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Vortrag und Buchvorstellung von Lucía Cavallero: Feministische Kämpfe in Argentinien unter Milei

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LUCi cavallero - Femi­nis­ti­sche Kämpfe gegen den Auto­ri­ta­ris­mus der finan­zi­el­len Frei­heit. Argentinien unter Milei.

April 29th, 2026

6. MaI LINZ WISSENSTURM

In diesem Vortrag wird Luci Cavallero ihr jüngstes Buch „Contra el autoritarismo de la libertad financiera“ (tinta limón, 2025, mit Verónica Gago) vorstellen, in dem sie analysiert, wie im Namen der Freiheit die Finanzmärkte das Leben der Mehrheit regieren. Sie zeigt, dass der Begriff der Freiheit im zeitgenössischen Finanzkapitalismus eine zentrale Rolle spielt – angetrieben von den neuen Rechten und gelenkt von Konzernen, die Reichtum in algorithmischen und extraktiven Formen konzentrieren.

Ausgehend von ihren jüngsten Forschungen im argentinischen und lateinamerikanischen Kontext wird Cavallero die Verflechtungen von Neoliberalismus, Autoritarismus und Antifeminismus untersuchen, die in der sogenannten „finanziellen Freiheit“ ihr Fetischkonzept, ihre großspurige, aber zugleich perverse Hülle finden – angesichts der beschleunigten Verarmung und sozialen Grausamkeit. Abschließend wird sie die Kämpfe der argentinischen transfeministischen Bewegung gegen den Vormarsch der extremen Rechten beleuchten sowie deren Widerstand zur Verteidigung anderer Formen von Leben, Gemeinschaft und Freiheit.

 

Der Vortrag wird auf Spanisch gehalten und vor Ort auf Deutsch übersetzt.

Übersetzung: Fatima El Kosht, das kollektiv

Moderation: Johanna Neuhauser, JKU Linz

 

Luci Cavallero ist Soziologin und Forscherin an der Universität Buenos Aires. Ihre Forschung konzentriert sich u.a. auf Schulden und Geschlecht. Sie ist Aktivistin bei Ni Una Menos, einer feministischen Bewegung, die sich gegen geschlechtsspezifische Gewalt einsetzt. Sie hat zusammen mit Veronica Gago „A Feminist Reading of Debt“ (2021) und „Der Haushalt als Versuchslabor Feministische Kämpfe um Mieten, Haus- und Heimarbeit“ (2023) veröffentlicht. 

 

VHS Linz in Kooperation mit der Abteilung für Gesellschaftstheorie und Sozialanalysen (Johannes Kepler Universität Linz), das kollektiv (kritische bildungs-, beratungs- und kulturarbeit von und für migrant*innen) und dem Center Interdisziplinäre Geschlechterforschung Innsbruck (CGI) der Universität Innsbruck sowie dem Institut für Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung (IFG), dem Institut für die Gesamtanalyse der Wirtschaft (ICAE), dem Arbeitsbereich Globale Soziologie und Entwicklungsforschung (alle Johannes Kepler Universität Linz), dem Institut für angewandte Entwicklungspolitik (IAE), der International Karl Polanyi Society (IKPS) und maiz (autonomes zentrum von & für migrantinnen). 

 

Luchas feministas en Argentina bajo Milei

 

En esta conferencia, Luci Cavallero presentará su último libro, “Contra el autoritarismo de la libertad financiera” (tinta limón, 2025, con Verónica Gago) en el que analiza cómo, en nombre de la libertad, las finanzas gobiernan la vida de las mayorías. La autora muestra que el concepto de libertad desempeña un papel central en el capitalismo financiero contemporáneo, impulsado por las ultraderechas y dirigido por corporaciones que concentran la riqueza en su forma algorítmica y extractiva.

 

A partir de sus últimas investigaciones en el contexto argentino y latinoamericano, Cavallero examinará las interrelaciones entre el neoliberalismo, el autoritarismo y el antifeminismo, que encuentran en la llamada “libertad financiera” su concepto-fetiche, ropaje grandilocuente y a la vez perverso frente a la velocidad del empobrecimiento y la crueldad social. Por último, analizará las luchas del movimiento transfeminista argentino contra el avance de la ultraderecha, así como su resistencia en defensa de otras formas de vida, comunidad y libertad.

 

La conferencia se impartirá en español y se traducirá al alemán in situ.

Traducción: Fatima El Kosht, das kollektiv

Moderación: Johanna Neuhauser, JKU Linz

 

Luci Cavallero es socióloga e investigadora en la Universidad de Buenos Aires. Su investigación se centra, entre otras cosas, en la deuda y el género. Es activista de Ni Una Menos, un movimiento feminista que lucha contra la violencia de género. Publicó junto a Verónica Gago “A Feminist Reading of Debt” (2021) y “Der Haushalt als Versuchslabor Feministische Kämpfe um Mieten, Haus- und Heimarbeit” (2023).

den Auto­ri­ta­ris­mus der finan­zi­el­len Frei­heit. Argentinien unter Milei. 

Luci Cavallero (Buenos Aires), Forscherin und Aktivistin bei Ni Una Menos, stellt ihr jüngstes Buch „Contra el autoritarismo de la libertad financiera“ (2025, mit Verónica Gago) vor. In dem Buch untersuchen die Autorinnen die Verflechtungen von Neoliberalismus, Autoritarismus und Antifeminismus, die in der sogenannten „finanziellen Freiheit“ ihr Fetischkonzept finden. 

Luci Cavallero kommt im Mai 2026 nach Österreich und wird drei Vorträge halten: 

Innsbruck: 5. Mai, 18:00 Uhr, am Center Interdisziplinäre Geschlechterforschung Innsbruck

Linz: 6. Mai, 19:00 Uhr, am  Wissensturm, Volkshochschule Linz und Abteilung für Gesellschaftstheorie und Sozialanalysen, JKU Linz

Wien: 7. Mai, 18:30 Uhr, an dem IPW,  Universität Wien, Arbeitsbereich Geschlecht und Politik in Kooperation mit dem Arbeitsbereich internationale Politik und der Forschungsgruppe Lateinamerika

Wir freuen uns auf viele interessierte Zuhörer*innen in Innsbruck, Linz und Wien!

ES WIRD UM ANMELDUNG bei der VHS Linz gebeten!
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Road to serfdom or great transformation? Lessons for today from competing Viennese schools

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Road to serfdom or great transformation?
Lessons for today from competing Viennese schools

April 28th, 2026

A dialogue between Richard Cockett and Andreas Novy,
moderated by Valentina Ausserladscheider 

We cordially invite you to join us for an evening event at WU Executive Academy’s Foyer on May 11th, 2026 at 6pm 
 
At the beginning of the 20th century, the cosmopolitan city of Vienna was a global hub of intellectual cross-pollination, influencing everything from psychology to art to advertising. This is the premise of historian and Economist journalist Richard Cockett’s pathbreaking book, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World.
Arguably one of Vienna’s most enduring legacies has been the “Austrian School” of economics. Developed by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, its liberal values of personal and economic freedom would prove influential in major economies in the latter part of the 20th century. Yet, the Austrian School developed its ideas in direct tension with the radical social welfare model of 1920s Red Vienna. While Hayek and Mises saw such state intervention as the first step on the “Road to Serfdom,” to Karl Polanyi—the “other” Viennese economist—it encompassed his vision of a “mixed economy”, where democratic freedoms are upheld, and markets serve social needs. 
As today’s liberal world order faces increasing threats—often from self-described liberals—the panel will discuss the relevance of the competing Viennese schools in navigating an uncertain future.
 
Venue: Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, Welthandelsplatz 1, Foyer of Executive Academy
Time: May 11th 2026, 6 pm
Organized by  IKPS and ISSET (WU)
 
SPEAKERS:
Richard Cockett, historiador & economist
Andreas Novy, WU Vienna and International Karl Polanyi Society
MODERATION:
Valentina Ausserladscheider, University of Vienna
We are looking forward of seeing many of you there!
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F&L Blog – No Nationalism Without Exclusion

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No Nationalism without Exclusion: On the Left’s Return to the Nation-State

by Valentina Ausserladscheider

09.04.2026

Does the nation-state offer democratic protection in an age of crisis – or does it reproduce the exclusions that helped generate those crises in the first place? In this article, economic sociologist Valentina Ausserladscheider examines why moments of economic and political dislocation repeatedly revive demands for national sovereignty – even on the left. While many contemporary left accounts portray the nation-state as the last viable site of social protection and democratic control, she argues that this move risks recoding rather than questioning the national form of the state itself. Drawing on debates in political theory, sociology, and critical political economy, the article argues that nationalism is never a neutral instrument: defining a political community always entails drawing boundaries of belonging and exclusion. At stake, then, is not only the resurgence of the far right, but a broader political convergence around nationalist frameworks of protection – but according to Ausserladscheider, there is also a democratic politics that can move beyond them.

Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation remains indispensable because it diagnosed how the collapse of liberal market society generated a widespread desire for protection. Historically, however, this demand did not produce an emancipatory response. Instead, the search for protection gave rise to nationalist spatial-political regimes. Most catastrophically through fascism and National Socialism, these regimes restored political control within bordered nation-state containers. The crucial lesson is that the crisis of liberal globalization did not simply produce “more state,” but a turn to national sovereignty through exclusion as the dominant horizon of response. That lesson matters today as the ascent of the far right openly couples social protection to chauvinism and nationalist exclusion. More surprisingly, even sections of the left increasingly flirt with the idea that democratic protection, welfare, and planning can only be recovered within nationally bounded forms. What this underestimates is that nationalism is never a neutral instrument. Once protection is framed nationally, exclusion is no longer a side effect but part and parcel of the political logic itself – an issue this blog post seeks to examine.

