Capillary Ochlocracy: An Attempt to Describe Serbian Democratorship and Possible Solutions
Read the full speech of Svetlana Slapšak, at the International Conference “In Effect, Do We Elect?” in Belgrade held on 23. October 2024.
Ochlocracy is a Greek compound word meaning “rule of the mob,” first used by the ancient Greek historian Polybius. Here, I use it as an operational term to describe the current mode of governance in Serbia.
In 1990, during the first free elections in Serbia, I was a member of the polling board, the entire day observing people voting. One particular behavior stood out: elderly women with visible signs of excitement, not the positive one – shaking, some even crying. Far from enthusiasm over new democratic possibilities, they expressed deep fear. I understood part of this as a remnant of the previous era that just ended, where many believed it was best to avoid politics, regardless of the relatively limited career opportunities. Attitudes towards party membership, the only available form of political participation unless one was involved in dissident circles and thus excluded from standard careers, outlined a hard-to-understand map of class and social stratification in Yugoslavia. Recruiting for the Communist Party had long ceased to be aggressive, and while multiparty system ideas were attacked, they still circulated. Regarding party membership, opportunism prevailed among the wider population, sometimes openly cynical. Not being in the party implied a moral stance against open moral corruption, though it could also stem from deep religious belief or nationalism, or old class resistance.
A part of society that created opinion and culture is especially interesting: in the early 1950s, after the break with the USSR, Yugoslavia’s nomenclature, led by Tito, embraced modernization (abstract visual art, for example), with occasional outbursts, that is the non-standardized, “spontaneous” censorship, despite the official stance that censorship didn’t exist. This encouraged visual artists but made writers more cautious, and sciences that focused on society faced risks. Regional mutations also occurred: in the late 1960s, Croatia’s Communist Party under Bakaric decided to promote and fund academic feminism as a way to combat the rising tide of nationalism among intellectuals. Nothing similar happened in Serbia, at least not regarding feminism.
In the cultural sphere, a specific phenomenon emerged – a distinct lack of concern for social issues and an aestheticism devoid of criticism, which suited the party. The paradox of an author who was a party member yet cultivated total disinterest in reality was common, as was the so-called “prose of reality,” which focused on bodily excretions more than criticizing the conditions in which the protagonists lived. This is why the “black wave” in film, with its polysemy, faced such passionate denials and bans. The same happened to theater, engaged science, literature, and even – though rarely – painting, if it involved a critical stance towards reality. All this contributed to the opposition’s perception that freedom of expression was the most important goal of political change; only later, in the late 1980s, did human rights become equally important goal alongside freedom of expression. Soon after Tito’s death, the opposition itself was split into two unequal and politically conflicting groups – the larger, consistently nationalist one, where collective and historical rights replaced human rights, historical revisionism took over the scientific objectivity, and mythomania social issues, along with pronounced anti-socialism and a primitive (mis)understanding of capitalism, and the smaller group, which remained committed to equality at all levels, from individual to minority and national rights, increasingly focused on social issues, and aligned with Yugoslavism and pacifism. To this day, this smaller group remains a fixed primary enemy in all the new states formed after Yugoslavia, without any real political influence. From its initial opposition role, the first group quickly became the core of local elites and the driving force behind state propaganda. Only by studying the emergence of opposition movements in the 1980s can we understand the current inability of the parliamentary, official opposition, its sterility, and, despite its elite background and education, its astonishing political stupidity.
I am mentioning these familiar facts primarily to highlight how changes in collective customs and behaviors couldn’t have happened overnight, with the 1990 elections, they required more time and less nationalist propaganda. The collective retardation in terms of parliamentary democracy was followed by a dangerously long period, still not concluded today, of the lack of reflection and accountability for the war, which is the deepest and greatest cause of the emergence of capillary ochlocracy in Serbia. Other causes stem from violations of the Constitution, from media manipulation aimed at collective psychological changes, and – admittedly – from a fundamental change in social relations based on a new attitude towards work, social insecurity and dependence on the will of the “chosen ones”. And all this without relying on ideology, but solely on basic, stripped-down nationalism and a distinctly original propaganda approach – placing the entire citizenry in the role of a patient listener-psychoanalyst of the one, collective son-ruler.
