milosavljević, Savremenici fašizma 2 – Jugoslavija u okruženju 1933–1941 (Beograd: Helsinški
odbor za ljudska prava u Srbiji, 2010).
57
Popović-Obradović, op. cit., pp. 300–301.
 478 M. Bogdanović
‘with the old left “which has liquidated almost every form of critical opinion”’ and the
need ‘to critically re-evaluate “some repressed and demonized currents of liberal-
ism”’.58 Popov con suis affirms within the new hegemonic paradigm liberal heritage.
There are no obstacles to that but nobody listens to him.
Nebojša Popov dedicated in his essay several critical sentences to Goran Musić
(‘some fellow, his name is Musić’: Vesna Pešić in the audiovisual report from the
panel),59 who criticized from the left Popov’s (petty) private property vision, ‘unravel-
ing’ of the present ‘chaotic situation’, without understanding that he actually is on the
right. He reproaches Musić’s ‘doctrinalism’ (read: dogmatism). However, Popov
himself & Co. approach reality from a doctrinaire (read: dogmatic) point of view: is
the dogma of private property not the very essence of liberal ideology?
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Gore Vidal, an offspring of a notable American patrician family, has written, apart
from exciting satirical novels about American past and present, an immortal aphorism
on the American political party scene: ‘There is only one party in the United States, the
Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat’. It seems that
all so-called relevant political parties in Serbia (and in the region) are Property Parties
with only one right wing. Is that not what Popov and Golubović are fighting for? Are
those who see in private property an obstacle to genuine democracy and equality going
to be deprived of the right to exist because they advocate demolition of the consti-
tutional order?

A Short Comparative Historical Reminder

I have mentioned the absence of comparative perspective in the works of our ‘genuine’
liberals. Comparative historical research, summarized by Rueschemeyer, Stephens and
Stephens shows a completely different picture of the subject matter.60
I have to stress, in order not to be accused of being doctrinal (read: dogmatic), that
the authors are not Marxists. Rather they are Weberians. The results of their research
demonstrate that the most consequent and persistent fighter for democracy, in the
conventional sense, was the working class. That was not because it was the most
oppressed of all, but owing to its capacity at that time to become gradually aware of
its condition. In the historical context described by the authors, the working class
was, in contrast to small peasantry and agricultural workers on grand estates, most
of all capable of self-organization. Democracy as we know it (Popov’s ideal not realized
in Serbia) has fully developed in highly developed capitalist societies of the West that
had undergone comprehensive industrialization and capitalist development. Such
development has also of necessity brought forth a massive and powerful working
class. In less developed societies democracy is more often the exception than the

58
R2, p. 6.
59
www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM4PcjcKHSw
60
Faculty.washington.edu/asc22/SinkerSite/Pols%20204/Rueshemeyer Stephens Stephens.pdf (hereafter
RSS).
 Critique 479

rule and, even when democratic institutions do exist, genuine democratic practice is
not on a high level.
The classics of nineteenth-century political theory also tended toward the view that
the transformations wrought by capitalist development would bring democracy. But
their reactions to this prospect were very different from what one might expect
knowing their twentieth-century heirs. Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill
were apprehensive about full-fledged democracy, and they were not alone in this.
Their fear of ‘false democracy’ (Mill) and of ‘the tyranny of the majority’ (de Toc-
queville) expressed the anticipations of many Liberals and bourgeois conservatives
of the time. By contrast, at the left end of the political spectrum Marx opted for full
democracy and saw in universal suffrage a major step in the transition from capit-
alism to socialism. His ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was not so very different from
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de Tocqueville’s ‘tyranny of the majority’, except that for Marx this was a vision of
hope and for de Tocqueville it was one of disaster.61
Živojin Perić belongs here too.
The authors of this collective comparative study also blow up the myth (widespread
in our situation), that the middle classes (in Anglo-Saxon tradition synonymous with
what one in socialism, in the French tradition, is called the bourgeoisie) are the cor-
nerstone of democracy. In their view the middle classes did not have a consistent atti-
tude, or rather they were consistently fickle. The central methodological approach they
use is the class concept, class power and class coalitions.
Class power is in our view intimately related to the development of, the increasing
organizational density of, civil society. This proposition seems at first glance similar
to—but in reality quite different from—claims of modernization theorists and plur-
alists that the growth of intermediate groups and associations tends to be supportive
of democracy. … The middle classes played an ambiguous role in the installation
and consolidation of democracy. They pushed for their own inclusion but their atti-
tude towards inclusion of the lower classes depended on the need and possibilities
for an alliance with the working class. The middle classes were most in favor of full
democracy where they were confronted with intransigent dominant classes and had
the option of allying with the sizable working class. However, if they started feeling
threatened by popular pressures under democratic regime, they turned to support
the imposition of an authoritarian rule.62
What is then the genuine historical left in contrast to the sugar water of liberal ideol-
ogy, conjuration, incantation and moralistic preaching? Vesna Pešić is aware of
Popov’s position as being classical liberal and asks the appropriate question: how
can we find here anything resembling the left? She riducules views such as Musić’s:
‘The language of social justice and defense of workplaces has the potential to unite
much wider layers of working class than insistence on the rule of law and private prop-
erty rights’.63 She then procedes to create a link with the left. The link in her view is
inclusion: for 200 years the Serbian state has demonstrated an incapacity to include all

