Post-Socialist Blues Within Real Existing Capitalism: Anti-Communism, Neoliberalisation, Fascism

• Author / Creator

  Traykov, Bozhin S

• This project draws on Alex William’s (2020) contribution to Gramscian studies with the concept of complex hegemony as an emergent, dynamic and fragile process of acquiring power in socio-political economic systems. It examines anti-communism as an ideological element of neoliberal complex hegemony in Bulgaria. By employing a Gramcian politico-historical analysis I explore examples of material and discursive ideological practices of anti-communism. I show that in Bulgaria, anti-communism strives to operate as hegemonic, common-sensual ideology through legislative acts, production of historiography, cultural and educational texts, and newly invented traditions. The project examines the process of rehabilitation of fascist figures and rise of extreme nationalism, together with discrediting of the anti-fascist struggle and demonizing of the welfare state within the totalitarian framework of anti-communism. Historians Enzo Traverso (2016, 2019), Domenico Losurdo (2011) and Ishay Landa (2010, 2016) have traced the undemocratic roots of economic liberalism and its (now silenced) support of fascism against the “Bolshevik threat.” They have shown that, whether enunciated by fascist regimes or by (neo)liberal intellectuals, anti-communism is deeply undemocratic and shares deep mass-phobic disdain for political organizing of the majority. In this dissertation I argue that, in Bulgaria, anti-communism has not only opened the ideological space for extreme right and fascist politics, it has demoralized left political organizing by attacking any attempts for a politics of socio-economic justice as tyrannical.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • ideology
  • neoliberalism
  • nationalism
  • anti-communism
  • fascism
  • Bulgaria

• Graduation date

  Fall 2020

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-bmze-m103

• License

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