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For the best part of the last four decades, global finance capital has succeeded in imposing in its own interest, working through international financial institutions and the governments of industrial countries, a uniform set of neo-liberal income-deflating and unemployment-raising policies throughout the world. These finance-capital driven policies are strongly reminiscent of the ‘sound finance’ policies a century ago that drove the world into depression and fed into the rise of fascism. History is repeating itself, and not necessarily as farce.

Background: Marxist economist, Emeritus professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi.

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Fascism is often depicted by its liberal critics as a dangerous and exceptional deviation from the “spontaneously emerging market economy.” However, a serious historical analysis of political economy tells a very different story. Benito Mussolini, the founding father of fascism, was one of the most diligent students of austerity policies—measures that characterize the routine management of the capitalist economy today.

Understanding fascism requires recognizing its ability to fulfill the fundamental demands of the capitalist order: high rates of exploitation and a docile labor force. This is precisely why uncomfortable alliances between liberalism and fascism have repeatedly surfaced throughout the history of our economic system.

Background: Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Heterodox Economics, at the University of Tulsa Oklahoma.

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The assertion of a connection between crisis and fascism will only be fruitful in theory and in practice if the concrete structure of this connection is revealed. The lecture contradicts views that German big capital had fled to fascism to escape the crisis and shows instead how the monopoly bourgeoisie has carried forward its decision to use the crisis for its own purposes with the transition to the fascist form of rule.

Background: Author on the history and theory of fascism and member of the Marx-Engels-Foundation.

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To understand the growth of the far right of a special type we need to both understand the historical dynamic of fascism and the far right, and to understand the new conjuncture in which this right operates. To defeat the right, we need to understand it as accurately as possible.

Background: Executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and the chief editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi).

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What was the role of fascism in the first half of the 20th century, how did it emerge historically and how does it differ from the fascism of today? In the interwar period and WWII fascism functioned as a form of state-monopoly imposition. Today it appears as an instrument of transnational-monopoly imposition. Thus, fascism becomes a “tool” of proxy warfare. Opposing fascism requires to crush imperialism.

Background: Professor of Philosophy at the Technical University of Crete.

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Background: Organizer and activist with focus on the Palestine solidarity.

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After three decades of wild neoliberalism and with the persistent lack of a left alternative, the electoral rise of the far right in Romania was just a question of time. Like elsewhere, the Romanian far right claims to be on the side of ‘ordinary people‘. In fact, Georgescu represents a cross-class coalition of elite interests with the base in the small-town and rural petty bourgeoisie. The Left needs to go beyond the liberal moralistic condemnations of the far right by exposing its class character.

Background: Lecturer in Politics at the University of Oxford.

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Capitalism is in crisis. Liberal and conservative forces give different answers how to save capitalism. State capitalism or liberal market economy? Europe based on national states or United States of Europe? Europe without or with migration? In the public debate, Orban and Fidesz are a symbol of the global shift to the right. We want to discuss this question with reference to the Historical roots of antisemitism, anticommunism, right wing extremism to Fascism in Hungary.

Background: Doctor of International Politics and author. President of the Hungarian Workers’ Party.

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How does the tendency to rehabilitate historical fascism work and who is promoting it? What purposes does the rehabilitation of fascist collaborators entail? How is the revision of (anti-)fascism used by the right-wing, fascist, liberal and conservative political actors to delegitimize the left? The lecture discusses the rehabilitation of fascist collaborators as a result of anti-communist political consensus rather than the work of fascist and right-wing actors alone.

Background: Historian at the Research Center for the History of Transformations at the University of Vienna.

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We have been warned that Europe is being swept by a fascist wave of anti-immigration parties or “classical” fascism. Although the threat is real, we are currently dealing with the clash of two opposing fascist waves. Political forces, originating from liberalism and social democracy are standing up against “classical” fascism, combining liberal elements with extreme chauvinism and militarism. An important centre of development of this new post-liberal fascism is Poland.

Background: Doctor of Humanities and Philosophy. His research interests include anti-humanist ideologies.

