Paper short abstract:

Contradiction, class, and capital, have been key concepts in my work, including on right wing populism in postsocialist East-Central Europe. I studied the region as another incorporation of globalizing capitalism. Right wing populism was one of its consequences. CEE turned out to be the avant-garde.

Paper long abstract:

Contradiction, class, and capital, have been the key concepts of my work, including on right wing populism since 2000. Most of my work on the Right has focused ethnographically on postsocialist East-Central Europe. For me, that was never a self-contained region. I studied it as another spatiotemporal incorporation of globalizing capitalism and I sought to confront its global/local contradictions. And so I ran into the emerging angry populist neo-nationalist Right in the late 1990s, as a popular sensibility and as political articulation and mobilization. Western liberal social science and punditry was inclined to explain this postsocialist surprise first as an effect of non-liberal local histories under fascism and communism. It would disappear as capitalism got consolidated in the region, just like nationalism had dissipated in Western Europe after the war. The liberal assumption – ignoring contradictions, and believing, as Alfred Hirschman once quipped, that under liberal rule all good things naturally come together – was that the region would gradually converge with the West in all sorts of ways. In fact, Eastern Europe’s angry Right turned out to be pointing the way for the Global North as a whole: it had been an avant-garde location, not a backward one, as pervasive Western centric thought judged. Right wing neo-nationalism has overran the liberal system. Capitalist contradictions, unfolding unevenly over global space, rather than mere ‘immigrants’ and ‘xenophobia’, are the explanation. We need a new Marxist global anthropology and elevate the idea of contradiction to the top of our agenda.