Miha Kordiš has founded a new party called “We, Socialists”. From the pulpit, surrounded by supporters and in front of the public, he is already promising the return of “real” socialism. We spoke with Dr Boštjan M. Turk about what this party means for the political landscape and about the far left’s self-destructive instinct.
Kordiš would not have needed to go it alone if he had not previously fallen out with his old comrades in The Left (Levica), a party that is already considered far-left even within the coordinates of Slovenia’s already left-leaning political space. The conflict between Kordiš – who represented the party’s most extreme wing – and the mainstream of Levica reportedly concerned staffing issues. He is said to have demanded that a certain person be hired; when that didn’t happen, he began publicly slandering the party leadership. More about the real reasons for the split – HERE.
This led to disciplinary proceedings against him, in which he was accused of disruptive behaviour, and he was eventually expelled from the party. Kordiš himself explained the split by claiming he was expelled for ideological differences – that the party had become centrist. He also said he was the victim of a “purge” and that the party did not dare face its own membership. Purges, however, are a natural part of communist parties, explains Dr Boštjan M. Turk, illustrating his point with the Yugoslav example.“Who are these people? They come from the ‘bee-hive’ tradition – the tradition of the Communist Party. In the Communist Party it was always the case that they ruthlessly destroyed one another. No totalitarian system had such a powerful self-destructive force as communism,” he explains.It was no different in Yugoslavia, he continues.
Mass killings began immediately after the communists took power, when they “cleansed” state enemies, and then they started applying the same method to their own ranks. The revolution began to devour its children. “In 1948 there was the Cominform resolution, Goli Otok, and Jasenovac, which was used as an extermination camp for Cominform purposes. When that ended, they purged the ‘Đilasites’, then the ‘Rankovićites’, then at the end of the 1960s came the so-called ‘MasPok’ or liberalism and the purges that went with it; then in the 1980s Milošević began purging the communist parties of the republics and autonomous provinces – and before they could start a new round of purges, Yugoslavia collapsed,” Turk comments, adding that the purges always followed an ideological line: who was more orthodox? The same logic and historical tradition also applied to Levica. First the victim was former MP Violeta Tomić, then came the clash between Luka Mesec and Asta Vrečko. “That is their internal logic. There is no other story here – it is simply the internal logic of a communist structure,” he says.
The socialist offer
The next obvious question is what the new party can offer voters that Levica does not already provide. With their rhetoric they are trying to position themselves as an even more extreme version – if that is even possible.“But the problem is: what do these people actually have to offer the wider public? How capable are they of doing anything themselves beyond being a lifelong burden on the state budget?” our interlocutor asks.He answers his own question by pointing to the “Kordiš Fields” project, which in his view ended miserably. Recall that Kordiš had announced a new system of socialist farming – a new alternative to the existing economic model. “As far as I know, that is the only project he has ever carried out outside of graduating. What he can offer the Slovenian people is what grows on his field. By their fruits you shall know them,” he insists. He adds that electoral results are impossible to predict with certainty, but he does not expect major success, given Kordiš’s rather modest result in the presidential election and Levica’s modest showing in local elections.
Cannibalism of the far left
In his view, Kordiš’s “We, Socialists” will mainly take votes away from Levica. “The likely scenario is that they will cannibalise each other’s votes in an already tiny ‘field’ they have at their disposal,” he says, adding: “But they are not thinking about that.”“That field that votes for them in Ljubljana consists mostly of caviar leftists – the ones who simultaneously shout ‘let the Palestinians live’ and ‘let’s poison Slovenian pensioners’.”The enduring problem of the Slovenian left“We, Socialists” will probably run into the same problem their parent party Levica did: that the left-wing electorate is sentimentally attached to the red star, its mythology and the socialist past. Therefore, idealists who try to actually implement these doctrines encounter an almost insurmountable obstacle – within their own political camp. After all, most owners of capital, or those who control state capital, are their own people. And then the familiar internal decay begins.“They say one thing and do another. That is their modus operandi. In my book Prisoners of Freedom I write about their fundamental lie,” Dr Turk concludes.
Ž. K.