The foundation of today’s Serbian democratorship, which has already exceeded Milosevic’s 11-year rule, lies in the violation of the Constitution, most obviously seen in the juggling of the roles and prerogatives of the prime minister and the president. This scandal of perverting the foundation of the legal system has enabled a vertical chain of similar actions, extending to the electoral process. Every rule in the state and society has become a subject of manipulation, or rather, fraud. Horizontally, in such circumstances, a capillary system has developed, holding party membership devoid of any distinctiveness or solid structure. Party membership became
the exclusive criterion for employment and survival in society: everything else became an arena for insecurity, fear and additional psychotic states accompanying such a daily reality: this is why I believe that Serbian democratorship is a phenomenon that must be, though it still hasn’t been, examined, understood and eventually changed with the help of collective psychology. Only in this way can we understand the tears and fear of elections shown by elderly women in 1990, and how this transformed into the guaranteed, routine, repetitive electoral victory of today’s Serbian democratorship.
Serbia’s democratorship requires that active participants – who alone can be elected – either are or will become mob-like figures. They operate through lies, tricks, fraud, corruption, usually without the need to explain; the only form of communication with the public that is not allowed is exclusive behavior of the general, common son-ruler. Passive participants are placed in a position of unconditional acceptance of dirty compromises, blackmail, threats and instability in everyday life. This isn’t just about the agonizing observation of distant high authority, but about the brutal pressure of such politics on the individual everywhere, in everything and without end. At the same time, the individual is subjected to immoral, orgiastic behavior by fictional or real figures offered by poverty-stricken media (television, tabloid trash, or occasionally social media) as the only relief and entertainment. I’ll summarize this description with an operational but, I believe, convincing hypothesis: the voter in Serbia has been stripped of human dignity. A large number of such individuals find their solution in surrendering to the system, in some kind of ritualized ecstasy of worshiping the ruler-son: it would be extremely superficial and irresponsible to place the blame on this victorious mass – it merely shows the extreme consequences of the psychological pressure with which the democratorship governs. Those who do not wish to live such a life must voluntarily exclude themselves from any civic activity, leading to their strong individual will and ethical composure only further supporting the system they wish to resist.
Is there a cure for this, and can it be changed? Experience with protests, uprisings and civic actions provides some pragmatic frameworks. One of them is clear: collaboration with the official opposition is undoubtedly an important cause of the failure of civic actions. By official opposition I mean the party system, which is entirely incapable of escaping the business of the sole ruling party and only contributes to the strengthening of such meta-system; I also mean the moral contamination by the meta-system. What remains is diverse civic action that promises systemic change, in which there should be no place not only for the current democratorship but for all who participated in it. Serbia’s problem here is not unique, this is a global phenomenon: even in Europe, the range and diversity of democratorships are expanding.
What I am about to present is not a joke, though it may seem so at first glance: it is about a form of democracy that is eponymous, one that gave the name and formed the term. Due to the lack of its application, the term is still not precise. “Lack of application” is relative: there are many non-European direct democracies, only in Europe, which claims “democracy” as its own, while the direct ancient, predominantly Athenian, democracy never realized on a state or group level, except in occasional student, artistic or anarchist endeavors. Athenian democracy was also incomplete, excluding women, foreigners and slaves. The rules thus applied only to adult men, registered in their municipalities, sons of Athenian fathers and mothers, whose fathers were Athenian citizens. But I am interested only in one procedure, which could be acceptable primarily at the local level, and at the same time useful in the process of replacing democratorship, as well as a model for future governance, once we finally realize that parliamentary democracy has been lost in poor usage, spent and unrecoverable. It is about voting by lot.
The basics of direct democracy, which make sense to apply today, can be listed as follows:
- Everyone has the right to decide on any issue they want, whenever they want, in free debate in the assembly; the time spent in the assembly, which never has the same composition, is compensated with a daily allowance after a full day’s work.
- All citizens are equally good at governing, whose foundation is the benefit and protection of other citizens. The term of office is one year, while accountability lasts a lifetime.
- Selection by lot for all governing and administrative positions is therefore the only feasible method.
