PINK TRANSITION IN SERBIA: SIX THESES CONCERNING OUR CULTURAL SITUATION
During transition, Serbia and other (semi) peripheral countries have become economical, political and cultural colonies of transnational capitalist class (TNCC) whose center (metropolis) is found in the main societies of the world capitalist system – the US and the EU. This has influenced the formation of the Serbian system of mass culture that is characterized by the culture of forgetting, the ideology of consumerist “liberation” of sin and shame, fetishism of sex and violence, as well as normalization (“relaxation”) of pathology and amorality. These features dominate also in the “high culture” produced and consumed by TNCC members (and candidates for it). Most of the “high culture” is now under TNCC control, which essentially dictates the dominant tastes. Members of the bourgeoisie, who successfully produce or demonstrate the right taste on the (semi) periphery, are incorporated into the idiocratic fraction of TNCC. Hence almost all high culture in Serbia is marked with comprador content and style, and also marked by “conceptual art”. And since it is impossible, in the current socio-historical conditions, to reject the main cultural function of the mass media in Serbia as a “collector” of consumer hypnosis, it is also impossible, in the current socio-historical constellation, to change the colonial comprador character of the institutions of high culture in Serbia. They are only an institutional expression of the dominant, financially and socially hegemonic classes in Serbian society – the comprador bourgeoisie.
