Where Have All Marxists Gone?
Where Have All Marxists Gone?

The Intellectual Left, Ideological Debate and Public Space in Post-Communist Romania

Summary/Abstract: The weakness of left parties in Central and Eastern Europe is less visible in their electoral support than it is in their intellectual support. After decades of intellectual hegemony, left ideas literally vanished in the region, leaving neoliberalism to rule as the only game in town. The immediate and alarming consequences as growing inequalities, unfairness and deprivation did not triggered any solid response from left intellectuals. In Romania, the explanation is to be found in the overwhelming ideological domination of neoliberal ideas, which still inhibit the intellectual left response, twenty-five years following the collapse of the socialist regime. If right-wing intellectuals helped democratization in Romania, as some scholars emphasize, by cultivating the alternative, breaking down previous stereotypes, relentlessly challenging thinking patterns and facilitating public deliberations, they certainly did not create a fruitful debate. If they struggled to deconstruct national-communist narratives, their virulent and obstinate effort in attacking not only totalitarian communism, but equally left values, inhibited any legitimate response from left-wing intellectuals. The consequence is two-fold. Very soon, reasonable values as equality and fairness have been submerged under the flux of full marketization, property accumulation/restitution and unlimited social competition, certifying that social Darwinism is the victorious ideological winner of the Cold War. On the long-run, the ultra-dominance of the neoliberal intellectuals will seriously undermine the consolidation of a public sphere, a space of freedom and equality accepting the public political reasoning, created by the discursive interactions between people willing to let arguments, not status, money and power, to be decisive. The aim of the article is therefore to map, by using a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the essential anti-left arguments produced by the right-wing intellectuals in one of their flagship publications and to unravel the general environment in which arguments are postulated and very few times answered.

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