Crisis and Class-Struggle in Slovenia

Details: Published on Thursday, 13 November 2014 22:22; Written by editor

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1055 .... November 14, 2014
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Crisis and Class-Struggle in Slovenia:

The Growing Momentum of Socialist Politics

Jaša Lategano

For many liberal spectators, Slovenia was for a long time considered a success story of transition from a ‘socialist dictatorship’ into a ‘parliamentary democracy’ based on a market economy. In the winter of 2012, however, mass popular uprisings swept through the larger cities and eventually brought down the far-right neoliberal government of the Slovenian Democratic Party. What followed was more or less a continuation of the same policies under a nominally ‘centre-left’ government. In a similar way that Tony Blair could be considered Margaret Thatcher's greatest achievement, the technocratic approach to dealing with the manifold crisis devastating Slovenian society in general and the historical achievements of labour movement in particular, has... become the universal language spoken by all political forces, often including those of organized labour. It seems, considering the socio-economic situation in the entire European periphery, that the subsumption of all spheres of society under the profit-driven rule of capitalist accumulation has only really begun for Slovenia.

After the collapse of Yugoslav socialism, two fractions of the bourgeoisie emerged. The ‘transitional-left’ national bourgeoisie, that played the key role in ‘gradualist’ transition between 1992 and 2004, and the more radical, ‘neoliberal’ comprador bourgeoisie, which shifted the restructuring of society to the more typical European ‘shock doctrine’ of privatization, flexibilization and deregulation. Despite the bankruptcy of Marxist theory and socialist political struggle, after a decade of marginalization on behalf of the national bourgeoisie, and another decade of outright demonization from the comprador bourgeoisie, several civil initiatives formed over the past ten years. As the socio-economic situation worsened, a space was once again created for a radical critique of capitalism as an inhuman system of accumulation, tending toward a global totality. Though most of these initiatives were partial in their political struggles as well as their methods of struggle, forming, disintegrating and re-emerging with every new particular struggle, a handful managed to form more permanent, organized structures and coalitions.
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