The Deceptive Appeal of the Nation-State

In the wake of recent developments such as increasing financial instability, ecological breakdown, geopolitical fragmentation, inflation, and the exhaustion of neoliberal globalization, a range of left and heterodox-economic accounts have renewed the case for the nation-state as the primary site of democratic agency, economic regulation, and social protection. These accounts locate both the crises and our inability to address them in the disembedding effects of globalized neoliberalism. Costas Lapavitsas, Professor of Economics at SOAS, for example, has made “the left case against the EU,” casting it as a neoliberal citadel from which nation-states must be defended through popular and national sovereignty. Another instance is Wolfgang Streeck, former Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, who – after his famous critiques of the EU´s austerity and neoliberal policy – moved toward controversial arguments about borders and immigration control as a last defense of the European welfare state. Streeck also became politically active in his support for Sahra Wagenknecht and her left-conservative, migration-critical party BSW. From this perspective, the sovereign nation-state has re-emerged as the last credible site from which market power might be restrained, political accountability restored, and planning capacities reconstituted.

This argument has real force. Transnational markets have escaped democratic control, while supranational institutions have insulated economic governance from popular contestation. The appeal of the nation-state lies not only in its familiarity, but in its concentration of fiscal, legal, territorial, and administrative power. The left return to the nation-state is therefore not simply nostalgic, but a response to a genuine institutional problem. In these accounts, the state is seen as the most capable institutions for constraining capital, organizing redistribution, and sustaining democratic solidarity – an argument that deserves serious engagement. Indeed, democratic institutions require a demos, which historically been organized within bounded political communities. Abstract cosmopolitanism, however, has thus far offered little concrete institutional approaches for redistribution, decarbonization, or decommodification.

"The nation-state is not a neutral scale of governance. It is a historically sedimented form of political belonging organized through the distinction between members and non-members."

The pitfall of this argument, however, is that it leaves the conventional understanding of the state as the nation-state intact, without adequate scrutiny. Since these approaches do not question the national framing of the state, the problem concerns not only institutional power but also the bounded and exclusionary community that such power is assumed to represent, a logic intrinsic to nationalism. Nationalism is not merely representative of a national political community; it is also a way of drawing boundaries around political membership. In that sense, there is no nationalism without exclusion. The nation-state is thus not a neutral scale of governance. It is a historically sedimented form of political belonging organized through the distinction between members and non-members. Even in its civic or universalist variants, nationalism presupposes a bounded community in whose name decisions are taken and distributive claims justified. Therefore, the nation-state remains exclusionary.

No Nationalism Without Exclusion

Among the many accounts demonstrating that nationalism is inherently exclusionary, Meghan Tinsley´s critique of patriotism is exemplary: while patriotism has been represented as a supposed counterweight to ethnocultural nationalism, Tinsley argues that patriotism itself hardens racialized distinctions between citizens and non-citizens. Thomas Jeffrey Miley likewise stresses that “nation” is bound to the legitimation of “states” – a nexus that has shown strong affinities with racism and fascism. Bhambra and Holmwood, in turn, show that the liberal welfare state cannot be understood apart from European colonial exploitation. These boundaries are not incidental; they are constitutive. To define a people is always also to define those who do not belong.

Exclusion, then, is not a deviation from nationalism but one of its basic operations. Its forms vary – juridical, racial, cultural, territorial, colonial, administrative – but it is always present. Nationalism establishes a principle of priority for those recognized as members of the nation, structuring the distribution of rights, protections, and vulnerabilities. The outsider – migrant, refugee, minority, internal stranger, geopolitical rival – is therefore central, not secondary, to national politics.

"Fascism does not emerge mechanically from nationalism, but nationalism supplies symbolic and institutional resources that fascist and reactionary movements can radicalize."

This is where the historical record matters. A critique of the left’s renewed attachment to the nation-state does not require the crude claim that all nationalism is fascist, or that every defense of sovereignty culminates in authoritarianism. The stronger claim is that nationalism has repeatedly furnished the grammar through which crises of liberal order are translated into projects of closure, hierarchy, and restoration. Fascism does not emerge mechanically from nationalism, but nationalism supplies symbolic and institutional resources that fascist and reactionary movements can radicalize.

Because of this, the left cannot assume that it can mobilize the desire for protection in national terms without reproducing the terrain on which the far right possesses decisive advantages. This may be the central error of left-national or sovereigntist currents: they treat nationalism as if it were a progressive idiom detachable from its exclusionary history. Indeed, Daphne Halikiopoulou and Tim Vlandas warn against the hype around supposedly “new” issues such as immigration and cultural grievance when these often eclipse enduring economic concerns; reclaiming the discussion on inequality would be a more promising strategy for the left than entering a contest over national belonging. 

Going Beyond the Dichotomy

"The problem with the left’s renewed attachment to nation-state sovereignty is not that state institutions are unimportant, but that state-centred strategies alone are inadequate to crises whose causes and dynamics exceed national borders."

None of this implies a defense of globalized neoliberalism, nor does it deny the importance of state institutions in any plausible project of transformation. The historical lesson is that nationalism is not an empty vessel waiting to be filled with progressive content. It is a mode of political belonging constituted through exclusion. The answer to current crises cannot be a left politics that re-legitimates the nation as the privileged horizon of protection. Solutions cannot be limited to either national or inter-, transnational. Global challenges such as climate change demand political solutions beyond this dichotomy – both within and beyond the state.

The problem with the left’s renewed attachment to nation-state sovereignty is not that state institutions are unimportant, but that state-centred strategies alone are inadequate to crises whose causes and dynamics exceed national borders. This does not mean we can ignore the familiar critiques of transnational governance – its democratic deficits, technocratic insulation, and subordination to market imperatives. The democratic failures of transnational governance are real as Robert Dahl so convincingly explained decades ago. But the answer to those failures cannot be a retreat into the nation-state as the final horizon of politics. The crises that define the present exceed that horizon and necessitates responses on all levels. With Jürgen Habermas’s death, we have also lost one of the most important thinkers who insisted that democracy need not end at the borders of the nation-state. The question, then, is not whether we can afford to think beyond the state, but whether we can afford not to.

Valentina Ausserladscheider is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economic Sociology at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses, among other topics, on the relationship between neoliberalism and right-wing populism.

Further Readings

  • Ausserladscheider, Valentina. (2024). Far-right populism and the making of the exclusionary neoliberal state. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Ausserladscheider, Valentina. (2024) Constructing a neoliberal exclusionary state: the role of far-right populism in economic policy change in post-war Austria. Comparative European Politics 22, 128–152.

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F&L Blog – Beyond Net Zero

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Beyond Net Zero: Towards a Climate Politics that Can Defeat the Far Right

by Christopher Shaw

26.03.2026

Christopher Shaw holds Research Associate roles at both the University of Sussex’s School of Global Studies and the Working Class Climate Alliance, and is a leading voice in climate communications in the UK. Below, he argues that the UK’s liberal, technocratic net zero climate politics has reached its limits. By ignoring both the political roots of the climate crisis, and the voices of the working class, net zero has allowed itself to be instrumentalized by the far-right. Drawing on recent political developments, Shaw outlines what a climate politics, rooted in social justice and grassroots democracy, could look like, in the fight not just for heat pumps or electric cars—but a world that feels like home.

The UK’s net zero policy: preserving liberalism versus preserving life

As the centrist waters recede back down the beach of history, climate policies are left stranded and exposed on the shore, flapping about like so many dying fish. Who will fight for net zero now? Not the European Union it seems, which is busy shredding many of its flagship climate policies, whilst the long standing net zero consensus in the UK is now coming apart. Even climate researchers supportive of net zero remain divided over the ability of net zero to deliver emission cuts quickly and fairly. To cap it all, campaigners have seen twenty years of efforts to get people to adopt the low carbon behaviours needed to deliver net zero come to naught. The rapid and ongoing collapse of the net zero policy architecture leaves climate campaigners with two choices. The first is to double down on net zero, turning increasingly to geo-engineering and technological innovation as the primary tools used to fix the climate. This limits the need to involve people or politics. The only choice the public needs to make is whether to install an air source or ground source heat pump. The second option is to recognise that the climate fight is, and always has been, political. Campaigners are choosing the first option, a strategy destined to fail further and faster than ever before. Rather than trying to lift climate policy out of the democratic sphere, we need narratives that present climate change as a product of the same politics that have delivered austerity, inequality and war. Fixing climate change means fixing the political conditions that are generating these crises. If this is not a fight the existing liberal climate movement wants to take on, we will need a new climate movement, one that does not prioritise the preservation of liberalism over the preservation of life.

The myth of the good liberal citizen

"Support for net zero has also come to stand as a marker of whether or not you are a good liberal citizen."

