At first glance, the two socialist city council members seem to hold the upper hand. Besides the advantage of incumbency, both have outraised their opponents, with Avilés having drawn more than double the amount in private donations than that of her leading challenger, Ling Ye. (New York’s new matching funds program means a candidate’s private donations can end up being only a fraction of their overall total.)

But it’s the outside spending, the “independent expenditures” by groups backing one or more campaigns, that makes clear just how intent big money interests are on ousting the two. Avilés’s and Hanif’s opponents have so far benefited from a combined total of nearly $305,000 in outside spending in their favor, in the form of digital ads, leaflets, and mass mailing. There is so far no reported outside spending backing either socialist city council member.

That outside spending is coming almost entirely from business interests the two socialist incumbents have clashed with over their time on the council. One is the real estate lobby. The Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), a powerful real estate trade association, has upped its spending for this election threefold from two years ago, to nearly $240,000. More than half of that total has gone toward backing one candidate: Avilés’s challenger Ye.

That enormous sum was made possible by donations from just eighteen mostly real estate firms based in New York, all but two of which gave REBNY’s campaign entity — named “Jobs for New York” — at least $45,000 each. That list includes names like Vornado Realty, Rudin Management, RXR, and Jack Resnick & Sons.

Avilés has clashed with the real estate sector by vehemently denouncing rent hikes and calling for a citywide rent freeze and has over the years introduced and cosponsored a suite of bills strengthening tenants’ rights. Public records show that over the past year and a half alone, REBNY has directly lobbied on more than a dozen bills strengthening regulations on landlords and commercial property owners that both Avilés and Hanif have cosponsored or introduced. The trade group has also lobbied on a major zoning reform that both voted for and that Avilés worked to add affordable housing funding into, and on New York’s City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement, of which Avilés has been a major champion and wants expanded.

Also spending big on these elections is Madison Square Garden Entertainment, the company that owns and operates the storied New York venue and has been controlled by the family of former Cablevision CEO James Dolan. The firm’s outside spending vehicle, the Coalition to Restore New York, has put $13,000 toward digital ads promoting Ye and has put its biggest single-spending total, $39,000, behind the candidacy of Maya Kornberg, Hanif’s challenger in the Thirty-Ninth District, presenting her as the progressive candidate fighting for “an affordable, sustainable, and inclusive” city that will end homelessness and invest in schools.

Both socialist incumbents have run afoul of the company for backing legislation, authored by Hanif, banning the use of facial-recognition technology and other biometric data-gathering by private firms like MSG, which records show lobbied against the bill in 2023. Hanif made specific reference to MSG’s abuse of the technology when she reintroduced that bill this year, complaining that “New Yorkers shouldn’t have to endure dystopian biometric scans to cheer for the Knicks.”

Hanif and Avilés were also part of the unanimous city council vote two years ago that gave the arena its shortest-ever permit. This came after MSG had furiously lobbied that year for a permit with no expiration date, hiring three lobbying firms alongside its in-house efforts, and whom it paid nearly $600,000 to work on the issue.

Also wading into the races is Uber, whose PAC — which is funded by a single $2.5 million donation from the rideshare app company — has poured a whopping nearly $814,000 backing ten city council candidates, $100,000 of which has gone to mailers promoting Kornberg. That sum alone is more than Hanif has raised in total from private donors.

The Uber NY PAC is being run by Joel Aurora, a partner at California lawyer-lobbyist firm Nielsen Merksamer Parrinello Gross & Leoni, which counts among its clients firms like AstraZeneca, Bank of America, and Comcast. The firm doesn’t lobby in New York City and doesn’t count Uber as one of its clients in California — but Aurora, among the many ways he helps corporate clients navigate government issues, does list helping operate independent expenditure committees on their behalf.

