The third voice

Although thirty years have passed since the dissolution of the SFRY, the political discourse of the ex-Yu countries is still, as in the first days of party pluralism, reduced to two ideological registers. Even today, just like at the beginning of that formally established political pluralism, those leftists whose criticism is directed not only at the nationalists, but also at the civil-liberal bloc are working in an alternative or some marginal party.

Since in the ex-Yu space, civil-liberal parties, unlike those that are (over)conscious, quite conditionally justify their original ideological assignment, showing a somewhat shameful inclination towards neoliberalism, the criticism of that option should be louder and more detailed. In that regard, nationalists are less of a problem, they are genre-cleaner, so the methodology of criticism aimed at them is simpler. All in all, today it is more than clear that in order to get out of the multi-decade high-speed transition and atrophied ideological two-voice, which in political practice results in mostly sterile party pluralism, a more prominent presence of something that could be called a third voice is necessary, which would, above all, generate theoretical and activist engagements of the non-calculating left. To avoid confusion, the fact that it should represent a third voice is not something that would correspond in any way to what is defined in contemporary political theory as the "Third Way", one could even say that it is necessary to demystify that ideological concept precisely from the position of the third voice. By the way, the political programs of the parties belonging to the liberal-civilian block are also based on the ideology of the "Third Way" implicitly, and often without the slightest evasion.

The fact that we live in a time in which the very concept of politics has been simplified, by reducing it to its service function, does not mean that we should forget about the blood connection between ideology and politics. The deideologized concept of politics is mostly advocated by the neoliberal structures of the developed world, which is rather doubtful, because a more detailed analysis of neoliberalism shows its deep ideological basis. A more serious neoliberal knows that ideology represents the salt of any more ambitious political concept and that without it, politics is a perishable commodity of very limited durability. Therefore, one could say that the neoliberal advocacy for a de-ideological, purely practical policy is essentially a story for others. Those who believe in that story can, at best, become technologists of one of the center's seasonal political projects, i.e. "unsalted", and therefore perishable. The ideological consistency of the neoliberal concept is perhaps most visible on the American political scene, because it was precisely thanks to neoliberalism that such conditions were created that forced the elite of the Democratic Party to seriously reduce leftist principles in their subsequent realpolitik strategies. Alex Parin, a political analyst whose texts often problematize this phenomenon, points to the defeatism of the Democrats and their easy acceptance of compromises. According to him, they "all the time operate and campaign from a stunted, defensive posture, even when they win power, accepting the ideological propositions of the center, thereby aligning their apparatchiks and consultants with the conservative rules that make America an irredeemably center-right nation." And they have almost no strategy or will to move that consensus to the left, i.e. to engage in an activity that used to be understood as "politics". It is clear that Parin's nostalgic invocation of "politics" should be read as a warning to the Democrats, whose politics clearly need a kind of ideological galvanization. The informal agreement on America as an incorrigible center-right nation, which is a recognizable indicator of the successful ideological action of neoliberalism and political practices from the zone of its gravity, is one of the most effective consensus of the ideological concept that was once founded by the Anglo-Saxon Thatcher-Regan axis. Formal modifications of that concept affected the entire contemporary politics of the West, and in a more sinister form, all European countries behind the former Iron Curtain. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when it seemed that a great ideological conflict had ended, it was revealed that this victory over East European communism was essentially not won by the ideological motives invoked by emancipators and reformers in the countries of the Eastern bloc. As Cornelius Kastoriadis says: "They were not looking for a truly freer, fairer and more solidary society, they were looking for capitalism. They asked to be provided with consumer goods, and everything else was unimportant to them."

