by Georgi
Medarov
Š¢housands are
marching in Sofia for weeks, demanding resignation of the recently
elected government - a coalition between the social democrats (BSP),
the far right (ATAKA) and a liberal minority-rights party(DPS).
Discontent started over the appointment of a media mogul as a head of
the state security agency. His “media empire” is an exaggeration,
most corporate media are highly supportive of the previous government
and of the current protests. Big business and liberal activists
insist on the “qualitative difference” with the winter social
protests, that brought down the right wing government of GERB.
GERB prided itself
for exemplary fiscal stability, yet it collapsed in the midst of
riots. Tens of thousands marched for weeks in every city against high
utility prices: in an outcry of despair, 7 people burnt themselves to
death in protest. Liberal activists, explicitly supported by big
business, asserted cynically that the poor protested in February,
while now the “middle classes”, marches not for welfare, but for
“values” against “the oligarchy”, trying to revive 1990s
reactionary anti-communism in the imaginary figure of the
“unproductive communist oligarch”, pulling the strings from
behind. A mainstream “liberal” think tank published a pseudo
class “analysis”, claiming there is an alliance between the
oligarchy and the poor. The “unproductive” oligarchy, they claim,
provides welfare, and the poor - votes, and now the “productive
bourgeoisie” (with such wording) is rising in resistance. This
“interpretation” translated into international right-wing media.
The Economist wrote: previous unrest “featured the poor protesting
about utility bills or the minimum wage”, but now it is the
“members of the young educated middle class who use Facebook”.
What liberals
prefer to miss is anti-communism has new meaning. It marks the
displacement of the disillusionment of liberal capitalism, giving an
easy explanation why most people live in such a misery, instead of
the promised EU prosperity. Anti-communism shifts discontent away
from capitalism and projects it onto its supposed “corrupt” form,
scapegoating minorities and an imagined shadow elite. Liberal
activists try to find “deeper meaning”, not only in “red scum”
(a slogan from the 1990s conservative revolution), but also in the
blatant homophobia, misogyny and racism of the current protests, with
“Turk”, “gay” and “whore” being common accusations.
Interestingly, this is precisely the ideology GERB used to gain
legitimacy between 2009 and 2013, reviving 1990s anti-communism,
along with liberal anti-corruption rhetorics and anti-Turkish racism.
They’ve also made some gestures to accommodate the widespread
socialist nostalgia, but, once again, displacing nostalgia for loss
of social rights with desire for the authoritarian racism of state
socialism.
Asserting the
“different class content” was used by BSP, who claimed this is
“class struggle” against their “progressive” policies. Š¢his
is not the case, as BSP is as neoliberal as the liberal right. They
introduced flat tax in 2007, along with various anti-labour reforms,
and now they already cut the taxes further, and showed they have no
intention in reintroducing progressive taxation.
Indeed there are
key differences, there was no anti-communism and racism (there was a
strong naive civic nationalism, but not racism) before. The protests
were not only in Sofia and thousands of Roma joined too. Another
difference is now corporate media and big business are trying to see
the protests’ potential for constructing a party of the New Right.
The mobilizations, however, are remarkably similar: much of same
people protesting, sharing similar core demands. Despite different
direct causes, both shifted to generalized discontent with political
representation. Both proved unable to break out of the post-political
ideology, imposed for over 15 years, and ended up in calling for more
of the same: post-political technocracy against “corruption”,
preventing realization of imagined European“normality”. The
Economist wrote: “Bulgaria’s best hope is a technocratic
government” to fight “corruption”,
yet precisely technocracy lies at the roots of the crisis.
Between 1994 and
1997 BSP tried to engineer a transition to neoliberalism with a
“human face”. It ended up in a dramatic failure: banking crisis,
hyperinflation and riots. An anti-communist coalition that came to
power in 1997 promised universal prosperity in exchange for “short
term” austerity and mass privatization, that would “cleanse the
communist remnants”, destroying welfare, causing mass unemployment
and forcing hundreds of thousands of workers to flee to Greece, Italy
and Spain. The anti-communist coalition collapsed in 2001, but since
then all parties promised more “real” technocratic hope for
“real” market economy, that never brought the promised
prosperity, but only misery.
This hopelessness
of calling for more of the same is characteristic of the current
post-ideological situation: one can change politicians, but not
politics. Dramatic lack of imagination is not the people’s fault,
but the failure of the left to produce an alternative. Yet, it is
only the (nonexistent) radical left that may heal the wound of
postpolitics and break the downward spiral of mutually reinforcing
conservatism and austerity.
* Georgi Medarov
is a PhD student of Sociology at the University of Sofia, member of
the political education group called New Left Perspectives. The
article was written for the blogsite enthemata.wordpress.com
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