There is more anger, resentment and fear abroad today than liberal politics can assimilate – liberal politics and the current public mood are as oil and water. Liberal climate policy remains wedded to the hope that the evidence-based application of intellect and reason will dissipate both greenhouse gases and public anger. Through calculation and rational deliberation we can fashion a painless technocratic and reformist path to the net zero land beyond history. Liberals look to an eternal tomorrow of ‘self-regulating citizens conducting resource-efficient and sustainable lives’, enjoying outdoor yoga, cycling to the repair cafe. The mainstream climate movement is blind to the true function of net zero; it is an idea created by the allies of capital as an instrument of control, handed over to the middle class liberal climate movement to then sell to the working class as their only hope of a decent life. Support for net zero has also come to stand as a marker of whether or not you are a good liberal citizen. It doesn’t matter if you enabled the bombing of 2 million Gazans or got rich from an exploitative finance system. If you are on board with net zero then you are part of the liberal climate family. As a consequence, your voice is more deserving of attention and obedience than a poor person of poor means who is critical of net zero. If you want to identify as a progressive then you have to support net zero. If you don’t support net zero you are a fascist.

Towards a climate politics that can defeat the far right

"The UK Green Party recently overturned a huge Labour majority without once mentioning climate change in their leaflets"

There is much excellent theoretical and practical work to draw on when thinking about what sort of climate politics can defeat the far right. Efforts to articulate and promote a Green New Deal offer vital insights for how to combine climate policy with an anti-austerity, anti-imperialist agenda. Community engagement projects across Europe have identified important knowledge about barriers and opportunities for combining climate action with social justice campaigns. These ideas will remain on the margins all the while climate organizations continue drawing from the same privileged strata of society, or insist any subaltern actors must adopt middle class values and norms before being allowed into the circle. The political shift we are seeing as parties of the left and far right gain momentum is an opportunity for the climate movement to jump to the left and engage in the battle for humanity’s future.

The UK Green Party recently overturned a huge Labour majority without once mentioning climate change in their leaflets, focusing instead on poverty and the destruction of public services. This reflects a deep public rift with the liberal climate agenda. It points toward the path we need to take — further and faster, in the opposite direction to that mapped out by net zero narratives: away from global and towards the local, away from work and towards play, prioritise the human over the machine, democracy over technocracy, the substantive over the abstract, equality over difference, the social over the individual. It is only from these foundations that we can undermine the allure of far-right politics, whilst building a climate strategy from the bottom up.

For a world that feels like home

"Such technologies may be a part of living in a carbon-constrained world, but the first task is to recreate the social world, to make a world people feel at home in, feel rooted in, have control over."

The failure of the liberal climate movement is in part a failure to understand human nature. Liberalism, and the climate policies it has birthed, wrongly assume there is a space above and beyond the human heart. We cannot escape our own subjectivity. Right-wing politicians would rather see the world destroyed than compromise their political beliefs. This is also true for liberalism. This is also true for climate campaigners. This is also true for you and me. I joined the climate fight because it seemed to me the best reason for the ecosocialist future I already wanted. I am not going to fight for a decarbonised capitalist future of ground source heat pumps, a modernised electricity grid, or more EV charging points, even if I thought such things would preserve a liveable future for my children. Such technologies may be a part of living in a carbon-constrained world, but the first task is to recreate the social world, to make a world people feel at home in, feel rooted in, have control over. There seems nothing so thrilling as this prospect. Whilst liberalism makes a fetish of free will and individual autonomy, the vast majority can see that the decisions about our future have already been made for us by experts and leaders. Net zero promised to let the targets be humanity’s guide and leave the politics behind. But actually what we need is maximum politics in climate policy, a genuine grassroots democracy, a mechanism for embracing and channeling public anger towards a world that feels like home, not an innovation hub.

Christopher Shaw holds Research Associate roles at both the University of Sussex's School of Global Studies and the Working Class Climate Alliance, and is a leading voice in climate communications in the UK.

Further Readings

  • Bernstein, Steven. F. (2001). The compromise of liberal environmentalism. Columbia University Press.
  • Crary, Jonathan. (2022). Scorched earth: Beyond the digital age to a post-capitalist world. Verso books.
  • Moyn, Samuel. (2023). Liberalism against itself: Cold War intellectuals and the making of our times. Yale University Press.
  • Rose, Matthew. (2021). A world after liberalism: Philosophers of the radical right. Yale University Press.
  • Shaw, Christopher. (2023). Liberalism and the challenge of climate change. Routledge.

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TWO Webinars in preparation for the “Democracy under Pressure” 2027 Conference

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JOIN us for TWO WEBINARs to prepare the 2027 conference

March 26th, 2026

We, the International Karl Polanyi Society (IKPS), the Institute for Spatial and Social-Ecological Transformations (ISSET) and the Institute for Law and Governance cordially invite you to join our webinars in preparation for the 2027 conference “Democracy under Pressure.” After the discussion of texts by Friedrich Hayek and Carl Schmitt and their understanding of freedom and democracy, of the state and markets and of fascism and liberalism in our Reading Circle, the webinars will further engage in discussions about alternatives to the current radicalization of neoliberal thought.

The webinars will take place via Zoom on the following dates,  starting at from 6pm (CET=:

  • Mon, April 13th, 2026, 6pm:
    “The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It”
     The first webinar  will present and discuss Katharina Pistor’s new book “The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It” and its implications for understanding and overcoming the erosion of democratic institutions across the globe.
    In her book, Katharina Pistor argues that capitalism is not just an economic system; it is a deeply entrenched legal order that enables private wealth accumulation and shields it from democratic oversight. She demonstrates how legal codes privilege capital and corrode social cohesion by favouring certain assets, markets, and property relations, with far-reaching implications for democracy and the climate crisis. This places law at the centre of any response to these converging challenges.
    The webinar will explore if and how legal and economic structures need to be transformed to counteract these challenges. What roles can lawyers, economists, legislators, and civil society play in reshaping the legal foundations of capitalism? And, how feasible is such a transformation in the current political conjuncture?

     

    Katharina Pistor is Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia University. She is a leading scholar and writer on corporate governance, money and finance, property rights, and comparative law and legal institutions.

    Anne Sanders holds the Chair of Civil Law, Corporate Law, Family Business Law and Judicial Research at Bielefeld University. Her research focuses, among other things, on legal issues of sustainable entrepreneurship and the concept of steward ownership.

    Verena Madner, Head of the Institute for Law and Governance at WU, will moderate the discussion with Katharina Pistor and Anne Sanders.

    Please register via this form by April 10th in order to receive a link to participate.

 

  • Mon, May 18th, 2026, 6pm:
    “Global Finance and Fascism: Yesterday and Today”

     The second webinar will discuss learnings from the great transformation following the Great Depression after 1929 for better understanding and combatting the emerging far-right reactionary movements today. The focus of the exchange will be on identifying differences and similarities of the respective manifestations of economic liberalism and reactionary political-cultural movements and parties in both moments, including the joint attack on democratic and egalitarian institutions by economic liberals and cultural reactionaries. 

    The webinar will start discussing the political consequences of the demise of the gold standard in the 1930s and the resultant increased national policy space – for fascism as well as reformism. Of special interest are similarities and differences in the center and on the periphery of the world economy. The webinar will continue by discussing the implications for the current conjuncture: What are the prospects for global finance given the current crisis of neoliberal globalization? How does the ongoing dominance of global financial markets in the 2020s contribute to the proliferation of far-right movements and what would be the prospects for progressive politics of a recurrence of disintegrating global financial markets? 
    Andreas Novy will moderate the discussion with Ann Pettifor and Bruno De Conti.
    Please register via e-mail for a link to participate.

 

The webinars are being held in preparation for the conference on “Democracy Under Pressure: Lessons From Past Authoritarian Crises” which will take place 24 to 26 May 2027 in Vienna, organized by the Institute for Law and Governance, the Institute for Spatial and Social-Ecological Transformations (ISSET), and the International Karl Polanyi Society (IKPS). Please find the save the date for the conference here. 

We are looking forward to your participation and to an exciting exchange!

Andreas Novy, Verena Madner and Stefan Mayr

WEBINAR DETAILS:

1st WEBINAR
“The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It”

Date:
April 13th, 6PM (CET) via Zoom

Participants:
Katharina Pistor, speaker,
(Columbia Law, USA)
Anne Sanders, discussant,
(Bielefeld University, Germany)

Moderation:
Verena Madner

Register by April 10th

2nd WEBINAR
“Global Finance and Fascism: Yesterday and Today”

Date:
May 18th, 6PM (CET) via Zoom

Participants:
Ann Pettifor,
Bruno De Conti, 
(University of Campinas, Brazil)

Moderation:
Andreas Novy

Register via Mail

Organised by:

Institute for Law and Governance (WU Vienna)
Institute for Spatial and Social-Ecological Transformations (WU Vienna: ISSET)
International Karl Polanyi Society (IKPS)

FURTHER READINGS:

New IKPS blog by the IKPS on 
Fascism and Liberalism: Yesterday and Today 

i.e.:
Markets and Morals: The Reactionary Right’s Ideological Core by Andreas Novy

SPEAKERS

Anne Sanders

Ann Pettifor

Bruno De Conti

Katharina Pistor

2027 CONFERENCE: DEMOCRACY UNDER PRESSURE

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SAVE THE DATE: CONFERENCE (2027)

The Institute for Law and Governance, the Institute for Spatial and Social-Ecological Transformations (ISSET) and the International Karl Polanyi Society (IKPS) at WU Vienna University of Economics and Business cordially invite you to the interdisciplinary conference on:

Democracy Under Pressure: Lessons from past authoritarian crises

Date:
May 24th-26th, 2027

The 2020s have witnessed a troubling erosion of democratic institutions across the globe. In the US, MAGA questions electoral legitimacy and undermines state administrations and fundamental rights. In general, “illiberal democracies” and “electoral autocracies” challenge constitutional courts and related checks and balances. Consequently, contemporary societies in established democracies face multiple threats to democratic resilience, including the return of fascism.