The marginalization of ideology, which is recognizable in today's political reality, is a consequence of capitalism's agonizing search for its continued survival, and the growing gap in the narrowing class division indicates that this survival would introduce capitalism into its most brutal phase. Numerous theoreticians of society believe that it will be most easily realized precisely in a deideologized world. Already today, where Bezos and Musk are sophisticatedly expanding the conceivable frameworks of financial power, as well as in those parts of the world where post-communist oligarchs and tycoons do it in a more vulgar way, the ideological recognition of political action has been reduced to mere rhetoric, which does not commit to anything or seduce anyone. . The left itself bears a great deal of responsibility for such a situation, because it was the one that most often gave up on its ideological agenda, which tells us that the left would first have to redeologize itself, more precisely, to make its own hierarchy of priorities more serious. Let's say - to raise the class issue above the problem of disappearing humid forests. After all, the wet forests are being cut down by unbridled capitalist corporations. The question also arises as to how far the concept of freedom, as formalized by today's mainstream left, is sustainable in a state in which an ordinary citizen, seemingly free and seemingly influential in socio-political life, is left to the neoliberal rules of the free market, where that freedom is relaxed. ideological dictates, but there are no corporate ones. According to them, today's left shows unacceptable tolerance, no less than that shown by civil-liberal options.

The beginnings and continuity of the ideological indistinctness of the ex-Yu space, in which literally either-or applies, can be seen much more clearly today. It could be said that this political haunting of the new states was noticed at the time of their liberation from the undemocratic one-party system. The epilogue of that change is irresistibly reminiscent of the event when Slobodan Penezić Krcun, while visiting the arrested not long after the partisans entered Belgrade, asked Simo Pandurović in surprise: "Since when have you been in prison?", and the famous poet and translator of Shakespeare replied: "Since liberation." When comparing the situation between Yugoslav non-freedom and post-Yugoslav freedom, we can find many such bizarre things in which that freedom acts as slavery, primarily on an existential level. Also, the mentioned two options - nationalists and liberals - could not reach any more extreme manifestations in that time of unfreedom, as they reached in various forms in the time of freedom. Both of them were very visible in Yugoslavia, at least in its last decades, but compared to those "after liberation" they were washed and combed. Nevertheless, this subversion of the more extreme branches was not enough for the SFRY era to overcome ideological monopolization, just as post-Yugoslav political pluralism did not influence a similar level of exclusivity to be overcome within more or less all parliamentary parties in the ex-Yu area during these three decades. In simpler terms, the experience of the political power of the ruling structures from the XNUMXs to today is not much different from the level of usurpation that was characteristic of the communists.

Regardless of the formally achieved political plurality in the nineties, the political scene as well as the electorate were, in essence, reduced to two camps: those who see democratic changes as a danger to the newly formed state (a conglomerate of nostalgic nationalists and communists) and, on the other hand, to those who only see the future of newly formed states in unquestioning cooperation with the West. It was clear to a small number of intellectuals that this narrowed ideological perspective would prevent the full democratic development of society, but they mostly remained silent or made compromises with pro-Western options, referring to "objective circumstances", "historical moment" or any of the similar platitudes that the proponents lines of least resistance usually wash their conscience. It was this despondency that decisively influenced the petrification of the ideological double-voice and made it impossible to create a more serious political platform for the criticism of anomalies, and there were plenty of them, in the two dominant ideological concepts.

For a possible analysis of the causes of such a situation, it is necessary to look back at some of the key events during the 1993s in world politics, primarily in Russia, which affected the balance of power between opposing options in the then common state of Serbia and Montenegro. The most influential of these events was the defeat of Yeltsin's opponents in October XNUMX and the adoption of the new Constitution of the Russian Federation at the end of the same year, which gave Yeltsin pharaonic powers. Since then, the hope of the Yugoslav anti-Westerners for Russian support has almost completely died out. A good part of the then FRY media scene in Yelcin saw the biggest hoax directed at Russia, Slavism, Orthodoxy, Christianity, Abrahamic religions and the general order. All in all, the one-time savior from Sverdlovsk was given archenemy status in a carnivalesque warning of doom.

