2 lectures: on fascism and islamophobia

Centar za radničke studije organizira u petak, 24. studenog 2017. u 17 sati u Zagrebu (BAZA, Božidara Adžije 11) predavanje A. Matkovića o političkoj ekonomiji fašizma i M. Nikolove o islamofobiji u Bugarskoj (sažeci u prilogu).

 

 

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BAZA, Božidara Adžije 11

 

 

 

17h: Aleksandar Matković: Making Europe: on the political economy of fascism

 

 

18h: Madlen Nikolova: On the political stakes of today’s islamophobia in Bulgaria

 

 

19h: Discussion

 

 

 

Abstracts:

 

 

Aleksandar Matković: Making Europe: on the political economy of fascism

 

 

The crisis of 2008., the story goes, seals the breakdown of the post-war order and the fragile power balance that were the European social-democracies. On the other hand, the ensuing upsurge of far-right nationalism only aggravates fears of fascism “2.0”.

In contrast to both, this lecture will address the political economy of fascism in light of its contemporary aftermath. While most theories of proto-fascism in liberalism (Ishay Landa, Gaspar Miklos Tamas, Domenico Losurdo, Tomaž Mastnak, Adam Tooze, etc.) rest on the use of analogies, this lecture will attempt to ground their relation beyond purely historical method. A self-reflection of Marxism is thus in order before one can fully analyse the contemporary tendencies of neoliberal Europe.

 

 

Madlen Nikolova: On the political stakes of today’s islamophobia in Bulgaria

 

 

Bulgarian governments have been introducing repressive policies against Bulgarian Muslims, justifying them by the threat of ‘terrorism and radical Islam’. Mainstream intellectuals and political actors project fantasies of potential revolutionary terror onto Muslim communities due to their marginalised state. ‘Radical muslims’s’ resolve is compared to ‘communist fanaticisim’. This is enabled by dominant analyses of totalitarianism, suggesting it is invoked by radicalised masses. Liberal interpretations hold that the far-right’s constituencies of poor and disenfranchised masses bring about those repressive practices. In this presentation I would show that elitist liberal interventions imagine a force formally similar to and equally intangible as the threat of radical Islam and assign it to disenfranchised ethnic majority masses. These masses are seen as potentially fascist and intrinsically racist. The racialised “White” far-right Jihadists are the mirror image of the racialised “terrorist” Muslim. Nevertheless, notions of “the totalitarian twins” remain speculative and not based on empirical studies. Despite the fact that far-right political parties keep getting the same number of votes at elections in the past decade, it is only in 2017 that the United Patriots first entered into a formal government coalition with the center-right GERB. What is more, far-right voters are mostly located in larger cities, as opposed to poorer small towns and villages. I will also address a wider misrecognition of the class divisions along ethnic lines. I will not look for the key to the current government coalition in supposed growing popular racist and conservative trends. I claim such interpretations function as a justification of useful for the current political-economic order repressive and austerity measures. The latter are aimed at an imagined ‘totalitarian’ potential of ethnic and religious minorities’, supposedly demanded by threateningly democratic potential of ethnic majorities.

 

 

Izvor: https://www.facebook.com/CentarZaRadnickeStudije/