Hanif has been a vocal champion for rideshare workers, calling out Uber and Lyft for deactivating the accounts of drivers as a way to underpay them and urging drivers to file a claim for their share of a $328 million wage theft settlement the state won against the companies. Uber has also spent thousands of dollars the past three years lobbying on various pieces of legislation Hanif has cosponsored on behalf of rideshare drivers and other gig workers, legislation that proposed: extending worker protections and minimum pay rates to workers of delivery services like DoorDash; mandating higher pay for rideshare drivers and banning rideshare apps from deactivating them without just cause; and extending guaranteed paid leave to some independent contractors, a bill she introduced.

In some cases, Uber lobbied Hanif’s office directly over the legislation. One of the Uber lobbyists who paid thousands of dollars to lobby her, other councilmembers, and City Hall more generally on these bills and other matters is Josh Gold, who has also personally donated $250 to Kornberg’s campaign and is listed as the only other official of the Uber NY PAC.

Uber’s PAC also gave $50,000 to the same “Jobs for New York” that has spent heavily to defeat Avilés in the Thirty-Eighth District. Avilés has cosponsored much of the same gig-worker-related legislation as Hanif and introduced her own, which Uber and Gold have lobbied on — suggesting a level of coordination between the outside spending groups.

Taking a page out of the Israel First lobby’s playbook on the national stage, the ads this money is funding make no mention of the incumbents’ positions on these issues and are mostly devoid of policy beyond accusing them of wanting to defund the police. In the Thirty-Eighth, they instead paint Avilés as more interested in protesting than being effective, and Ye — who opposes a rent freeze and emphasizes the cost of city contracts for sheltering New York’s homeless — as the candidate backing safer streets and affordable housing. When Avilés confronted Ye in a recent debate about the real estate–funded mailers attacking her, Ye claimed ignorance and said that she is “not backed by any groups or organizations.”

The candidates’ respective lists of donors make this corporate affinity clearer. The socialist incumbents’ donors tend to be dotted with professors, nonprofits, students, educators, and other government employees, as well as health, tech, arts, and union workers. The challengers’ donor lists are peppered with real estate, finance, and investment firms, business executives, and, in Kronberg’s case, venture capitalists and corporate lawyers.

That includes names like Joshua Nash of investment firm Ulysses Management, hedge funder John Petry, pharmaceutical executive Sherrie Glass, former News Corp executive and Rupert Murdoch advisor Gary Ginsberg, and private equity maven Eric Edell. Some have already drawn controversy, like Leonard Blavatnik, a major donor to the British Conservative Party, who also gave $1 million to Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural fund. Others, like venture capitalist Lee Fixel and his wife, real estate empire scions Edward and Ezra Stern, and billionaire hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, have donated to both.

This onslaught of corporate money has been accompanied by the involvement of the local pro-Israel lobby, which has similarly intervened in the races.

Avilés and Hanif have each made waves by backing a cease-fire in Gaza and supporting Palestinian justice more broadly, and both races have come to be viewed as proxy battles in the larger intraparty struggle over the Democrats’ position on the war, even as their opponents have avoided centering the issue. Kornberg said in an interview she had for months “been praying for” a cease-fire but criticized Hanif for having “prioritized” the issue at the city council, while Avilés has charged that Ye had shocked her by privately telling her that “people should just leave Gaza.”

Ye and Kornberg are both officially endorsed by Solidarity PAC, a pro-Israel committee formed last year by political operatives of both major parties that, rather than making direct donations itself, directs donors to give to particular candidates. New York Focus determined that Solidarity PAC has raised roughly $80,000 for city council candidates this year, including $9,060 and $13,400 for Ye and Kornberg, respectively. Ye’s campaign has also received $175 personally from Sara Forman, Solidarity PAC’s treasurer.

In between railing against left-wing groups and officials in the city, Forman penned an article this past spring that outlined the thinking undergirding the work of herself and groups like Solidarity PAC: disaffected left-wing Jews, she wrote, have formed their own organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow that, together with left-wing groups like Democratic Socialists of America — which have backed both Avilés and Hanifa — “have been smart to treat internal [Democratic] party politics as the crucial battleground.” At stake is the question of “which Jewish voices will determine the future of the Democratic Party,” she wrote, and it is time for “liberals and moderates to save the party from its own activist class,” noting that it could be done at “a fraction of the campaign cost.”