In the Serbian media, after the shelling of the White House, the debunking of Yeltsin and his key associates was mainly carried out by numerous conspiracy theorists and ideologically diverse pan-Slavic nostalgics, both monarchist and communist. Evidence that Yeltsin and his team are some black brotherhood hired by the godless West is found both in various sources that, of course, were "never available to the public" and in hidden places of their genealogies and even more hidden signs of their gestures, names and rituals. So, for example, in RTS prime time, you could hear, not only from vivid secret-seekers but also from political officials, how Chernomyrdin's last name can clearly see his intentions, because the adjective чёрный (black) and the noun morda (muzzle) show that even with his last name, the unfortunate Viktor Stepanovich was predestined for dishonorable affairs, especially according to the chaste, white and swarthy Orthodoxy. The media scene, occupied by all those nadir interpreters who called for an uprising against the destroyers of Russia and Serbia, also suited the pro-Westerners, because in this way, to a large extent, a generally valid profile of the attackers of freedom and democracy was created. Thanks to that, even those who criticized the Yeltsins from left positions, primarily because of the oligarchic-neoliberal axis, were put by the liberal-civilian bloc in the same basket with that para-Nazi-exotic. Simply, in the simplified and largely faked division into crazy nationalists and free-thinking intellectuals, which covered the public discourse in the then FRY, almost no one among the rare critics of both options could provide any more visible authenticity, because in the field of the visible, the criticized would immediately push him to those others, which the people, also divided into two blocs, accepted without question.

That rigid duality does not last until today, but it has been sharpened to the end in recent years. If in Croatia, Serbia, and to some extent in Bosnia and Herzegovina we can find some of those third voices, in Montenegro there is a total silence of the third voice. Official politics in this context should not be wasted - the completely legalized calculation of political parties has created a situation in which no one expects any ideological consistency from politicians, and thus from those who declare themselves as leftists. What is fundamentally worrying is the lack of an uncontaminated third voice among intellectuals who are not engaged in a political party. Precisely because of their overwhelming small number, conditions have been created in these thirty years in which the sustainability of an authentic expression of rebellion is almost impossible, because such phenomena are almost always perceived as mimicry of one of the two dominant political discourses. Come on, mother's son, say something against litium - at least from the position of someone who believes that the canonicalism in which the truth is determined by providence and dogma, which is a legitimate way of theological interpretation of the world, cannot be a generator of progress in a secular society - without attach, at best, the label of nostalgic for the old government. In the same way, anyone who asserts that the unscrupulousness of the former government massed those same masses will immediately become a destroyer of the state. Today, it is clear that the reason for the lack of a more serious political option from which both the undertakers of the welfare state and those who believe that something from theocracy can be mixed into a secular system would be criticized with the same fervor should be sought precisely in the despondency of those who were obliged by the ideological sign to create such a system. options. All those libertarians, democrats, citizens, pacifists, cosmopolitans, reggae fans and independent scenes failed in thirty years to build a platform on which they would stand today, express their position clearly and loudly, without at the same time being pushed into one of the two side ravines .

I don't know if we can be comforted by the fact that the problem of the marginalization of the third voice is essentially a global problem. Such a situation has influenced, among other things, a serious reduction of the ideological substrate in today's political practices of the centrist parties, so, at least as far as existence is concerned, the unhappy citizen is the same under any centrist option. In addition, we have seen from previous coalition perversions that such parties, when they reach the potential status of a "bow in the balance" in the elections, show more and more open political promiscuity, because most of them can get along with anyone.

A clearly defined and meaningful activist-theoretical framework of truly left-wing and truly civil groups and individuals would not only represent a foothold for a socio-political alternative in our current rather obscure political reality, but could largely determine the socio-political perspective of that reality. The post-election awakening showed the depth of the problems of the Montenegrin political reality, and the cause of this is still seen exclusively in the disharmony that reigns in the winning coalition. The older and essential cause of this one-year-old schizoid political reality is hidden in the fact that shows us that this society has not managed to create a serious political and ideological ramification in three decades. If there were, this turn to the right would not be a particular problem either, just as it is not a problem in any society where there is a functional fragmentation of the political scene, which, by the nature of things, makes it impossible to create any ideological monopoly. And when it is no longer there, then we are obliged, in this still demonopolized political state, to start seriously working on the desperately needed expansion of the ideological register of our unacceptably simplified multi-party system. In addition to launching new initiatives, a serious contribution could also be made by those who mainly represented decorum on the political scene so far. This primarily refers to parties that declare themselves as civil and left-wing, taking into account that Montenegrin politics, which at the moment is seriously drifting to the right, is in dire need of ideological regulation.

