---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 3:26 PM Subject: Breaking social class solidarity via bias ? : "characteristics of the political and social landscape of post-socialist countries" ? To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Mariya Ivancheva (Central European University, Sociology and Social Anthropology) just uploaded a paper on Academia.edu: *The Bulgarian protest wave of 2012-2013 * *http://www.academia.edu/4888291/The_Bulgarian_protest_wave_of_2012-2013 " I show a number of characteristics of the political and social landscape of post-socialist Bulgaria, which have made the anti-neoliberal or anti-capitalist framing of the protests in- creasingly difficult. I claim that a reason for this has been a few mutually reinforcing characteristics of the Bulgarian protests, typical not only for Bulgaria, but also for other post-socialist countries. First, the recurrence or persistence of a strong neo-liberal capitalist party in power – which draws on the symbolic legacy of state socialism but fervently destroys socialist welfare institutions – perpetuates a strong ‘anti-communist’ framing of the protests. Second, the trope of the ‘hard-working middle class’ – a main slogan of the transition to liberal democracy and free-market capitalism since 1989 – has made in- ter-class alliances between the economically vulnerable low- and high-skilled workers impossible. Last, but not least, given the decades of creation of neo-liberal hegemony in the country, ‘smoothly functioning capitalism’ has been seen as a solution to, and not the cause of, impoverishment, indebtedness, and pre- carity. These three motives, which are all present in the Bulgarian case, make it impossible to frame protests in an anti-neoliberal and anti-capitalist way. They also draw a line between parallel but not coin- ciding waves of social protests around the world: a demarcation that might turn out to be a frontline in emergent mobilization for global social change. " * -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/