61
RSS, p. 243.
62
RSS, pp. 245–247.
63
Musić, pp. 75–76.
 480 M. Bogdanović
of its citizens into the community, leaving out individuals/groups on the basis of creed,
nationality or sexual orientation, that is, violating the principle of the equality and
liberty of all its citizens.64 Pešić herself necessarily remains stuck in liberal terms,
namely in liberalistic reduction of the left, although she is at pains to prove something
else. She mentions the exlusion of the LGBT population, a marginal group whose
struggle for tolerance I heartily endorse, but she seems to forget that the private prop-
erty magic excludes a huge majority, including also LGBT people. There are not many
who live of love and of private property.
Just like many banks and states of today, the bourgeois society, as the frame in which
the market operates, is facing bankruptcy. In one form or another, labor issues are
returning to the political scene. It remains an open question whether new organized
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labor will stem from the transformation of the old unions or the merging of grass
root local initiatives as happened in Zrenjanin—whatever the case may be, the
working class in Serbia has a new chance to establish independent, democratically
structured organizations with their own body of ideas and methods of struggle. …
Connecting workers beyond their own workplaces comes across as the underlying
theme for any future project. This joining of forces would have to be based on
the democratically elected structures controlled by the workers themselves in
order to prevent dependency on individuals. … Moreover, this type of workers’
organization would have to rediscover the rich historical traditions of workers’
movement in the region. Armed with its own program, the working class could
assertively set its foot in the political scene and stop being dependent on support
from sympathizing individuals standing outside of the movement, borrowed ideol-
ogies and improvised solutions, which go against interests of the working class as a
whole. Organizing workers as a class, with a political program and clearly defined
class goals, would finally unfasten the straight jacket of ‘pro-European’, nationalist,
or any other ideological variation of the present order, and open perspectives for the
constitution of a socioeconomic system in agreement with the real interests of the
vast majority of the population.65
Musić did not further elaborate on the pecularities of Serbian original liberalism. I did
it instead in order to show two totally opposing views that cannot both be on the left.
History is in spite of all magistra vitae. Zaga Golubović writes: ‘In the whole period
of Serb people’s history, leftist orientation has been repressed and uncritical attitude
towards the right has taken root.’66 She means, if I get it correctly, socialism.
Well then—let us review the integral Serbian modern history and let us confront the
leftist ‘original’ liberalism with the ‘rightist’ ideas and ideologies that in her view dom-
inate the Serbian history. If we thereby make use of the theoretical apparatus devel-
oped by the criticized authors we shall not get very far. Or we shall end on the
wrong spot.

64
R2, p. 7.
65
Musić, op. cit., p. 76. Zrenjanin is a town in Serbia, where a failed experiment in insider privatization of a
pharmaceutical company took place. Popov, himself from Zrenjanin, and his Republika played an important role
in this matter.
66
R2, p. 7.
 Critique 481

The best of the contributions that appeared in Republika is the question Vesna Pešić
asked in the latter issue of Republika referring to Popov’s essay in the former issue:
how can we find here anything resembling the left? If this is the best Serbia’s alterna-
tive mainstream can produce, what then is the worst?

Syriza and the Left in Serbia

The electoral victory of Syriza caused a major stir in Serbia’s intellectual and political
circles. Even Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić, on his belated neo-liberal trip, had to
voice his disapproval of intended measures by the new government in Greece. He is in
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favor of hard work instead. However, more interesting in the present context are the
theoretical views Vesna Pešić aired on this matter and the practical steps envisioned by
Borislav Stefanović, the leader of the rump Democratic Party in the Serbian
parliament.
Pešić did a bit of homework and prepared herself for a TV panel, broadcast on 5
February 2015 by the quality weekly Vreme: she read a Steven Lukes publication on
left and right to orientate herself on the subject matter. As we have seen, only a
year previously she defined the left as inclusion.67 In the meantime she changed her
mind.
Pešić leans on Lukes’s definition of the left:
The left is on this account a critical, strongly egalitarian project, which, however,
allows for successive and varying interpretations and reinterpretations of what
unjustified inequalites consist in and of how—through what methods and pro-
grams—they can be reduced or eliminated. Often, throughout the history of the
left, that project has been abandoned or betrayed by those claiming to pursue it.
What I here seek to identify is an ideal-typical left, an account that displays
what its adherents can acknowledge as its most desirable rationale: the
essential elements by virtue of which abandonment and betrayal can be identified
as such. My suggestion, in a word, is that the left is defined by its commitment to
what we may call the Principle of Rectification and the right by opposition to it.68
Pešić either did not read the whole of Lukes’s disussion, or misunderstood/misrepre-
sented it completely. Or did she want to correct Steven Lukes, a competent source, as
she rightly observed? Anyhow she stopped reading where it suited her, at the Principle
of Rectification suggested by Lukes as the most abstract common denominator of the
left through history. While Lukes further elaborates his principal point, including in
his review all possible forms of the left and, among many others, of course, socialism
and communism, Pešić blows the Rectification Principle out of all proportions and
maintains that the left wants only to rectify capitalism, not to abolish it. From her
point of view Syriza belongs to the genuine left because it did not come in power by
violent means and does not intend to abolish capitalism. Here again we have to