“Faced with the rise of the far right globally, the radical left needs historical and theoretical clarity and a strategic orientation that starts from the needs of the working classes. The Berlin conference – taking place while the powerful meet in The Hague for the NATO summit – is a fundamental step in strengthening the political articulation in Europe.”

Background: Europe correspondent for Peoples Dispatch.

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The professional elite of German imperialism deploy sophisticated strategies to lay the foundations for fascist politics: by reducing the taboo around Nazi ideology and culture; by concealing, denying or instrumentalizing the past; by relativization their own guilt through the (retrospective) “Nazification” of the Soviet Union and Russia. In doing so, they draw on the effective whitewashing mechanisms that have long been deployed in the Globke* state.

* Hans Globke was the author of the racist Nuremberg Laws of 1935. He was a central architect of the West German state following 1945.

Background: Journalist and editor of books like ‘Der Bandera-Komplex’ (The Bandera Complex) and ‘Antifa heißt Luftangriff’ (Antifa by Aerial Strike).

Italy is the first country in Western Europe to experience a far-right government. Yet, contrary to popular belief, we are not witnessing the advent of fascism. The lecture will try to explain how behind the little fascism that is visible, there is a lot of invisible fascism, a reactionary bloc that is broader than the right wing in government, which through the passivisation of the masses, a long ideological anti-communist work and the attempt to establish corporatism in every aspect of social life, prevents the birth of an alternative in our country.

Background: Researcher at the Institute for the History of Philosophy and Science in Modern Age in Naples.

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This lecture aims to explain the anti-democratic character of the European Union and its effects on fascism in member states, particularly in France, based on Nicos Poulantzas’s work on the institutions. Opposition to neo-liberal reforms at the level of the French state leads to increasingly repressive policies pursued by Macron’s extreme center, and a growing loss of hegemony, opening the way to the far right, particularly the Rassemblement National, for bourgeoisies concerned with political stability. The RN thus becomes a trans-class party, and above all a trans-bourgeoisie party (national and transatlantic).

Background: Affiliated researcher at Sciences Po.

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The rise of authoritarian neoliberalism since the 1970s has failed to destroy society, despite its best attempts. In the case of Catalonia, from 2011-2019, Catalan popular movements fighting for democracy, public services, feminist struggles, migration rights, and housing, coalesced around the movement for a referendum of independence in 2017. The double far-right movement in Catalonia (with its expressions both in Spanish and Catalan fascism), will be analyzed in relation to their connections to the global far right, and their attempt to re-assert authoritarian neoliberalism.

Background: Senior Professor of Political Science at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.

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The lecture analyses the rehabilitation of fascist collaborators and the destruction of the socialist heritage as a result of Serbia’s accession process to the European Union. Legally guaranteed compensation claims are ideologically underpinned by EU resolutions on totalitarianism, which as well fundamentally shape national historiography. On the basis of this the relation between the struggle for sovereignty and antifascism shell be discussed.

Background: Coordinator of ‘Antifascist International’ in Serbia and PhD student at Singidunum University.

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Thirty years of austerity and neoliberal policies, implemented even by left-wing governments, have increasingly pushed Italian workers to the right. How can a class-oriented trade union intervene and counter this?

Background: Member of the Unione Sindicale di Base (USB).

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Whether to legitimate deportation or NATO wars – in Germany anti-fascism has been transformed into an ideology and practice of the ruling class that serves to legitimise imperialist politics. What are the causes of this development and what kind of anti-fascism can we oppose it with? Possible counter-strategies will be discussed on the basis of the anti-fascist work of ‘Studis gegen rechte Hetze’ at the university.

Background: Student of history and founding member of the antifacist group „Studis gegen rechte Hetze“ (Students against Right-Wing Incitement).

Lecture as PDF: English

The new Popular Front in France achieved major electoral successes. However a so-called “republican” right-wing government came to power, which consciously or unconsciously paves the way for the future success of the Rassemblement National (RN). Moreover, this makeshift alliance quickly revealed the weaknesses of a purely moral anti-fascism that permeates the entire French political class and much of the West. Against this backdrop, the perspective of anti-fascist alliance politics will be discussed.