In today’s practice, this would mean that party careerism makes no sense, even less so an election campaign. The assembly functions without elections. This may seem impossible at first, but is actually already happening. One of the main reasons for rejecting such or similar democracy is simply the numbers – direct democracy is based on small numbers of participants. However, today’s local actions, which transcend local boundaries, highlight perhaps the most important applicable aspect of direct democracy – action in favor of others. Citizens of Novi Sad are protesting against lithium mining that threatens the citizens of Macva and are traveling to demonstrations in Loznica. There is no better example of the functioning of modern direct democracy.
A major problem with civic initiatives is their rapid exhaustion and the gradual waning of action, with fewer and fewer participants. Direct democracy, with the institutionalization of the rule “I vote when I want” solves this problem.
I am aware of what reactions such thinking can provoke. About 30 years ago, in 1995, in Amsterdam, I was elaborating the idea of election by lot in a public debate with members of parliament, and one participant reacted with horror. He said that this meant we could randomly select a fascist. I responded with a question – would you prefer to elect them in parliamentary elections, which triggered a strong reaction from the audience. This year, in the Netherlands, where 30 years ago they couldn’t even imagine electing fascists and considered such an idea offensive, they elected a fascist by a majority vote, who cannot even form a government or become its president. The same just occurred in Austria, and almost happened in France… Parliamentary democracy can no longer respond to new social conditions, and a repair or replacement is necessary. The question is whether parliamentary democracy can do this on its own. There are already buzzwords like “participatory” democracy, which mostly refers to local, let’s say municipal forms of citizen participation in governance. ”Self-governance”, a much better-adapted term, is still on the associative blacklist. On the other hand, what civic movements, or simply connected human movements, create as a new social reality, with all their failures, deviations, instability and chaos, occasionally and from time to time show some success. “Occasionally” and “from time to time” is incomparably better than democratorship.
Let’s also mention chaos: it’s probably what most citizens fear the most when voting, and the fear is often disproportionate to the chaos in which the voting takes place. In the mix of fear and the desire for a balanced life – let’s remember the tears of those elderly women – the imagined chaos, even in outline, hinders collective reason and citizen knowledge and is certainly not a favorite concept of political scientists. Among the relatively few authors discussing chaos in social sciences is the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis. Reflecting precisely on Athenian democracy, he developed the concept of chaos as ontogenetically linked to democracy: change, improvement, conflict of ideas are the fundamental characteristics of democratic practice. Such practice can never be in conflict with progress, which is one of the main problems of today’s parliamentary system. On the other hand, it equally allows for slowing down and traditionalism, if they benefit society. Let’s imagine expanding democratic practices today with moves that most parliaments would declare chaotic: expanding human rights, for example, the right to housing or the right to water as a public good; the latter measure was written into Slovenia’s Constitution after a successful referendum four years ago, initiated by a small non-governmental society. Democratic chaos would be limited by the lifelong accountability of every citizen, especially the proposer. Let’s add to this the unbearable attitudes of most European states towards non-citizens, towards migrants, who are certainly our future in two senses – there will be more of them, and we will eventually become migrants ourselves. A democratic measure for this could be the stance, and with it an organization that operates based on that stance: the author is Elie Wiesel, and it states “no person is illegal”. This rule is found in UN documents: how it is being implemented can be seen, for example, in the refugee agreement from Marrakesh a few years ago and the difficulties in formulating and signing that agreement. The echo of inhumanity and rejection is seen in the formulation of “legal” versus “illegal” refugees: it is in complete opposition to the stance of Elie Wiesel and the UN and hypocritically relates to the factual situation – such as the number and existence of European consulates in Africa and Asia, which are supposed to resolve the legality of refugee status.
The rehabilitation of democratic chaos will inevitably come with the downfall or dismantling of democratorship, whichever term you prefer. The key question remains – how? And the answer is always the same: nonviolently. Two processes, one long and one short, will inevitably increase tension, even when the democratorship no longer exists: one is collective learning, acquiring and utilizing collective civic reason (for which citizenship is not a condition), which is long, the other is replacing the structure of power, which had better be short. The most important thing is to establish helping others as a collective social goal, as only that will ensure that no one is afraid, and elderly women will not cry when they vote.
