Feminist Antifascism

It might seem that the situation in Europe has changed tremendously since the time Rosa Luxemburg wrote her pamphlet Order Prevails in Berlin. However, while certain things change, much else stays the same. In this book I propose a dismantling of the liberal vision and practice of the public sphere, so as to reclaim the notion of the public and block the growth of fascism. The ideas discussed here amount to a feminist politics of antifascism. However, differently from many books and texts already published on antifascism and the public, this book steps out of the prevailing focus on the West—the cases discussed here as well as some of the conceptual interventions are drawn from the East and South. Theories of counterpublics are discussed here—those publics or groups that form and organize through mutual recognition of wider public exclusions so as to overcome those exclusions—and the common—the social realm, including humans and their capacities, nature, and the cultural goods in cases of political mobilization originating in Poland, such as the early Solidarność (1980–81) and recent women’s protests (2016 onward), for several important reasons. First, while criticism of the one-sidedness and other limitations of “world-focused” vocabulary has been justifiable, the process caused the notion of the Second World to somehow disappear from political maps. This has produced significant theoretical and historical problems, as the majority of today’s world could arguably be classified by this term. Instead, in the name of dismantling dated vocabulary, we entered a world of sharpest distinctions; while this explained and perhaps combatted the most striking remnants of colonial capitalism, by sweeping the supposedly “developing” countries off the map, it also made new forms of colonialism and imperialism invisible.