The Technofascist Specters of Liberalism

Chapter 3 investigates how liberal property and protest formations on both sides of the former Iron Curtain enable technofascism to spread. Refusing the post–Cold War trope that positions “the dangerous East” as the global harbinger of authoritarianism and illiberalism, the chapter instead suggests that the East offers important lessons regarding how liberalism prefigures fascist possibility. In compiling a genealogy of Romanian populist protest movements that have seen anticapitalist politics get co-opted by the anticommunist right, it charts the increasingly cramped space from which to foster anticapitalist organizing. Engaging in a counterfactual exercise, this chapter also describes a protest that never came to be. While Romanian protestors have mobilized against other forces of global capital, they have yet to effectively organize against the largest owner of Romanian forestlands. This is partly due to the liberal fantasies of Western intimacy that IKEA affords despite the company’s fascist origins and dispossessory present.