No matter how naive these expectations sound now, this new environment, in which the despotic-neoliberal concept of governance has been shaken, still allows some original leftist principles, above all the issue of workers' rights, to enter the priorities of the future strategies of the left simulators so far. It is only necessary, although that "only" still seems like an impossible mission, that the parties whose members refer to the left and civic orientations show that their ideological designation is not reduced only to form and semantics, but also that they possess ideological consciousness and conscience. If they did not already do this during the DPS rule, now their ideological foiling must not be forgiven, because any talk about political plurality, a fairer society and existential improvement will remain mere rhetoric. In simpler words, if this does not happen, it will be the same for us as it was when the DPS Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare and Danilo Popović took care of workers' rights, or like now, when Srđa Keković is still "burning" for these rights. .

In addition, many of the "leftists" of the local political scene would have to seriously start reading those left theorists of the 20th century whose views were not the result of the expectations and dictates of the ruling and monolithic left ideology, more precisely - those who did not theorize in one-party communist regimes. The Montenegrin left always had a bad time with that reading, it mostly moved within the framework of something that could be called security communism. Our communists didn't read Sartre, Bloch, or even Tucović, but party bulletins and minutes from hearings. In such a system, ambition always overtook knowledge, and practice did not care much for ideology. Today's increasingly numerous defenders of that "golden age" mostly appeal to the equality and safety of citizens, to a society where there were no tycoons and criminal clans. By the way, there were no tycoons and crime in Cambodia during Pol Pot's time either. Of course, there are no tycoons and criminals in such regimes, because some tycoon and criminal mechanisms are incorporated in their initial strategies, primarily the key one - devastation to the complete cancellation of all competition in the power system. To put it more simply, this "orderliness" of the former communist regimes was not the result of justice, but an achievement resulting from the establishment of an organization that excludes all competition. Do we need to constantly remind Communist Party nostalgics that that regime was not only repressive for criminals, but also for politicians who spoke affirmatively of a multi-party system, economists who advocated some form of privatization, intellectuals and artists who demanded freedom of speech, and in its extreme stage even for those who would sing "Rjabinushka"? That is why the fascination of our current leftists with the arrangement of Yugoslav communism is essentially anti-leftist, even very repressive, because it essentially boils down to a fascination with the Service. And just as Montenegrin politics needs relaxation from transitional neoliberalism and nationalism, it also needs the final retirement of softcore nodovics.

What is perhaps most important for a more serious ideological emancipation of Montenegrin politics, a more present and functional left in its new political reality could also influence the creation of an environment in which even the protruding offshoots of the right will become more politically aware and move, as they were pompously inaugurated and then disappeared the prime minister's adviser guessed, closer to the center, more precisely - the position occupied by contemporary conservative political options in the European Union. By the way, if we have already rushed to refer to the European political scene, then we must know that the fashioned and hiccupped right, i.e. the center-right parties, whose coalition is the most numerous in the European Parliament, is such precisely because of the approximately equally strong European left, which, although often insincere, performs the function of an ideological counterweight.

In the end, it should be said that all this will not be easy, not only because of our internal problems, but also because, and this is truly a global phenomenon, that political programs for fairer socio-economic distribution have long been replaced by the logic of the free market, according to which the accumulated money will elites also produce general improvement. That's why it should be said in time that those who, with a consistent leftist agenda, would set out to conquer some significant space on our political scene must know that, unlike ideologically flexible political options, a much more difficult path awaits them because they certainly would not have serious financial and media logistics . Among other things, they would not be able to count on the extra-budgetary support that the strongest political parties of the post-Yugoslav transition draw from the tycoon zones, and for God's sake not even on the support of European funds, since they are largely spent on weakening every left "leaner" from the ideological position that belongs to social democracy . It has always been difficult to conduct politics without the support of a financier, and today it is impossible, just as it is impossible to consistently represent the originally leftist principles and expect sponsorship from some transitional hunter who became that thanks to trampling on those principles. This natural conflict with accumulated money forces the left into more alternative ways of political struggle, and these possibilities are almost inexhaustible in the time we live in, thanks to the increasingly diverse forms of virtual organization. The fact that these methods are more effectively applied today by the right, with all its obsession with tradition and the past, is one of the indicators of the perversion of our political scene. In order for it to normalize, it is necessary for the left to act with more self-confidence and less compromises, because these compromises always benefited those with whom the left made them and thus enabled them to keep us in two furrows for thirty years.