“A competitive New York State Assembly race, for example, will cost around $450,000, which amounts to a rounding error in a competitive US House race,” Forman pointedly wrote.

Solidarity PAC isn’t the only pro-Israel organization weighing in. Hanif has also weathered more than $13,000 worth of flyers from Brooklyn BridgeBuilders, which presents itself as a group of disaffected former supporters who turned against her after October 7; it raised an early $15,000 with the help of Rep. Ritchie Torres, the notorious Israel First congressman funded by Trump donors and other right-wing financiers. The flyers lobbed a range of attacks on Hanif’s record, including by taking a page out of pro-Israel groups’ tactics at the national level and accusing her of being a disloyal Democrat undermining the party. 

The pro-Israel and corporate lobbies aren’t simply working together — they’re sometimes one and the same. The donors New York Focus identified as being part of Solidarity PAC’s money push for the city council races — like Nash, the Fixels, the Stern family, and Deep Track Capital’s David Kroin and his wife — are also major players in real estate and finance. One of Solidarity PAC’s listed officers and donors, Adeena Rosen, is married to hedge funder David Rosen of Rubric Capital; the two are among Ye and Kornberg’s donors, and previously backed Republican Lee Zeldin (now busy dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency on Trump’s behalf) when he ran for governor.

Listed last year as having “operational control” over Solidarity PAC is Hal Fetner, another New York real estate titan who sits on the executive board of the same REBNY that has spent nearly $140,000 backing Ye. Fetner’s wife and daughter also gave $175 each to her campaign, while the Durst Organization, which Fetner’s real estate firm was once merged with, contributed $45,000 to REBNY’s “Jobs for New York” PAC.

Meanwhile, another donor to Ye and Kornberg, hedge fund manager Loeb, also funds the New York Solidarity Network (NYSN) headed by Solidarity PAC’s Forman. Forman has described NYSN as a “centrist Jewish membership organization” set up to defeat critics of Israel running for office, by giving money to their opponents and urging non-Democrats to register for the party and vote in its primaries.

With this high-profile and well-funded support, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that, as Forman alluded to in her spring op-ed, Jewish opinion is far from uniform on the topic of Israel. Jews for Racial and Economic Justice is backing both Avilés and Hanif, who has also been endorsed by Jewish city comptroller Brad Lander, and each has received donations from executives of Jewish institutions.

What’s happening in New York is part of a wider trend. Last year, I led a statistical analysis of the donors behind the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)’s super PAC, United Democracy Project (UDP), which had put Squad members and other Israel critics in its crosshairs during the Democratic primary contests. While the standard progressive criticism of AIPAC and UDP is that many of these pro-Israel donors wading into Democratic primaries are Republicans and specifically Trump backers — which is true — a full picture of the campaign finance data tells a bigger story.

That story is the growing political convergence between the pro-Israel lobby and corporate interests: nearly two-thirds of UDP’s donors were top-level executives, and half came from finance, insurance, and real estate alone. Just as we’re seeing in New York, these donors often had business interests that clashed with the political work of lawmakers they were targeting: at least a dozen, for instance, headed firms that sat on the American Investment Council, a private equity trade group that vocally opposed the Build Back Better bill championed by progressives because it would have raised taxes.

The big money flooding into the New York City Council elections this year solidifies that this convergence isn’t only happening in national elections but is becoming an intrinsic feature of US politics at every level. Despite its high-profile scalps in 2024, AIPAC had an overall poor track record in defeating the Left that year. In less than a month, we will find out if pro-Israel group’s attempt to spend socialists out of existence in New York will be a show of its strength — or a similar show of weakness.

Born in 1933 in Los Angeles, Ostrom grew up during the Depression against the backdrop of a socially conservative America and worked as an economist until her death in 2012, at the age of seventy-eight. At school, she was denied the opportunity to study mathematics because she was a woman, a slight that had a long-lasting impact on her career.

