Description
Abstract: Something happened between the partisan struggles of the twentiethcentury and those of the early twenty-first century: the Cold War. We
live in its aftermath, where “post-socialism” has become a planetary
status quo. This hardly means that the “idea of communism” has
been eclipsed—rather, it lives on in the minds of a tiny and mostly
disconnected part of humanity. In the 1990s, globalisation was
imposed from above—even if, as has been argued, it constituted, at
least in part, a response to internationalisms from below. Our century
started, literally, when the global dogma of antiterrorism (upon
9/11) fell as a fire blanket on the transnational anticapitalist activist
movement. Obviously, even in the 1990s, the term “anticapitalist”
should have alerted us to the fact that the transnational movement
operated within the scope of an internalised, traumatic defeat - the outcome of the Cold War, both material and ideological. In the
twenty-first century, it’s hard to find partisans who self-identify as
communists—and this makes perfect sense, given what we read in
the academic transcripts of Chinese students who continue their
education in the West. In these transcripts, a course on Mao Zedong
is classified as a course in international markets and management.
Capitalist markets are, indeed, everywhere, and everyone is forced to
acknowledge them, at the very least.
When we read that “multiplicity is becoming the horizon of our
political imagination” (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Empire,
Twenty Years On”, New Left Review, 2019), we know we are in a different
terrain than the one where partisan culture formed. The truth is
that there is no unified partisan culture today. In conditions not just
of multiplicity but of ideological interchangeability, governments
embracing key features of a fascist agenda pose as antifascists and
feminists are called feminazis (even by men on the left) while historical
fascism is replaced by “populism” in public speech. All these things
literally happen, and this talk takes contemporary Greece as a case
study of how they happen, with an emphasis on the “battle” between
historical memory and the demands that survival, in the current stage of capitalism, dictates.
| Period | 1 Oct 2021 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Symposium ‘Partisan Cultures: Weapons of Mass Creation.' |
| Event type | Symposium |
| Location | Vienna, AustriaShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |