Balkan forms of socialism had their own contradictions and ultimately collapsed due to both external and internal factors. These contradictions are also felt in today’s perception of the anti-fascist legacy. While socialism was the greatest modernization project ever seen in this region, it simultaneously gave rise to a privileged bureaucratic class, the so-called red bourgeoisie.

Most descendants of this class still enjoy middle- and upper-class status. They are the only sociopolitical group that publicly validates the anti-fascist struggle and the socialist period. But they do so in a hollow manner, treating anti-fascism as an identity marker or a matter of family tradition rather than a political platform built through mass struggle from below.

Their perception of the partisans erases the crucial role of communists, the contribution of the USSR and the Red Army, and the fact that the majority of the partisan army consisted not of intellectuals fighting for ideals but of oppressed, illiterate peasants and workers to whom the Communist Party gave the means to defend their bare material interests with rifles in hand.

Liberal advocates of anti-fascism have completely degraded it into a form of empty nostalgia and symbolic fetishism, doing it as much harm as the revisionists who attack it from openly hostile positions. Despite the shortcomings and contradictions of our anti-fascist movement and socialist experience — which we should critically examine — we must remain aware of the heroic achievements of the 1945 revolution, which constitute the true emancipatory legacy.

Today education and health care are under heavy assault from the private sector, yet the fact that visits to the doctor and university enrollment still remain free for a large part of the population is a direct consequence of the partisan victory. Many families are not homeless today because it is common for multiple generations to squeeze into apartments built by the state during the socialist period.

Before World War II, the Balkans had the status of a colonial region, with low literacy rates and a rural population that served Western capitalists for the extraction of raw materials. Through a process of revolution and anti-fascist struggle, we gained literacy, industrialization, more democratic workplace relations, and women’s emancipation.

After the transition and counterrevolution, the Balkans are now once more an impoverished semi-periphery, while the only thing keeping the working class afloat is the material base built during socialism. This is the tangible legacy of anti-fascism.

To prevent this material and political legacy from vanishing and to further expand upon it, it is necessary to build new platforms capable of fighting for the interests of the majority, in which history can be a teacher. The foundation of the anti-fascist struggle was mass popular resistance — more precisely, local units of people’s power called People’s Liberation Councils.

These councils handled logistical support for partisans and organized agriculture as well as education in liberated territories, people’s courts, and cultural programs. Their legacy lived on after liberation in the fact that every village, through local initiative, gained a cultural center, a larger or smaller industrial facility nearby, electricity, and transport links to cities — now distant memories.

Decades of transition have destroyed much of the communal fabric built on the foundations of the 1945 victory. It can only be rebuilt through mass struggle that practices democracy in its original Greek meaning — the will of the majority and the rule of the people.

The recent student uprising in Serbia partially succeeded in that mission by organizing plenums where direct democracy enacts the will of the majority. This protest method has spread beyond universities, with people across the country holding assemblies where they attempt to reclaim political power, completely outside of parliamentarian methods.

Fascism was an antipode to democracy. It arose as a dam erected by elites against potential revolutions in Italy and Germany — against mass demands for better living conditions and expanded democracy. Today’s enemy may not look like Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini, but the struggle for direct democracy is still the best way to revive the fight for universal and timeless freedoms that May 9 represents.

Democracy is the only way to preserve the anti-fascist legacy and the only way to stop capitalism and imperialism from shaping our daily lives. Hope exists. The methods of assemblies from Serbia have gradually spread to Macedonia and Turkey. Perhaps Julian Assange’s statement that Serbia is where the future happens first will prove to be true.