On 1st November 2024, an awning collapsed at a train station in Novi Sad, Serbia, claiming the lives of sixteen people. Upon investigation into who was responsible for the tragedy, the government responded with what has, in their last thirteen years of power, become the norm: lies, corruption, and deceit. They refused to release documentation pertaining to the recent renovation of the station roof, suspectedly because the documents would reveal that the government dealt with shady contractors to save money and line their own pockets.
Fed up with the absolute disrepair that the government — headed by President Aleksandar Vucic — had put the country into, students decided to take action. In November they began a physical blockade of their universities, faculty by faculty, city by city. They took to the streets, amassing widespread support from the community with the simple message: enough is enough, get this corrupt government out.
I arrived in Serbia to visit my family just as these protests were starting. In having many friends who were heavily involved in organising, I became engrossed in the protests themselves. For context, I had spent just over a year in student politics at the University of Sydney (USyd), and even though I was never a headkicker or a BNOC, I was privy to a lot of goings-on through being on exec and involved with organising. All this is to say: I saw and heard some things.
Over the three months that I spent in Serbia I watched the protests grow and evolve. In the process, I compared the organising and success of the Serbian actions to those that I had experienced at USyd. There are obvious caveats in these comparisons, not least the difference in the organising causes, which I do recognise. But I do not believe this wholly justifies and explains why USyd student organising isn’t as widely successful as the Serbian student movement.
First and foremost is the culture surrounding political organising in general, especially in this generation of students. In Serbia, I had the sense that despite the wide ranges of political ideals, groups, personalities, faculties between student organisers, there was a mutual understanding that the fight at hand was larger than partisanship or petty squabble. Such comradeship is, I believe, gravely missing from the USyd left. The self-aggrandising, egocentric attitude adopted by larger Trotskyist groups as well as centre left partisan groups (seriously, why are there 4 Labor factions?) does little to both engage the masses of students necessary to create groundbreaking movements and to promote healthy collaboration between groups that are already engaged in student politics.
This is not to say that this is at all, or even majorly, a fault of student politicians themselves. It is quite clear to me that in Australia the average student lives in a state of political apathy due to the ruling class’ ability to keep the middle and working class teetering just on the edge of complete destruction, in a somewhat dispirited complacency that lends itself to inaction and indifference. This complacency is unfortunately not available to the working class of a country like Serbia. It is all intertwined however, and the question I kept asking myself while at the protests in Belgrade was “They’re even getting the frat bros out on the streets?!”
It was baffling to me that the overall culture skewed positively towards the idea of protest, rather than against it. So many around me at USyd have echoed sentiments to me that justified non-participation through the notion that ‘someone else’ would fix it. This is precisely the attitude that perpetuates the culture of apathy that those in power abuse to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. The reality is, no one else will fix it; every citizen has to engage to create change.
Notably, student politicians use, or rather abuse, the art of debate and the organising space to create division between themselves, rather than recognising the immensely greater power they could hold in unity and solidarity (puns unintended). I do recognise the importance of having many different political groups, with pluralist beliefs in an organising space, but I also believe that there is an art to knowing when to put the cause before one’s selfish, partisan, pursuits.
Let me contextualise this using the monthly Students’ Representative Council meetings as an example. Council meetings are meant for debate. However, the state of emotional drainage that one finds oneself in after six hours of yelling, screaming, and insults is counter-productive, counter-intuitive, and does little to “build” any of the movements that we are fighting for. Council effectively serves as a dick-measuring contest where a Trotskyist headkicker who’s been in student politics since I was in Year 9 yells at the room about how many posters they’ve put up to build a certain action, and how the rest of us should be ashamed that we didn’t put up as many. Criticism of one another does keep us accountable, but we have to know where to stop.
Lastly, there is much to be learnt from the Serbian student protestors when it comes to the creativity and innovation in the types of actions that are being organised. An almost complete media blackout in the country led to the genius and inspiring idea of students to take their message to the communities that would be least likely to hear it. They made a pilgrimage across the country on foot, stopping in rural towns where they were met with love and support, a sure indication of the mass opinion of these protests from the community. It is creativity like this, as well as the drive, stamina, and collaboration which I have discussed above that would propel the effectiveness and reach of organising if implemented by our student politicians here.
