More of a bloomer rant I think this time around.

I think a good chunk of you already know but there’s a lot of civil unrest going on in my country (Serbia) as of the last couple of months.

Went to protests and blockades once a week basically. Helped me out a bit mentally ngl. I went to two with a long time childhood friend and a third one with an org group I decided to join. They were pretty chill and nice too. So I’m really glad I could do some ground work. Though we didn’t use symbols since we respect the students rules of no political symbols but we still had a good time. Met the general secretary too.

Besides that some lib opposition activist groups tried to infiltrate some protests and blockades but failed miserably. With self-organized college students telling them to fuck off basically. In the end the libs blamed both the radical left and right lmao. So that’s pretty good.

Also since I got ghosted by some studio’s HR for a 2D animator position 2 months ago I thought I’d start making some stuff for YouTube. Basically fulfilling my middle school me’s dream lol. Though I’m still unsure about It.

Still that’s kinda about It. I thank ya’ll for the support :D

  • grandepequeno [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    14 days ago

    These student protests have been organized in an anarchst manner from the very start and decisiona are made through direct democracy. The demands have been clear from the very start and haven’t changed in the past 3 months that we’ve been protesting.

    That’s pretty much what the subject of the Bevins’ book I mentioned is about, it’s called “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution”, the movements he analyzed (sometimes having been there in person) had pretty much that configuration too, and that has strenghts and weaknesses that ended up driving said movements into, for example, in Brazil, proto-bolsonarista politics, in ukraine, the maidan, in egypt, the sissi coup etc.

    It’s a paradox because it’s precisely that leaderless, low comittment (dip in and dip out), directly democratic (in the essence of rejecting representation) of these movements (and I assume in serbia too) that leads MORE PEOPLE to participate, it’s just that he makes a point that because there isn’t a leader, or a representative, eventually that can develop a political vacum where people DO start looking for someone to represent them and carry their aims, because that vacum has to be filled.

    It’s also a fact that most of the time there already absolutely are leaders of the movements, they’re just neither appointed not public, but there for sure are people who are well connected inside the movement (in some cases in control of the social media accounts that schedule the protests) to exercise more control over them than your average low comittment protestor, but because this hierarchy isn’t revealed, and there aren’t institutional ways to participate in it, some nasty people or nasty politics can come out on top, sometimes by just literally beating up leftists into being driven out…

    So yeah it’s complicated.