PV staff
In response to ongoing anti-government protests in Serbia, the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia (NKPJ) has called on working people to not participate. The NKPJ warns that both the protests and pro-government counter-protests are organized by sections of the ruling class to further their own narrow interests, and offer no benefit to working people.
“Those two pro-imperialist bourgeois camps, the ruling one and the opposition, both carry on anti-people, anti-worker and anti-students policy, while demonstrating a shameless, vulgar and lying anti-communism,” said the Party on March 13.
The protests first erupted in November 2024, in response to the collapse of part of the roof on the railway station in Novi Sad, Sebia’s second-largest city, in which 16 people died and one was severely injured. The protests, which have been led by university students, have now spread to some 400 cities and towns across Serbia.
The NKPJ has called for government action to identify who was responsible for the tragic accident and to hold them accountable. At the same time, though, the Party notes that the leaders of neither the protests nor the counter-protests are fighting for this outcome.
“During the last four and half months the bourgeois opposition and its loyal students have not fought for the establishment of responsibility of those who caused this tragedy. No, for them it is only a screen, aimed at hiding their attempt to grab power – to serve faithfully the interests of Western imperialism, as they always did between the coup d’état on October 5, 2000, until 2012, when they lost power.
“Similarly, during the last four and half months experience has shown that the bourgeois government and its loyal students do not fight against the ‘destruction of the country’ or a ‘colour revolution,’ since that would not carry out a pro-imperialist line imposed by Washington, Brussels and London. This shows that their only goal is the preservation of the current regime [and its] privileges.”
The NKPJ is calling on students to “not participate in factional conflicts of the pro-imperialist opposition and government, but to turn their fight toward their social interests, which are: unpaid education and abolition of the reactionary “Bologna Declaration” [referring to the 1999 document aiming to create a European Higher Education Area (EHEA)] which hampers education of youth from working families.
“Along this way they should follow the shining example of the progressive students’ organization Studentski front [“Student Front”]. This fight can be carried out to its successful end only through joint action of all oppressed layers of our society, led by the working class.”
In promoting a united, mass struggle for progressive change, the NKPJ is specifically calling on working people to ignore what it calls “factional conflicts of the bourgeois opposition and government.” These conflicts, says the Party, both promote Serbia’s membership in the European Union, “whose only raison d’être is making the rich richer and the poor poorer.” Serbia is currently a candidate member of the EU.
Rather than joining the EU, the NKPJ insists that “it is necessary to fight against the looming wave of factory closures and workplace reduction in our country – what foreign exploiters-investors pronounce in response to the world crisis of capitalism – and the continuing reactionary process of privatization, contrary to both the interests of the state and its citizens.”
The Party is calling on workers, students, pensioners, youth, unemployed people and intellectuals to form a People’s Front to fight for social justice and against Western imperialism, which the NKPJ notes is still occupying the southern Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija.
[Thanks to Vojvodić for translating the NKPJ statement from Serbo-Croat]
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