This interdisciplinary conference addresses this urgent challenge through a specific lens: It seeks to explore how intellectual debates from a past period of democratic crisis—the 1920s and 1930s—can provide insights into current dilemmas.

While history does not repeat itself, it is often said to rhyme. The conference will connect historical debates on markets, law, and authority to analyses of contemporary challenges to liberal democracies posed, inter alia, by digital surveillance, gendered anti-feminism, inequality, climate crisis, and imperialism. To shed light on today’s authoritarian turn, we will explore competing diagnoses from four pivotal thinkers— Friedrich von Hayek (“state interventionism leads to fascism”), Karl Polanyi (“fascism defends capitalism while sacrificing democracy”), Hans Kelsen (“democracy is based on pluralist compromise”), and Carl Schmitt (“sovereignty means the power to decide on the state of exception”).

Vienna—a city whose history embodies both the promise and fragility of democratic experimentation—offers the ideal setting for this urgent conversation.

The Department of Socioeconomics at WU, our academic home base, is an interdisciplinary faculty, uniting economists, social scientists, and legal scholars—a unique institution in the German-speaking context.

“While history does not repeat itself, it is often said to rhyme.”

Core Questions

Rather than contemplating ready-made answers, the conference will investigate burning issues related to contested democracies past and present: Are economic liberalism and political authoritarianism related and if so, how do they intersect? What can the 1920s-30s teach us about socioeconomic causes of constitutional fragility and political collapse? How do current technological and politico-economic developments impact contemporary forms of authoritarianism? And how can we move from “what went wrong then” to “what and how to transform today?”.

Methodological Approach

The conference employs three complementary methods.

  • Textual Reconstruction: Close reading of primary sources to understand each thinker’s arguments in their strongest form, avoiding caricature while identifying genuine tensions and contradictions by connecting texts to their context.
  • Comparative Historical Analysis: Examining case studies of democratic resilience and collapse in the interwar period (Austria 1933-34, Germany 1930-33) and contemporary cases (Hungary, Poland, Spain’s Catalan crisis, US, Brazil for example) to identify patterns and divergences.
  • Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue: Structured panels pairing legal scholars with economists, and historians with political theorists, to explore how different disciplinary perspectives illuminate—or obscure—connections between economic processes and political-legal outcomes.

Format

Three days of keynotes, cross-disciplinary panels, and round table discussions to examine the intersections of socioeconomics and law. Sessions will be organized around substantive problems rather than individual thinkers, ensuring genuine dialogue across perspectives.

Our call is aimed at scholars from various disciplines, including economics, economic sociology, law and political economy, constitutional theory, political science, and history.

Expected Outcomes

The conference seeks to foster scholarly networks capable of sustained interdisciplinary engagement with democracy’s present crisis. Rather than providing predetermined conclusions, it seeks to clarify what historic debates can—and cannot—teach us about contemporary challenges to democratic institutions and socioeconomic development. It aims to achieve a better understanding of the underlying politico-economic and socio-cultural conditions of the current authoritarian turn, thereby contributing to a new research programme at the intersection of socioeconomics and law.

Full call and registration details coming soon.

DETAILS

Date:
May 24th-26th, 2027

Facilitation:
Institute for Law and Governance
Institute for Spatial and Social-Ecological Transformations (ISSET)
International Karl Polanyi Society (IKPS)
(WU Vienna University of Economics and Business)

Keynote Speakers:
Katharina Pistor (Columbia Law)
Quinn Slobodian (Boston University)

Quinn Slobodian

Katharina Pistor

Organised by:

Institute for Law and Governance
Institute for Spatial and Social-Ecological Transformations (ISSET)
International Karl Polanyi Society (IKPS)
(WU Vienna University of Economics and Business)

More info coming soon:

Watch this space for more info.

SPEAKERS

Quinn Slobodian

Katharina Pistor

title page for the F&L blog post "Understanding the new fascism" by Silky van Dyk

F&L Blog – Understanding the New Fascism

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Understanding the New Fascism: Post-Truth, Big Tech and the Return of Arendt’s Organized Lie

by Silke van Dyk

12.03.2026

Trump II is far more than just a radical version of the first administration. Rather, we are confronting a deeper transformation of the political itself, writes Silke van Dyk. The flooding of public discourse with right-wing populist falsehoods that defined Trump’s first term has given way to a more far-reaching manipulation of public opinion. This is further reinforced by the rise of digital capitalism and its neo-feudal concentration of power and resources. As such, van Dyk argues we are seeing a return of Hannah Arendt’s “organized lie” – the ongoing and deliberate manipulation of opinion and knowledge – a defining feature of totalitarian regimes. But countering this new fascism will require more than fighting fake news. It means liberal democracies must also address their own inconsistencies

With the first and second election of Donald Trump, the Brexit referendum, the rise of right-wing parties across numerous countries, the influence of conspiracy narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the momentum of climate change denial, a new political era has taken shape – one in which the right is increasingly challenging liberal hegemony. Alongside the resurgence of racist, nationalist, and chauvinist politics, public discourse itself has undergone a marked transformation. We are witnessing a proliferation of falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and half-truths, often coupled with hostility toward science and intellectuals. Political deception, of course, is nothing new. What is new, however, is its sheer volume, the speed of its dissemination, and the striking fact that exposure no longer appears to damage its authors. Whereas Richard Nixon was forced to resign in 1974 following the revelation of his lies in the Watergate scandal, Trump returned to the White House for a second term despite his countless false statements. 

Traditional versus Organized Lies

The classic definition of the lie is that of an intentional act in which the perpetrator is quite capable of distinguishing between the true and the untrue and deliberately makes a false statement. The publication of the Pentagon Papers[i] prompted Hannah Arendt to re-evaluate this traditional lie, and to contrast it with what she termed the “organized lie”. According to Arendt, “the difference between the traditional lie and the modern (organized) lie will more often than not amount to the difference between hiding and destroying.”[ii] While the traditional lie revealed itself because the yardstick of truth remained intact, this no longer applies to the organzied lie, since it changes the overall context in such a way that the lie becomes a substitute for reality.

According to Arendt the organized lie destroys, our “sense by which we take our bearings in the real world”[iii]. The organized lie is a demanding practice: it requires the power to eliminate or refashion all contrary evidence – documents, testimonies, witnesses, even history books – so that reality itself is consigned to a form of orchestrated oblivion. Unsurprisingly, such practices are most characteristic of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. As a central example, Hannah Arendt points to the Stalinist effort to erase all traces of Leon Trotsky from everyday life, education, and cultural memory.  

If, according to Arendt, actors lack the power needed for the organized lie, with its inherent shift away from reality, they increasingly fall back on the mode of opinion, claiming the right to freedom of expression: “The blurring of the dividing line between factual truth and opinion belongs among the many forms that lying can assume.”[iv] To take just one example: it is one thing to conclude from the Fukushima nuclear disaster that Germany’s energy policy did not require revision – this would constitute a legitimate political opinion. It is quite another thing to deny the disaster itself in order to preserve nuclear energy – and to justify that denial in the name of free speech. The latter amounts to erasing the boundary between fact and opinion. To avoid any misunderstanding: Hannah Arendt consistently defended the value of opinion and warned that truth turns despotic when it supplants politics. At the same time, she made unequivocally clear that democratic contestation presupposes a shared sense of reality, which forms the indispensable basis of political struggle. Without it, public debate deteriorates into cynical relativism – a danger against which Hannah Arendt forcefully warned. 

Trump I: The Populist Play With Truth

Arendt reminds us: "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

Echoing Friedrich Nietzsche’s dictum that truth is “the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention”[v], Trump & Co lied in open defiance of convention.[vi] The falsehoods were so frequent, so blatant, and so inconsistent that their inaccuracy were most often immediately apparent. Many of these statements were situational and contradictory, loosely connected rather than embedded in a coherent worldview. In Trump‘s first term, the surrounding context remained largely intact; indeed, the point was to flaunt the possibility of dismissing that context as the ‘deceptive reality’ constructed by allegedly left-liberal elites. In this configuration, being accused of lying poses no threat to the liar. On the contrary, it serves as proof of the critic’s elite status. 

Deliberate fabrications or organized lies were less a threat to empirical realities than the elevation of mere opinion. When Trump once speculated that U.S. unemployment might be as high as 42% he did not challenge the official rate of 5.3% by criticizing statistical methods or narrow definitions of unemployment. Instead, he countered a verified figure with an opinion, citing unnamed sources and invoking the right to free speech. In its first phase, the Trump system thus sought to circumvent the established procedures of truth verification in liberal democracies. Yet the countless falsehoods of Trump I had another effect as well: they generated lasting confusion, thereby paving the way for authoritarianism. As Hannah Arendt observed: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.”[vii]

Trump II: The Fascist Return of the Organized Lie

From the outset of his second term, Trump and his circle made utterly clear that they would not simply replicate the first. Immediately after the inauguration on January 20, 2025, the new president signed numerous executive orders, including pardons for convicted Capitol rioters, withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO), and the elimination of birthright citizenship for U.S.–born children of non-citizen parents. Although the January 2025 inaugural address carried unmistakable populist overtones – Trump accused “a radical and corrupt establishment” of having “robbed our citizens of power and wealth” for years – the speech, and even more so the administration’s first-year policies, revealed distinctly fascist-like features.  