Later, when she applied for doctoral study at the University of California Los Angeles, she was denied entry to the economics program because of her lack of earlier training in mathematics. She decided instead to study for a PhD in political science, a move that made her alert to the depoliticizing tendencies of the discipline she would come to shape. Her PhD, completed in 1965, focused on the management of shared groundwater in Southern California.

Perhaps surprisingly for someone whose work had an egalitarian bent, Ostrom associated with and participated in conservative circles. Between 1982 and 1984, she was president of the Public Choice Society. The tradition of public choice is rooted in the assumption that policymakers are self-seeking, that the capitalist market is a public good, and that privatization is desirable.

While she did not entirely accept the dominant ideology of neoliberal economics, she shared many of its assumptions. This put limits on her work that economists of the Left seeking to engage with her thinking would have to overcome.

One of the prime targets of Ostrom’s work was the aforementioned “free rider problem,” which purported to show that if a person cannot be excluded from the benefits provided by the collective action of others, then that person is motivated not to participate but to “free-ride” on gains of the others.

Perhaps the most pernicious variant of the free-rider problem was what the ecologist Garrett Hardin called the “tragedy of the commons.” In 1968, Hardin used the example of common grazing land to argue that, while it is in everyone’s interest to cooperate, individuals follow their self-interest and exploit shared resources until they are exhausted. Avoiding this tragedy required extinguishing the commons by state control or privatization.

Hardin’s thesis became popular in conservative circles as part of a backlash against a rising tide of left-wing environmentalism that had emerged in the early 1960s. For example, the marine biologist Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring illuminated the link between corporate capital’s profit-seeking and increasingly widespread environmental destruction caused by pesticides. She proposed greater regulation of pesticide use and greater government accountability and public awareness to counter corporations’ ability to damage the environment.

Hardin’s thesis, by contrast, blamed individual’s self-interest, rather than corporate capital, for environmental degradation.

Ostrom expanded her writing about common-pool resources (CPRs) in the 1980s, when movements for environmental protection and justice were in the news. But she did not see her work as contributing to such struggles.

From the late 1960s onward, the Brazilian military dictatorship began opening the Amazon forest to “development” — a euphemism for land speculation, deforestation, logging, and the expansion of cattle ranching. In opposition to these forces, social movements, often collaborating with radical elements of the Catholic church, fought for their rights to live in and manage the natural resources of the Amazon.

By the 1980s, these struggles — especially following the murder of the Brazilian trade union leader Chico Mendes — were becoming increasingly visible and popular among populations in the Global North.

Following Brazil’s transition to democracy in the 1980s, these social movements succeeded in forcing the Brazilian state to establish new commons for rubber tappers and fisherfolk who hunted along the rivers and estuaries of the Amazon.

Such struggles were not part of Ostrom’s notion of collective action. She instead provided an image of harmonious collective action that could preserve natural resources.

Ostrom took issue with the assumptions the free-rider problem made about the individual. “Users [of resources] are pictured as trapped in a situation they cannot change. Thus, it is argued that solutions must be imposed on users by external authorities,” she wrote in a 1999 academic paper.

Through numerous empirical studies, she showed how individuals cooperate to organize resource use in ways that are environmentally sustainable. She attributed to people the ability to communicate and to establish “institutions resembling neither the state nor the market to govern some resource systems with reasonable degrees of success over long periods of time.”

Her interlinked notions of CPRs and collective governance explain how collective action by individuals can successfully regulate resource use.

CPRs are human-constructed and natural resources where a) it is difficult to exclude potential beneficiaries, and b) exploitation of the resource by one user reduces its availability for others. CPRs include terrestrial and marine ecosystems — ranging from forests to groundwater basins to irrigation systems to fishing stocks.

CPRs can be governed by a range of institutional arrangements that shape individuals’ behavior and subsequent economic and environmental outcomes. For example, in the early 1970s in southwest Turkey, the Alanya fishing community was riven with conflict and suffering from unpredictable catches and rising costs due to unregulated fishing. In response, the community found its own collective solution to this problem.