67
www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=1267953
68
Steven Lukes, fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/244/cup.pdf, p. 16.
 482 M. Bogdanović
deal with muddled criteria. In applying her understanding of Lukes to the past 30 years
of West European history, Pešić argues that the center-left and center-right have under
neo-liberal regime merged into a corrupt and arrogant establishment that threatens to
drive class antagonism (a novelty in her conceptual framework) to the extreme because
it has created ‘too much injustice’. However, she did not mind neo-liberalism when she
served as an MP for the most extreme neo-liberal party in Serbia.
Enter Syriza armed with the Rectification Principle to redress the grave imbalance
between classes and save capitalism from disaster. Such a party, or conglomerate of
parties, is according to Pešić a welcome phenomenon because it will disempower
the oligarchy and prevent the rise of fascism or ‘something lefter than the left’.69
Mysteriously grinning, she did not disclose what that might be. My guess is that she
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meant socialism/communism: she puts fascism and ‘something lefter than the left’
in the same brackets and unintentionally bestows leftist legitimacy to socialism/com-
munism, the taboo words she may not utter because they imply something that goes
beyond her horizon, limited by decent capitalism and the genuine left as she sees it.
Likewise unintentionally, she ignores that fascism did not aspire to destroy capitalism,
but only to rectify it. In her unreflected understanding of Lukes, fascism too would
belong to the genuine left! Pešić holds on to the views defended by Popov and Golu-
bović in the Republika panel of capitalism being before neo-liberal invasion the best of
all possible worlds.
I do not wish to be unfair to Vesna Pešić. As far as I am concerned she may profit
from the benefit of the doubt. She has changed so many political orientations until
now. Who knows where is she going to end? She certainly does not.
So much on the theoretical consequences of Syriza’s victory. Back to its political
impact in Serbia.
The extreme nationalist Serbian Radical Party founded in 1991 by the notorious
Vojislav Šešelj, at present indicted for war crimes before the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, changed its course in 2008 and
made a sharp pro-European turn (turnabouts are the order of the day in Serbian poli-
tics), changed its name to Serbian Progressive Party and won the presidential and par-
liamentary elections in 2012 and extraodrinary parliamentary elections in 2014 to
confirm its hold on power. It swept from power the DP that ruled from 2008,
riddled with corruption scandals and marred by arrogance and complacency. Even
Vesna Pešić, a veritable champion of liberalism and democracy nominally embodied
in DP, was fed up with this beacon of Western values and agitated for the former Rad-
icals in the election campaign. Her motive was punishment of DP.
To general surprise the former Radical Party, in coalition with equally dubious
Serbian Socialist Party founded by Milošević, made an unexpected move: they
signed the Brussels agreement in 2013 on normalizing relations with the independent
Kosovo’s government. This removed the stumbling block to Serbia’s EU accession

69
Credit to Vesna Pešić for this neologism, which sounds as awkward in Serbian as it does in English. Italics
M.B.
 Critique 483

talks. DP in power did not have the courage to take such steps and persisted in ignor-
ing the new state and in disparaging Kosovo. The other spectacular move was the take-
over of neo-liberal reforms that DP pursued. In this way pro-European liberal parties
lost their reason for existence. To be real opposition to Vučić, they could only move to
the left.
After the electoral debacle in 2012, the DP, actually an interest cartel glued together
by greed and corruption, fell apart into four new formations. Of more importance
though is the blatant lack of vision and political know-how that the party displayed.
Speaking with Vesna Pešić, the situation had to be rectified. Syriza came in as a gift
from Heaven.
In his interview to Radio Free Europe on 15 February 2015 Borislav Stefanović at
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long last conceded blunders that his party had made while in power.70 DP’s profile,
even though it is a full member of the Socialist International, was difficult to define
unambigously: it was a mixture of conservatism, neo-liberalism, leftist ideas and mon-
archist ideas, while the key values, such as social justice, solidarity, equality and anti-
fascism, had been pushed aside. In other words, the basic principles that DP upheld
have been identical to Syriza’s. Nevertheless, many leading figures in DP still believe
and stubbornly insist on neo-liberal policies. The only difference with Vučić is that
they believe they can do it faster.
Only after Vučić embarked on a neo-liberal course did Stefanović wake up and seek
alternative politics inspired by Syriza. The Grand Old Man in the DP, ex-praxis lumin-
ary, Dragoljub Mićunović, called Stefanović’s plans ‘a marketing gimmick’. Stefanović
announced a new DP program in a few days. That was on 15 February. We are still
waiting.
Maybe it was after all a marketing gimmick?

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

70
www. slobodnaevropa.org/content/stefanovic-sta-mozemo-nauciti-od-syrize/26850500.html