"The manipulation of knowledge production and dissemination [...] all testify to a new form of control over education, culture, and science. [...] this represents a renewed deployment of the organized lie with its characteristic power to derealize"

This has resulted in the further radicalization of the extreme nationalist MAGA (Make America Great Again) project, paired with the construction of Trump as a Führer-like figure divinely chosen to end the “terrible betrayal” of international forces against the American people. Glorification of violence appears in the widespread imagery of deportations of alleged gang members, the repeated calls to expand the death penalty, and the brutal conduct of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with its increasingly paramilitary characteristics. Migrant communities, queer people, and scientists are cast as enemies from whom the American people must be “saved.” 

Concrete measures quickly followed: deportations, emergency legislation at the Mexican border, the elimination of the third-gender option on official documents, cuts to diversity programs, and sweeping restrictions on academic freedom. The manipulation of knowledge production and dissemination, the suppression of unwelcome research in climate, health, and diversity, and political interference in the governance and direction of cultural institutions all testify to a new form of control over education, culture, and science. School curricula, museums, and public libraries are seeing the increasing removal of references to the crimes of slavery and the history of racism. Government agencies are currently deleting photographs and documents that record the service of women and people of color in the military or critically examine U.S. military actions. In the terms of Hannah Arendt, this represents a renewed deployment of the organized lie with its characteristic power to derealize: inconvenient facts, evidence, and scientific knowledge are no longer merely challenged with opinion – they are actively manipulated, and the records themselves, destroyed. 

Big Tech as Agents of Fascist Derealization

The newfound alliance between Silicon Valley tech giants and Trump & Co. has accelerated this trend, visible in every inauguration photograph, with the heads of Meta, Google, X, and Amazon seated in the front row. It proved highly convenient for the Trump administration that the fact-checking measures temporarily introduced on Facebook and Instagram to curb fake news and conspiracy theories vanished immediately after the inauguration. Likewise, Google promptly – and illegally – implemented Trump’s order to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”, at least within the U.S. The fragmentation of the public sphere in the digital economy corresponds to the concentration of power in the hands of a handful of ultra-wealthy private entrepreneurs, who, as enablers of fascist–leaning governments, have become key agents of derealization. Artificial intelligence is increasingly deployed to reshape the state in anti-democratic ways: deepfakes can be used to discredit political opponents, while evidence of corruption and illegal government actions are likewise dismissed as false, fabricated by the liberal elite. The fascist–like return of the organized lie thus brings derealization into reality – something that even Hannah Arendt and George Orwell could hardly have imagined: a neofeudal, privately controlled capacity, enabled by new technologies, to artificially remake the very representation of the world. 

The Liberal System Must Confront Its Own Inconsistencies

"the liberal 'postpolitics' of inevitability bears at least partial responsibility for the rise of rightwing forces that manipulate reality and advance their own anti-elite narratives"

One obvious response to these developments would be to bring communication and information infrastructures under public ownership and democratic control – rather than subject to the priorities and profit motives of a handful of multi-billionaires. Yet to do so requires understanding why the “offer” of rightwing and fascist politicians appeal to so many. This means examining the functional deficits of liberal democracies. At a time when liberal elites often celebrate the primacy of truth, they frequently overlook their own problematic handling of facts. For decades, they have presented certain realities as immutable constraints, while promoting radical market and austerity policies as inevitable and beyond debate. 

Hannah Arendt emphasized that political thinking operates between two risks, “the danger of taking [facts] as the results of some necessary development which men could not prevent and about which they can therefore do nothing, and the danger of denying them, of trying to manipulate them out of the world”[viii]. To understand the complex picture we face today, it is crucial to connect these two dangers and recognize that the liberal “postpolitics” of inevitability bears at least partial responsibility for the rise of rightwing forces that manipulate reality and advance their own anti-elite narratives. It is true, in other words, that “those at the top lie” when they claim there is no alternative. It becomes particularly dangerous when the necessary vigilance against the right blinds us to the functional deficits of liberal democracy and economy – the unfulfilled promises, technocratic tendencies, and socioeconomic failures that have brought us to the present moment. Even more perilous is the call to end debates among democrats in the face of the rightwing threat. Yet democratic public life depends on political contestation, including vigorous debate over what an anti-fascist social and economic policy should look like – a question that now, more than ever, must concern all democrats. 

 

Silke van Dyk Headshot

Silke van Dyk is a professor of Political Sociology at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Her main research areas are the sociology of social inequality, the sociology of social policy and the welfare state, the sociology of aging and demography, and perspectives of social critique.

References

  • i The Pentagon Papers are a formerly secret document produced by the US Department of Defense, whose serial publication by the New York Times in 1971 revealed the feeding of false information to the US public concerning the Vietnam War.
  • ii Hannah Arendt (1969) Truth and Politics. In: Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, New York, p. 227-264 (here: 253).
  • iii Ibid., p. 257.
  • iv Ibid., p. 250.
  • v Friedrich Nietzsche (1988) Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol. 1, Berlin/New York, p. 881 (own translation).
  • vi For a detailed analysis, see Silke van Dyk (2022): „Post-Truth, the Future of Democracy and the Public Sphere”, in: Theory, Culture & Society, 39 (4), pp. 37-50.
  • vii Hannah Arendt (1958) Origins of Totalitarianism, Cleveland/New York, S. 474.
  • viii Hannah Arendt (1969) Truth and Politics, p. 259.

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title page for the F&L blog post "Property Damages" by Jacob Blumenfeld

F&L Blog – Property Damages

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Property Damages

by Jacob Blumenfeld

13.02.2026

Does private property secure freedom, or train us for domination? In this article, philosopher Jacob Blumenfeld traces how liberal ownership rights shape social relations, trigger ecological conflict, and foment authoritarian desires. His claim is not that all forms of private ownership corrupt individuals. Rather, he argues that the specific legal form of liberal property rights – granting exclusive control over socially necessary resources – enables relations of power, resentment, and authority that prime authoritarian movements. In an age of climate crisis and deepening inequality, the future hinges on the question of how property relations are organized: for private ends – or for social needs.

In a speech on January 21st in Davos, Donald Trump asked, rhetorically, in relation to Greenland: “Who wants to defend something on a lease?” To defend something, he implied, one must first own it. The need for protection becomes the justification for possession. Trump’s remark expresses a familiar liberal conviction: authority appears legitimate when grounded in ownership, and ownership is only legitimate if you take on ‘responsibility’ and can defend it. Property rights, thus, do not only allocate resources, they allocate decision-making power. Whoever owns decides; others adapt. This article examines the ideological roots of such thinking and discusses the political consequences of that ordinary arrangement posing the question: does owning property make you more prone to fascism? Does acquiring a taste of sovereign authority over an external thing slowly translate into a desire to dominate people as well? If you treat the world fundamentally as property, characterized by the right to use and abuse things at will, then isn’t it only a matter of time before you overstep the boundary between thing and person?

Property is Power

If slavery is the origin of property rights, as David Graeber once argued, then being a property owner is an education in dominion, the authority to dispose over what is mine by commanding the wills of other people. The right to an external thing is a license to treat others in certain ways in relation to the thing at hand. My legally sanctioned authority over this land, these assets, and those machines gives me the legitimate power to determine how others may or may not use them, irrespective of the social consequences. Treating something as property flattens the salient normative distinctions between items of personal use, societal infrastructures, natural landscapes, and means of production, as if they could all be simply mine or yours, ours or theirs, without further thought. Property is power over people, masked as a relation of power over things. Whether a pair of shoes or a pair of companies, a piece of land or a piece of writing, I can develop or destroy what’s mine as I see fit. Whether the air is polluted, food wasted, tenants evicted, or ecosystems plundered, that is not my concern. Freedom trumps consequences.

Liberalism is founded on the right to private property, but private property is also what breaks liberalism. For what better way than owning property is there for learning how to be a dictator? If this is true, then the bedrock of liberal freedom is made from the same material as the authoritarian longings it is supposed to ward off. Or maybe we have it backwards. Does not owning property make you more prone to fascist tendencies? If you don’t have anything at all to call your own, does that make you jealous of those who do? Resentful, hateful, you see others as threats or competitors, as rivals scrambling for scarce jobs, limited resources, and even romantic companions. Dependent on bosses, managers, and landlords, you despise those not above you—you want to be them—but those beside you and below you. They are the ones taking your job, raising costs, committing crimes. Squeezed between employers and unemployed, between owners and beggars, you seek an outlet for affirming your unrecognized status, for exercising the power of possession over property you don’t have. A class of vulnerable people—women, migrants, minorities—fills the void of property and upon them you exert your dominion. But resentment does not remain a private feeling—it seeks a public form. It looks for a figure who can promise to restore what should be yours, someone who can bring back greatness, who can give you a share of domination as compensation for a share of ownership.

The Liberal Paradox of Private Property Rights

Damaged subjects, damaged objects, damaged society—property leaves wreckage in its wake, whether you have it or you don’t. But what is property after all? And isn’t this about private property, not property as such? The term property can refer to a thing that is owned, to rules of ownership, or to the right to control the use of something. Ownership usually entails rights of exclusion: the authority to legitimately exclude others from determining the use of something, including the right to possess, to control, to sell, to destroy, and so on. Private property—as opposed to public, common, open access, social and other forms of ownership—grants the authority to decide on the use of something to a single person, although “person” here is not a human being, but a juridical category. This right to exclude others from having a say in determining the use of goods is the anti-democratic core of liberal democracy, and it is morally permitted due to the alleged gains that private property contributes to securing individual freedom and fostering economic efficiency.

