• Thu 29 06 2017 / 9 pm •
Through a Dark Mirror Jan Sowa

with JAN SOWA in conversation with EKATERINA DEGOT

Populism, Nationalism and Other Consequences of Neoliberal Assault in Central-Eastern Europe

Jan Sowa’s talk revisits recent Polish history from the point of view of Walter Benjamin’s famous quip that “behind every fascism, there is a failed revolution.” He looks at a history of roughly 35 years, beginning from the early 1980s. The original revolutionary event is the appearance of Solidarność, a worker’s movement with a social message and little sympathy for private enterprise, crushed under martial law. Its ideals soon disappeared in the course of so-called communism’s collapse and the oppressive neoliberal transformation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Today, it is replaced by populism as a reactionary, post-neoliberal formation. This development is typical of the former so-called communist countries on the whole, forming a perverse avant-garde on the semi-periphery of the world system, where the social and political consequences of neoliberalism occur in a particularly striking, unmitigated form. After his talk Jan Sowa joins in conversation with Ekaterina Degot.

Venue: King Georg, Sudermanstraße 2, 50670 Cologne
3 €
In English

In cooperation with King Georg Klubbar