They worked together to establish a cooperative that registered all eligible fishers and identified usable fishing locations. Boats could fish in these locations between September and May (to enable reproduction of fish stocks during the summer). Every September, each registered boat was allocated to a fishing location. They spent one day in each location before moving to the next one.

In this way, each boat had equal access and opportunity to harvest the sea, fish stock replenishment was ensured, prior conflicts were practically eliminated, and predictability (and hence incomes) maximized.

Alanya, Ostrom argued in her book Governing the Commons, “provides an example of a self-governed common-property arrangement in which the rules have been devised and modified by the participants themselves and also are monitored and enforced by them.”

Ostrom married her radical ideas about cooperation to some rather conventional ones about economics. She wrote that the “competitive market — the epitome of private institutions — is itself a public good.” What this ignored was the fact that unequal power within the market effected the ability of agents within it to make rational decisions about the collective management of social goods.

While she drew on anthropological and sociological studies for her work, she filtered these insights through the narrow conceptual lens of new institutional economics (NIE), an outlook that recognized the role of the state and other social institutions in shaping market behavior while holding onto a rational-choice view of individual actions within the market.

Consequently, questions of class and power remained absent from her analysis. This omission did serious harm. Thanks to it, she missed the key driver of the degradation of the commons and environmental destruction: unequal class power.

But while Ostrom may have held onto assumptions that undermined the radical insights of her theory, later interpreters of her work did not.

For example, Craig Johnson, a political scientist, has written about how economic inequalities affect how inshore fisheries in Thailand are managed:

Even for the relatively well-endowed owner-operators, however, the benefits that accrued from common property were barely keeping pace with the escalating costs of coastal fishing and variable returns. Indeed, the only households who appeared to be “getting ahead” in the industry were those with the capital, influence and contacts to command new or vital market niches, such as contract processing and direct marketing.

Ostrom, by treating capitalist markets as natural, missed the pivotal moment in the establishment of these markets: the destruction of the commons by the enclosures. This was an insight that Karl Marx, writing more than a century earlier, had gleaned in Capital.

In the chapter entitled “Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land,” Marx describes how between the fifteenth and nineteenth century, “the systematic theft of communal property was of great assistance in swelling large farms and in ‘setting free’ the agricultural population as a proletariat for the needs of industry.”

But Ostrom, despite moving far from the dogmas of her discipline, was unable to see the harm that imbalances of power have on society. This proved fatal for her understanding of global environmental destruction. In an article written for the World Bank, she wrote how

while many of the effects of climate change are global, the causes of climate change are the actions undertaken by individuals, families, firms, and actors at a much smaller scale.

Such a formulation would be music to the ears of the hundred firms responsible for over 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, who have collaborated to obscure their environmental impacts. This tendency to equate individuals, families, and firms stemmed from Ostrom’s NIE approach. But it did not condemn her thinking to irrelevance.

Her ideas continue to be useful as a counter to justifications of privatization and for local-level management of resources. Yet her notion of cooperation between individuals was founded upon the assumption that the definition of success was the sustainable use of local resources through capitalist markets.

Decades of environmental destruction combined with rising inequality have proved the incompatibility of free markets, democracy, and the common good. Against the backdrop of today’s social and environmental crisis, Ostrom’s writing remains valuable, both as a critique of the pathologies of the present and as evidence of the shortcomings of market-oriented solutions to these problems.

General exhaustion, or outright burnout, is visible across the board. We see it among students, assemblies, strikers, workers of all kinds and all tax brackets, and among teachers and professors. It’s found among public sector pharmacists facing the threat of privatization and drivers for Belgrade’s public transport company, whose routes are now changed so frequently — due to student or pro-government blockades — that they no longer even know where they’re going.

Citizens’ donations for students and teachers keeping up the blockades are not as generous as they used to be. Many small business owners are seeing a drop in turnover, and freelancers are watching their gigs dry up. And no, this isn’t (only) the result of the blockades: the cost of living has long exceeded average incomes in Serbia, with inflation among the highest in Europe. Many, not just teachers and professors involved in the blockades, haven’t received their salaries. We’ve been pushing forward, or “pumping it up” as a popular slogan has it, for a full six months now. For those who could at least somewhat afford it, this has meant putting life on hold — and now the time has come to settle the bill. At least that’s how the room reads.