"Property organizes our ethical relations, our ecological conditions, and our subjective identities. It habituates us to a grammar of command and deference"

But private property is not a simple one-way relation between owner and owned. Rather, the relation extends in multiple directions out from the self: from self to others, from self to world, and from self to self. Property, in other words, is a social relation, a world relation and a self-relation. It shapes how we relate to each other, how we treat nature, and how we treat ourselves. Property organizes our ethical relations, our ecological conditions, and our subjective identities. It habituates us to a grammar of command and deference. While owning personal possessions need not be problematic, at the societal level, private control over infrastructure, housing, or productive assets magnifies the dominating, sovereign power of private property over social life. That is why it’s so important to prevent social property relations from being structured in ways that are beyond democratic control. Letting private persons with ownership rights determine the fate of the natural environment, visual media, medical developments, or technological investments, to name a few, can cause immense damage not only to social institutions and complex ecosystems, but also to the psychological well-being of individuals themselves.

The paradox is that liberal property rights, in their very atomism, bind human beings together on a planetary scale through our forced inclusion in global markets. We are individually empowered to exclude each other, yet collectively unable to escape one another. Therein lies the dual power of property rights: separating us in ways that foster regression and binding us in ways that elicit material transformation.

Critical Property Theory

There has been a renaissance of critical property theory in recent years. Eva von Redecker has shown how authoritarian tendencies emerge as a kind of reflexive phantom possession over amputated rights to dominate others. Daniel Loick argues that property rights themselves deform the subjects who exercise them, and thus demands a non-appropriative relation to the world. Brenna Bhandar has traced the colonial violence embedded in legal techniques of property such as title by registration, while Robert Nichols has demonstrated how states create property through acts of dispossession. Across these approaches, a common theme emerges: property is not a neutral legal tool but a central site of social conflict, whether over housing, data, land, finance, and the environment, or wherever we have a stake in determining the boundaries of mine and yours.

"To treat nothing as property would block the will’s need to externalize itself. But to treat everything as property would be a scandal for ethical life, reducing all relations to the grammar of possession."

This insight has deep philosophical roots. Hegel described property as an “external sphere of freedom,” the domain in which the free will gives itself objective form in the world and can be recognized as such by others. For Hegel, property is a necessary but still one-sided realization of freedom. It must be taken up into richer ethical and political relations—family, civil society, and the state—if freedom is to acquire substance and direction. To treat nothing as property would block the will’s need to externalize itself. But to treat everything as property would be a scandal for ethical life, reducing all relations to the grammar of possession.

The political stakes of this ambiguity become stark in moments of crisis. In a 1934 essay on the relation between liberalism and fascism, Herbert Marcuse highlighted the property-centered definition of liberalism offered by Ludwig von Mises: liberalism, according to Mises, can be summed up in a single word—property, specifically private property in the means of production. From this premise follows both an unqualified defense of capitalism and a qualified tolerance for authoritarian rule, insofar as it is seen as a temporary bulwark against socialism. When property becomes the supreme value, the line between defending freedom and excusing domination grows perilously thin.

Max Horkheimer captured the view from below with brutal clarity: for those who live at the sharp end of economic power, liberal and authoritarian regimes often blur together. What changes is not the experience of hunger, police, or compulsion, but the language in which these realities are justified.

Liberal Property and Authoritarian Politics

A contemporary echo of this logic surfaced in Trump’s recent Davos speech, cited at the top. Ownership in Trump’s liberal-fascist rhetoric is bound explicitly to protection, and protection is bound to war—both legally and psychologically. What is not asked is what should be defended by whom in the first place. The fact that property must be defended is taken as retroactive justification for making it “mine.” Whether concerning oil, airspace, land, or minerals, the right to determine the use and abuse portions of the world as one’s property is the underlying premise of geopolitical struggle. Trump just made it explicit.

Also in Davos, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney defended what he calls the ‘liberal international order’ against Trump’s openly proprietarian language. Yet the contrast is less absolute than it appears: the liberal world order has long protected property claims through sovereignty, contracts, and international law, thereby limiting open territorial conflict while simultaneously enabling asymmetric control over resources, labor, and development across the global economy. Recognition and domination formed two sides of the same structure: internally pacified through rights, externally extended through markets, finance, and extraction.

"[...] conflicts increasingly appear in direct form as disputes over entitlement - who may dispose over shared conditions of life, and who must adapt."

Whether in Ukraine, Venezuela, or Gaza, it seems as if the recognition of formal property rights has suddenly ceased to play a role in geopolitics. But what is changing is not the respect for property as an international principle altogether, but the weakening of the discursive and juridical mediation around which property was previously organized. As the language of sovereignty loses its stabilizing force, conflicts increasingly appear in direct form as disputes over entitlement – who may dispose over shared conditions of life, and who must adapt. Those who have the power to take and defend property with force increasingly shape the future of the planet. Breaking the capacity of these claims to determine our collective fate for the gain of a few at the expense of the many is one of the defining political tasks of our time.

Under conditions of ecological crisis, these dynamics intensify further still. As material conditions deteriorate, struggles over access to energy, housing, water, and security sharpen. Claims of “mine” and “yours” harden, becoming less negotiable and more willing to enlist authoritarian means—which is what we are arguably witnessing in international politics already. Managing a declining economic order becomes a central political problem. If investment, infrastructure, and resource allocation remain governed primarily by markets and private rights, the burdens of transition will be distributed through mechanisms that amplify inequality, exclusion and violence. Demands for protection slide into demands for war.

Socialization or Regression

If authoritarian tendencies are rooted in the contradictions of liberal property rights, familiar liberal remedies, such as more rights, better juridical procedures and stronger institutions are unlikely to suffice. As long as the external sphere of freedom remains privately monopolized, the gap between formal equality and material power will continue to generate political and affective pressures that can be mobilized in illiberal directions. However, the alternative is not the abolition of property but its socialization, or rather, the abolition of one kind of property through its socialization: the democratization of the powers of use, control, and investment over the basic infrastructure of society so as to plan a better future together. Socialization means transforming property from a private claim backed by exclusive rights into a collective capacity oriented toward shared needs and democratic priorities. It asks who gets to decide what is built, extracted, funded, maintained, or allowed to decay. It seeks to expand the external sphere of freedom beyond the boundaries of private title – a necessary precondition for a more just and sustainable social order, particularly regarding the ownership of society’s central means of reproduction.

"When property relations fail to secure mutual recognition and the satisfaction of basic needs for large segments of society, they become politically damaging. The defense of private ownership transforms from a claim of freedom into a demand for domination."

In this sense, socialization is a struggle for recognition at the level of material life. It aims to make democracy effective not only during the election cycle but in the everyday organization of production, reproduction, and ecological repair. It is an attempt to align formal equality with real capacities to shape one’s conditions of existence. When property relations fail to secure mutual recognition and the satisfaction of basic needs for large segments of society, they become politically damaging. The defense of private ownership transforms from a claim of freedom into a demand for domination.

Property is not simply something individuals have. It is a social relation through which freedom, dependence, and mutual obligation are organized. How that relation is structured will shape not only patterns of inequality but the very forms of politics that appear plausible, legitimate, or necessary in moments of crisis. Property damages, and damage demands compensation. In a world of climate breakdown and deepening precarity, the stakes of property are nothing less than the kinds of futures we make possible—or foreclose.

Jacob Blumenfeld is a philosopher and postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Social Critique in Berlin. His work spans critical property theory, the normative foundations of socialization, climate change and subjectivity, Fichte’s critical theory, and the moral philosophy of Günther Anders.

References

  • Angebauer, Niklas; Blumenfeld, Jacob; Wesche, Tilo (ed.) (2025): Umkämpftes Eigentum. Eine gesellschaftstheoretische Debatte. Suhrkamp.
  • Bhandar, Brenna. 2018. Colonial Lives of Property. Duke University Press.
  • Blumenfeld, Jacob. 2024. The Concept of Property in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. Routledge.
  • Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5000 Years. Melville House.
  • Hegel, G.W.F. 1991 [1820]. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Cambridge.
  • Horkheimer, Max. 1973 [1940] . “The Authoritarian State” in Telos 15: 3-20.
  • Loick, Daniel. 2023. The Abuse of Property. MIT Press
  • Marcuse, Herbert. 2009 [1934]. “The Struggle against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State.” in: Negations: Essays in Critical Theory. Mayfly.
  • Mises, Ludwig von. 1985 [1927]. Liberalism. Liberty Fund/Cobden Press
  • Nichols, Robert. 2019. Theft is Property! Duke University Press.
  • Redecker, Eva von. 2020. “Ownership’s Shadow”. Critical Times 3 (1): 33–67.

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F&L Blog – Silicon Valley Tech For Whom?

