KRIZA HEGEMONIJE, STUDENTSKI POKRET I PROCES POLITIČKE SUBJEKTIVACIJE
CRISIS OF HEGEMONY, THE STUDENT MOVEMENT, AND THE PROCESS OF POLITICAL SUBJECTIVATION

Summary/Abstract: This article argues that contemporary political life in Serbia cannot be adequately explained through the notions of civic apathy, opposition weakness, or authoritarian rule alone. Instead, it proposes the concept of political powerlessness as a specific hegemonic form through which political stability is reproduced under conditions of widespread dissatisfaction. Political powerlessness designates a situation in which social discontent is high, political attitudes are formed, and criticism of power is broadly present, yet collective action is still perceived as ineffective. The article situates this condition within the structural context of peripheral capitalism and shows how it is reproduced through clientelism, the depoliticization of social conflict, mass emigration, class fragmentation, and the mediating role of the state in the distribution of scarce resources. Against this background, the Serbian student movement that emerged after the Novi Sad tragedy is interpreted not merely as a protest wave, but as a symptom of a deeper crisis of hegemony. Such a crisis does not necessarily mean the immediate collapse of political power; rather, it marks a moment in which the ruling order gradually loses its capacity to organize consent, neutralize social conflict, and maintain the belief that the existing order is the only possible one. The article traces how a moral shock, the reduction of fear, the delegitimization of authority, the creation of new repertoires of action, and the widening of mobilization beyond the student milieu opened the space for a broader political process. The core of the analysis is devoted to the concept of political subjectivation. Drawing on Gramsci, Rancière, Butler, Melucci, and Rousseau, the article understands subjectivation as the process through which atomized social actors begin to act as a collective political subject. In this sense, plenums, blockades, and assemblies are analyzed not simply as tactical forms of protest, but as political scenes in which new collective identities, competencies, and shared horizons are produced. The article further argues that the movement’s formula of an “ideological minimum coalition” points toward a process through which dispersed grievances can be translated into a common political language. This allows the concept of the general will to be reinterpreted not as an already existing unity, but as the contingent result of collective political practice. The final part of the article addresses the limits of political subjectivation. It argues that subjectivation, however significant, does not automatically solve the problem of political power. The transition from mobilization to organization, from political event to political duration, remains the decisive difficulty of contemporary movements. In dialogue with recent debates on post-politics and hyperpolitics, particularly Anton Jäger’s work, the article suggests that contemporary societies are often capable of producing intense political mobilization without generating durable political institutions. This problem is especially acute in peripheral and post-socialist societies, where deindustrialization, labor fragmentation, and the weakening of unions constrain the organizational extension of protest beyond the spheres of education, public institutions, and urban activism. The article concludes that democracy should not be reduced to electoral procedures or institutional pluralism alone. It should instead be understood as a historical configuration in which political subjectivation and the formation of the general will intersect. From that perspective, the historical significance of the Serbian student movement lies less in its immediate outcomes than in its capacity to reopen politics as a field of collective action, to challenge the social production of political powerlessness, and to create the conditions under which broader forms of political organization may emerge.

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