When it comes to tallying the numbers, it may seem that the blockades and protests have not yielded any significant political victories. None of the students’ core demands — insisting on accountability for the Novi Sad train station disaster — have been fully met. The prime minister was indeed brought down, only to be swiftly replaced by a new one. Smaller, single-issue citizen protests — against numerous city-killing “urbicide” and “development” initiatives, such as the demolition of the Sava Bridge to benefit of the Belgrade Waterfront project — have similarly borne no fruit. Instead, these projects continue apace in Belgrade and across Serbia. Furthermore, the government is strengthening its grip with many different actions, through legislative pressure on (public) universities and the judicial prosecution of protesters.

Yet, looking at things another way, a whole new world has opened up, and within it, a new kind of politics: horizontal, directly democratic, grounded in blockade and strike tactics, and open to greater unionization and support for labor struggles. Alongside this, a new kind of culture has emerged, marked by (transgenerational) solidarity, empathy, and nonviolence.

“Actually, the most radical part of this isn’t the surface level — the demands themselves fall within a representative and liberal-democratic framework — but the organizing level. The model of plenums [collective assemblies] very easily took root among students, because in moments when we need to organize, it’s almost instinctive — if we’re facing a problem and need to confront it, it’s natural to think of ourselves as equals and to make decisions collectively,” said Ivana Kovačević, a sociology master’s student involved in the blockade. Students realized that this structure protects them from various influences, from their struggle being co-opted, and that it also brings people physically in one place, creating a sense of community.

This new culture has not been confined to university buildings. In a Letter to the People of Serbia, published in March, students issued an appeal for “everybody to assemble.” They called on the general population to organize and form direct-democratically organized people’s assemblies (Zbor) in their locales, as a way of returning sovereignty to the people and taking decisions about Serbia’s future into their own hands. People’s assemblies started flourishing across the country, much as university blockades spread at the end of 2024. Many of these are still in full vigor, with their own objectives, procedures, working groups, and a range of actions, rallies, and public forums held already, as well as established in cooperation with each other.

Another important recent milestone was the May 1 protest, organized jointly by students and five national unions. Students for the first time directly linked labor issues and the Novi Sad rail station disaster, casting this not only in terms of the prevailing “anti-corruption” discourse but — as a representative of the student body at the protest put it — as “consequences of a decades-long collapse of the economy and society, which has mostly harmed working people.” For the trade union scene, co-opted and divided by the government authorities, May 1 was also an historic occasion that produced a draft of Amendments to the Labor Law and the Law on Strikes, prepared by unions and students, as a necessary prerequisite of a new social contract.

The people’s assemblies and cooperation with unions did not sit well with the liberals who populate oppositional media channels and who were eagerly (but unsuccessfully) pushing for their long-held dream of a nonelected, expert government. While the Left in Serbia is decimated, similarly to other countries across the post-communist world, there is a vibrant and committed array of smaller left and anarchist-left organizations, including the Party of Radical Left (PRL).

In a real Red Scare atmosphere, these groups have become a target, depicted in pro-regime tabloids as well as in oppositional liberal media as Khmer Rouge and Bolshevik infiltrators in the student body who are orchestrating blockades from within. Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is, exaggerating the influence and numbers of left groups. Liberal commentators attacked students also, especially those from Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade who had consistently insisted on “systemic change” more than just “governmental change.” In reality, PRL and other groups stuck to what the student plenums had demanded from the outset — namely, no interference from political parties and other organized groups. Such a stance is primarily directed toward the opposition parties, based on previous experience of opposition-run protests that never led to anything but greater apathy and demoralization.

“We publicly supported those statements or actions that were ideologically closer to us, but we didn’t go beyond that — we didn’t cling to the movement. Mainstream liberal parties failed to grow their membership or base, because they don’t know how to operate when there’s a real student or popular movement happening; they don’t know how to function within a movement,” said PRL president Milena Repajić.