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Silicon Valley Tech for Whom? From Flying Cars to AI-controlled Weapons Systems

by Claus Thomasberger

29.01.2026

What can the 1930s interwar period teach us about the growing power of Silicon Valley tech monopolies? Below, Claus Thomasberger contrasts two critical works on the role of technology: an article by the late anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, and a book by libertarian thinkers and Palantir executives Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska. Combining these with Karl Polanyi’s observations of how corporate interests aided the rise of fascism and sidelining of democratic and civil liberties in the 1930s, he cautions against Karp and Zaminska’s vision of a merger of tech monopoly and state interests. Drawing parallels between Polanyi and Graeber, he then shares ideas for how we might instead develop technologies that work in the interest of all, not elites.

In 2015—one year before Donald Trump’s first election—the much-too-early-deceased anthropologist David Graeber, leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement and self-described anarchist, expanded on his widely acclaimed 2012 article Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.[1] In the extended version, he directed even stronger criticism towards the government bureaucracies and economies of Western countries for losing sight of the needs and desires of the majority of the population. Technological progress, he argued, was being directed in ways that served the class interests of capital while ignoring the actual needs of society. Technologies were being steered toward enforcing labor discipline and the surveillance of people in and beyond the workplace. In place of the promised democratic control of technological progress, had come complex bureaucratic apparatuses. Not only technology, but social development as a whole, had gone astray. At the same time, the gap between economic and political systems had widened, while society’s control over both shrank.

A decade later, only a few weeks after Trump’s second inauguration, billionaire Alexander Karp, co-founder and CEO of defence contractor Palantir Technologies Inc.—who earned his doctorate in social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt—and Nicholas Zamiska, the firm’s legal counsel, published a book in which they drew on Graeber’s critique. The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West [2], quickly rose to number one on the New York Times Bestseller List. Karp and Zamiska, too, criticized today’s political system—, its inflexibility and overgrown bureaucracy. The government, they complain, has become unwilling and unable to promote large-scale technological breakthroughs— a task that in the past had been essential for the rise of the U.S. On the other hand, they accused U.S. companies—especially the Silicon Valley giants—of treating the U.S. government as an impediment to innovation instead of as a logical partner. Some Silicon Valley monopolies focusing on trivial products such as photo-sharing apps and chat interfaces had actively avoided working for the government and abandoned any serious efforts to improve and uplift society. “The vital yet messy questions of what constitutes a good life, which collective endeavours society should pursue, and what a shared and national identity can make possible have been set aside as the anachronisms of another age,” they concluded. At first, Karp and Zamiska’s critique appears surprisingly similar to Graeber’s, however, as we will see, its underlying vision and implications differ significantly.

Polanyi’s Warning

In 1932, a few months before Hitler came to power, Karl Polanyi published an article for the weekly Der Österreichische Volkswirt that began with the following observation:

A chasm has opened between the economy and politics. These scant words give the diagnosis of the times. The economy and politics, two manifestations of the life of society, have declared their autonomy and wage unceasing war against each other. They have become slogans under which political parties and economic classes pursue their opposing interests… There is no contemporary problem more worthy of the attention of well-intentioned people than this one. A society whose political and economic systems are in conflict is doomed to decline – or to be overthrown. [3]

Ever since universal suffrage had become a political demand, influential liberals – think of Lord Macaulay’s famous speech against the Chartist petition – had been well aware that the relationship between democratic politics and capitalism was the Achilles heel of liberal civilization in Europe. The outbreak of conflict between the political and economic system in the early 1930s meant defeat not only for the socialists, but for the new liberals of the interwar period as well.

Certainly, Mises, Hayek, and their followers never regarded democracy as a value in itself. Their primary goal was to limit the power of political rulers. Their reasoning was simple: autocratic governments—if not kept in check from outside by liberal forces, as in the colonies or later, for example, in Chile under Pinochet—would mostly tend to extend their rule without limits. Democratic politics, on the other hand, could be kept under control much easier, they believed, by steering public opinion. In the same year that Polanyi’s warning was published, Ludwig Mises proclaimed that “just because they cannot think for themselves the masses follow the lead of the people we call educated [i.e., liberal intellectuals like himself —author’s clarification]. Convince these, and the game is won.” [4] A decade earlier, in his book Public Opinion, [5] Walter Lippmann had analysed how public opinion was “shaped” from above. Similarly, Edward Bernays had declared that “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”[6] Or, in Hayek’s more cautious language: the central political task of neoliberal intellectuals is “to persuade the majority ”[7] to accept the rules of liberal capitalism.

Ludwig Mises proclaimed that “just because they cannot think for themselves the masses follow the lead of the people we call educated [i.e., liberal intellectuals like himself]. Convince these, and the game is won."

By 1933 at the latest, it had become obvious that this strategy had failed. The new liberals had lost their influence on public opinion and key political institutions. They had been unable to prevent the global economic crisis. Their arrogance had blinded them to the fact that the common people were perfectly capable and willing to think for themselves. Not only Mises and Hayek, but also Popper, Karl Polanyi’s brother Michael, Schumpeter, and other Central European neoliberals drew the same conclusion: they emigrated to the Anglo-Saxon world. The Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1938 was a first attempt to get back on track. However, it was not until after the end of World War II that they made a new attempt to regain their influence on European politics from the U.S., by founding the Mont Pelerin Society. Countless other neoliberal think tanks followed.

For Polanyi, in 1932, there was no doubt: the abuse of the political and economic systems—the two vital institutions of capitalist market societies— in the struggle for specific interests undermined the integrity of society as a whole. Overcoming the division was in the interest of all, not just of a particular class. If society was to survive, the deadly struggle between democracy and capitalism had to end. And those forces able to show a way out—or at least give that impression—would win.

Socialism had sought to resolve this tension by extending democracy to the economic sphere. Fascism pursued the opposite goal: overcoming the conflict between capitalism and democracy by abolishing democracy. The corporative state aimed to directly intertwine the economic and political systems: economic planning, but not by a democratic society hostile to business—by the economic corporations themselves. To achieve this, democratic influence on the state had to be suppressed and parliaments, labour unions and socialist parties eliminated. The triumph of fascism, thus, was the result of the weakness of its opponents. Or, in Polanyi’s words: “Under the liberal and Marxist belief in the primacy of economic class interests, Hitler was bound to win.”

False Heroes: Founders and Founder-led Companies

Even if Karp and Zamiska’s understanding of the problems seems quite close to Graeber’s, their answer, which they call “The Technological Republic,” points in a very different direction. The boundaries between business and government, they argue, must be dismantled. Only if the software industry is able to rebuild its bonds with state agencies—enabling the country to develop technological and AI capabilities through the integration of state and business—will it be capable of mastering the future. But to what end? What is the interest of U.S. society as a whole?

According to the two Palantir authors, one goal can unite the American nation: the belief in the superiority of American civilization and the preservation of U.S. supremacy on the international stage.

Leaving aside their long-winded discussions about founder culture and other American myths, what remains is one goal that, according to the two Palantir authors, can unite the American nation: the belief in the superiority of American civilization and the preservation of U.S. supremacy on the international stage. Given the emergence of geopolitical rivals threatening the U.S. dominance at all levels, this requires, above all, maintaining leadership in the military and weapons technology sector. The key vision: “A union of the state and the software industry—not their separation and disentanglement—[…] will be required for the United States […] to remain as dominant in this century as they were in the last.”[8] In other words, the Technological Republic aims essentially at a strengthening of the military-industrial complex under the auspices of artificial intelligence.

At the same time, democratic forms of decision-making play no role in the Technological Republic; in fact, any interference by the common people appears as a disruptive factor that would only disturb the integration of political and economic systems and weaken the U.S. vis-à-vis China and other countries.

The Washington Post (owned by Silicon Valley technologist Jeff Bezos) praised it as a “A Freethinker’s Manifesto.” However, the libertarian orientation underlying Karp’s and Zamiska’s argument led the Post—and many other reviewers—astray. Karl Polanyi would have agreed that the chasm between the economy and politics is a feature of the obsolete capitalist market society; it should and must be overcome. But he also warned that democracy would have to take the lead. Otherwise, personal freedom would be destroyed. If the individual is not conceived of as a responsible member of society, but as the embodiment of economic and political functions, individualism and freedom lose their foundation. “Anti-individualism is … the cue of all Fascist schools of thought,” Polanyi underlined in his analysis of The Essence of Fascism.[9]

The heroes of the Technological Republic—the founders and founder-led companies—would enjoy full freedom, while ordinary people would struggle in vain to defend their democratic rights against the powerful.

The Technological Republic depicts—and the two authors would not deny this—the vision of a highly elitist form of society. Its heroes—the founders and founder-led companies—would enjoy full freedom, while ordinary people would struggle in vain to defend their democratic rights against the powerful. Despite libertarian claims, freedom in the Technological Republic is reduced to mere advocacy for founder-led companies. For the vast majority of people, the demise of democracy would also mean the irretrievable loss of personal freedom.

From Elite Power to Collective Self-determination

The focus of Polanyi’s research was never solely on critiquing the capitalist economy, but on understanding the relationship between the economy, politics, and society—or, as he put it, “the place of the economy in society.” David Graeber, in his own way, asked the same kind of question, warning that technology had been hijacked to serve bureaucratic and corporate control rather than human needs. Karp and Zamiska confront the same structural rupture, but their Technological Republic offers a solution that would fuse state and corporate power while sidelining democracy. If Polanyi’s studies of fascism teach us anything, it is that real alternatives must go beyond class interests and address the needs of society as a whole. Confronting visions like the Technological Republic requires developing democratic answers to the challenges of modern industrial society—answers rooted in democratic economic planning that includes all sectors of society, not just Silicon Valley monopolies. For Polanyi, this was the essence of democratic socialism. For us today, it may indicate paths that enable a future characterized by collective self-determination, rather than a future dictated by elitist alliances of power and profit.