While left-wing groups acted respectfully toward the student blockades, leftist ideas also emerged from individuals within the student body. “And these ideas aren’t alien to our population — in the sense that neoliberalism isn’t really seen as common sense, here,” said Kovačević. “When these ideas emerge spontaneously, people accept them as their own. The broader left has often acted in a narrow way, a bit like a small organized sect aggressively pushing its ideas, which created resistance in the past.  The absence of a pamphleteering approach and the policing of others allowed leftist ideas to emerge more clearly, and for students to be able to accept them.”

In a political context characterized by government repression, continuous liberal-opposition pressure for a technocratic takeover, and the completely unrealistic expectation placed on the students, by the general adult population that sees them as unworldly angels in mythic fight, the students were left with not much space to maneuver.

Both the assemblies and the students’ collaboration with trade unions represent a revolutionary practice; however, that practice is currently extremely fragile and demands time, various types of resources, and a long-term organizational effort. In a move that resonates with Vincent Bevins’s main finding from his latest book, If We Burn — that politics abhors a vacuum — students have initiated the formation of the social front as a strategy to avoid others filling the open space. Can the movement’s energy really be transferred into an electoral list? Is the electoral horizon itself a step backward from what was gained through the blockades? Will our revolution be stolen?

Our country’s history does offer successful examples of a real (antifascist) Popular Front, organized and led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, which won the 1945 elections and led the country through socialist revolution. Yet today, not only are the conditions greatly different but this type of organizational backbone doesn’t exist anymore.

Moreover, most post-1968 strategies employed by the Left globally have not aged well. Sociologist Cihan Tuğal analyzed three defeated strategies: new social movements, anarchist-autonomist uprisings, and populism. Yet, despite their defeats, some of the spirit of these strategies does need to be incorporated into a new class-based organization. How does this translate into the current Serbian context? As a party cadre, committed to building organizational infrastructure, Repajić still recognizes many gains for the Left in the student-initiated approach.

“In the situation we’re in today, where there’s generally a deep skepticism toward any kind of organizing, where participation in political life is extremely expensive and reserved for an upper-middle-class, bourgeois segment of society — in that context, directly democratic organizing really does have value. This time, a significant number of people have become politically engaged — and that’s irreversible.”

Commenting on the student-initiated Social Front and the issue of organization, Repajić recognizes that the movement was too heterogeneous from the start to expect it to produce a political organization. “But regardless, building a social front is important, because we’re seeing connections between different struggles that didn’t exist before.”

Repajić points to an organization of which she is a member, Joint Action Roof Over Your Head, which fights against forced evictions and for housing policy and against debt slavery. “Now we’ve made contact, we’ve formed assemblies, we’re in touch with other assemblies, with trade unions, with the student movement, and that could lead somewhere. I don’t think there’s any going back from this — from this level of political activation. The ruling party knows that, and so does the opposition, which is why the student movement is under constant attack.”

As students have often said, some of the things they are doing are being done for the first time. Not only do we need to patch together what’s left from publicly owned and publicly governed goods and services, but we need to reinvent many of our organizations, including unions, as well as support the parallel solidarity structures birthed by the blockades. We also need to put extra effort into including those who are left behind: people from certain groups, for instance a friend of mine who works as an unregistered worker in cleaning sector, were left out, if not from the protest, then certainly from the people’s assemblies, simply because they cannot afford the time to participate.

Some of the aforementioned efforts can and should be pursued by nonelectoral means, while some require (public) legislation and funding. In the long run, we need to keep “pumping it up,” but in a more structured and more sustainable way, deepening already established alliances and parallel structures, making them bulletproof against current and future attacks. The focus on elections may come as a disappointment to some, in the context of the crisis of liberal democracy. Yet, perhaps the two are not so counterposed. Serbia’s protest movement can operate on both fronts with their own organizational frameworks, within the electoral-institutional arena and outside of it.