Claus Thomasberger is a former Professor of Economics and Foreign Economic Policy at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences

References

  1. David Graeber: The Utopia of Rules. On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Melville House, 2015
  2. Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska: The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belif, and the Future of the West, Crown Publishing Group, 2025

  3. Karl Polanyi: Economy and Democracy, in: Polanyi, Karl: Economy and Society (ed. M. Cangiani and C. Thomasberger), Polity Press, 2018, p. 68

  4. Ludwig Mises: Socialism. Yale University Press, 1962, p.23

  5. Walter Lippmann: Public Opinion, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922

  6. Edward Bernays: Propaganda, Horace Liveright 1928, p. 9

  7. Friedrich Hayek: The Constitution of Liberty, The University of Chicago Press, 2011, (CW Vol. XVII), p.167
  8. Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, p. 10
  9. Karl Polanyi: The Essence of Fascism, in: Karl Polanyi: Economy and Society (ed. M. Cangiani and C. Thomasberger), Polity Press, 2018, p. 87

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F&L Blog - Andreas Novy Antifascist Climate Politics

F&L Blog – Building an Anti-Fascist Climate Agenda

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Building an anti-fascist Climate Agenda

by Andreas Novy

15.01.2026

Can growth-critical progressives, ecomodernists, and anti-fascist liberals and conservatives find common ground to halt authoritarianism and address the climate crisis? This first piece of 2026 reflects a new area of focus for this blog—the link between neoliberalism, fascism, and the failure of climate politics. Andreas Novy, President of the International Karl Polanyi Society, explains why both “green” and “de-” growth agendas have so far proved unsuccessful in meeting climate targets, and why they are insufficient to defend democracies against fascism. To secure a liveable future, he advocates for moving beyond the climate policy silo to build broad alliances with movements that reject both fascism and neoliberal austerity, before outlining four cornerstones of a new, anti-fascist climate politics.

"Under an austerity regime, public funds will never be sufficient to finance the activities necessary to achieve climate targets.”

Current far-right reactionary movements not only share fascism’s anti-egalitarian aspirations, but the same will to merge economic and state power. Controlling the media and the courts, weakening civil society and the opposition, changing electoral rules, even the use of paramilitary violence—these are among the means by which they seek to stay in power. For this reason, we must exclude far-right parties from governing at all costs. 

This is, however, insufficient to prevent the return of radical forms of authoritarianism, eugenics, and state violence. Neither decarbonization nor the defense of liberal democracy will be successful if delinked from socioeconomic reforms that not only overcome neoliberalism, but also transform basic pillars of capitalist domination, especially unconditional property rights. 

Neither green growth nor degrowth can combat fascism alone

Today’s reactionaries use culture war rhetoric to camouflage their class war intentions. The Thiels, Musks, Mileis, Kickls and Weidels of this world are not populists but elitists who, self-consciously, increasingly defend their backward-oriented supremacist ideologies in public. To counter their strategy, neither mainstream ecomodernist “green growth” strategies, nor “degrowth” movements offer convincing alternatives. The former are naïve with respect to the political-economic preconditions of deep socio-ecological transformations. The latter underestimate the need for unconventional alliances to resist a civilizational backlash that aims at building hierarchical societies to guarantee a good life only for a select few. Such broad alliances are necessary, however, as the far right indiscriminately attack both sides, denouncing them as urban educated, often academic “elites”. 

The ecomodernist mainstream has long tried to convince enlightened business to adhere to a green agenda based on science and facts by “bribing” them with de-risking policies: green investment should be good for the environment and for profits. Still today, many believe that both economic and political liberalism are necessary for tackling the climate crisis in pluralist societies. Markets and private corporations together with democracy, human rights, and science offer, so the belief, the necessary preconditions to implement profound ecological changes, including—in line with Fridays for Future—the ability to “listen to science”. What this overlooks, however, is that economic liberal parties—such as Austria’s NEOS or Germany’s FDP—share with the far-right—such as FPÖ and AfD—a defense of market solutions and private property, and an aversion to redistribution. This point barely enters into contemporary debates, and yet, it has severe implications for current economic policies which prioritize competition and growth over achieving climate targets. This is justified—in line with economic liberalism—by austerity and geopolitical competition. And it is grounded in a common supremacist belief that, as per Friedrich Hayek, some must lead and others must follow.

Degrowth research, unlike ecomodernism, is critical of economic liberalism. Nevertheless, it reinforces a narrative that is inimical for alliance-building. If one wants to focus on human flourishing and planetary health, calling alternatives “de-” or “post-growth” risks trapping them in the same imaginary. Neuro-linguist George Lakoff illustrated in his book “Don’t Think of an Elephant“ what Michel Foucault demonstrated with respect to sexuality—showing how “free sexuality” and “demonize sexuality” remain prisoner of the same discourse (or put another way, the more one tries to shift the narrative “beyond growth”, the more the focus stays on growth). To avoid marginalization and build support for new objectives of wellbeing, and better approaches for coordination and planning, the climate movement needs a new language, new discourses and new framings that can move us from words to deeds.

Four cornerstones of anti-fascist climate politics

"Anti-fascist climate politics abandons the climate policy silo entirely, including futile debates on growth. And it shares the discursive field of anti-fascist politics which centers pluralism and socioeconomic security in times of turmoil."

Right now, climate policies follow a minimalist agenda, centered on the narrow concern of climate neutrality. Substitute this with a target of climate-friendly living however—linking mitigation and adaptation with ecological and social objectives—and such a ‘more-than-climate’ politics widens the horizon to include issues of fairness and social justice. This is an important starting point for creating anti-fascist politics. But anti-fascist climate politics would be more than this.

Anti-fascist climate politics abandons the climate policy silo entirely, including futile debates on growth. And it shares the discursive field of anti-fascist politics which centers pluralism and socioeconomic security in times of turmoil. This broad discursive field has four cornerstones:

First, it seeks to attract progressives, conservatives, and liberals who oppose the far-right. In times of climate crises and geopolitical tensions, the common denominator could be a “transformation by design” approach. This would attempt to alter the current mode of living and producing while maintaining the best of its values and institutions; individual freedoms and human rights being the dearest achievement of Western civilization. Due to the determination of reactionaries for systemic change, transformation is, therefore, a precondition not only for emancipatory transformations but also for preserving certain democratic and egalitarian traditions. This would challenge conservatives to choose between a liberal democratic order and authoritarians who share certain reactionary values. And it would force liberals to choose between an open, democratic, and pluralist society—or the unconditional defense of economic and property rights. 

Second, the key anti-fascist learning from the Great Depression of the 1930s was that a living wage and reduced costs of living must be key policy objectives. One can witness the relevance of this lesson today in the success of Mamdani affordable living campaign in New York, and Lula’s minimum wage and welfare policies in Brazil. Neoliberalism has created widespread insecurity and makes striving for a good and stable life an existential challenge. While low-income households struggle to meet basic needs, middle-income households often face relative deprivation, derived from rising cost of living and an eroding margin of comfort. As the latter are decisive swing voters, policies must not limit themselves to guarantee minimum provisioning, but link this to building public and social infrastructures that also reduce living costs for the middle classes. It needs “bread” and “roses” – for all. 

"Public planning and better coordination of business, science, civil society, and the state can improve the wellbeing of lower and middle classes by shifting from individual consumption to collective forms of provisioning."

Third, such a political shift is only possible with a radical de-concentration of economic power. If billionaires use political donations and can obtain digital platforms to buy the control of state apparatus, the public domain becomes their fiefdom and liberal democratic institutions vanish—a phenomenon we can currently observe in the US. Therefore, progressive taxation, wealth redistribution, and rigid anti-trust regulations—especially for digital platforms and intellectual property rights—are preconditions for science-based public debate and democratic decision-making. As long as commercial and social media remain under the control of billionaires who profit from the climate crisis, climate research is powerless, and sound arguments will never win against billionaire-financed fake news. 

Fourth, goods and services can become more affordable and sustainable if needs are satisfied less via commodities and more via infrastructures, such as by urban planning and buildings that maximize resource efficiency. Public planning and better coordination of business, science, civil society, and the state can improve the wellbeing of lower and middle classes by shifting from individual consumption to collective forms of provisioning—such as public transport, community care, social security and state pensions. This requires monetary and fiscal reforms—such as around budget rules, credit guidance and progressive taxation—to increase public funds, redirect investment and stop the transfer of riches to millionaires and billionaires.

Rejecting neoliberal austerity can unite climate and anti-fascist agendas

At this decisive moment, combatting austerity could be a starting point for creating unconventional alliances, as cuts in public spending affect both the lower and middle classes. This could become a key agenda for socioeconomic improvements. But there is much to gain for climate politics as well: under an austerity regime, public funds will never be sufficient to finance the activities necessary to achieve climate targets. And it might be the best way forward to avoid a reactionary systemic rupture that pushes Western civilization back into a 19th century-style society that maximizes the freedom of the privileged few with the correct genes. 

For all these reasons, the rebellion against the prevailing liberal economic paradigm should be at the core of a common agenda of climate politics and anti-fascist politics. 

Andreas Novy

Andreas Novy is associate professor and head of the ISSET Institute at WU Vienna and president of the International Karl Polanyi Society (IKPS).

References

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