Lefteast

Organizing for Housing Justice during the Covid-19 pandemic: a report by organizations from 18 countries

The European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and to the City (EAC) is launching its report: Organizing for Housing Justice during the Covid-19 pandemic. A collectively written overview, the document covers tactics employed by housing movements from 18 different national contexts in Europe during the first part of the pandemic (March-July 2020), detailing how they have positioned themselves in regards to the legislative measures adopted by the state. Housing activism in March-JulyThe period of March to July of 2020 has seen the rise of the health, social and financial crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pan ..

Why Globalise? 1989 in Eastern Europe and the Politics of History

In this three-part interview, conducted, transcribed and edited by Zoltán Ginelli, history professor James Mark talks about his latest book James Mark is a British Professor of History at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on the history and memory politics of state-socialism in East Central Europe from the perspective of broader global histories, transnational processes and comparative methods. In 2019, James finished leading two 5-year international research projects: 1989 After 1989: Rethinking the Fall of State Socialism in Global Perspective and Socialism Goes Global: Cold War Connections Betwee ..

Progressive Patriotism

Translated from the Russian original on Colta.ru by Maxim Edwards. LeftEast publishes this text not by way of unreserved endorsement but rather in an effort to initiate a debate about leftist strategy. In our editorial discussion at least, it generated plenty of questions: Do we need to limit our imagination of political community to the form of the nation-state? Can we meaningfully expect to control the meaning of the notoriously shape-shifting ideology of nationalism? Hasn’t the progressive patriot niche in Russia been already occupied by forces that are not all that progressive, ranging from the Communis ..

Post-Pandemic Struggles in Social Reproduction: Lessons from the Therapist Union in Georgia

Note of the LeftEast editors: The present text is part of a series of publications and webinars on the topics of social reproduction, (women’s) labour and migration in East-Central Europe and beyond. The video from the first webinar, where this text was first presentedcan be seen here. The aim of the series is to raise awareness about struggles for labour, reproduction and migrant rights, as well as of the condition of women in society and how these have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. The publications and webinars are coordinated in cooperation between the Bulgarian Left feminist collectiv ..

The Serbia-Kosovo Treaty: a Servile Acquiescence to US Imperialism

This article was originally published in Serbo-Croatian on the website of the revolutionary socialist organization Marks 21 on September 5, the day after Serbia and Kosovo signed a treaty that international media have labeled “historic.” The “historic” treaty recently signed by Serbia and Kosovo under the auspices of the US president, will prove very useful to American (and western) imperialism in the Balkans, as well as to Israel, its main bulwark in the Middle East. The document should not be viewed as an historic rapprochement between Serbs and Albanians, but rather as a confirmation of the per ..

Is There a Globalization-Migration Nexus?

This article first appeared on the blog of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia Compared During the last 30 years migration levels have risen sharply. This change is associated with the opening up of national markets by global capital. The affinity between the mobility of capital and the movement of people can be explained through recourse to the Polanyian notion of disembeddedness. The increasing role of foreign investment in the 1990s and the 2000s was associated with privatization, the closing down of local industries, neoliberal (pro-market) shifts in economic poli ..

Colonial Legacies, Decolonial Struggles: Anthropology and Europe’s Peripheries Today

This plenary session of the European Association of Social Anthropologists Biennial Conference, which took place July 21-24 in Lisbon, rethinks anthropology in and beyond Europe and considers how disciplinary hierarchies are reinforced. This requires concerted effort to create new spaces to counter structures and practices that reinforce hierarchies. The speakers engage with anthropology’s margins and marginalisations. Prem Kumar Rajaram (Central European University) &Mariya Ivancheva (University of Liverpool, LeftEast editorial board) convened this panel. Discussants include Mary Taylor (CUNY, LeftEast edi ..

Before Bandung: the Moscow-based Communist University for Toilers of the East (KUTV) and the Fates of Interwar-era Anti-Colonial Internationalism

This is an abbreviated version of an article that originally appeared on Global South Studies, a digital scholarship project hosted by the University of Virginia. The following account of the Moscow-based Communist University for Toilers of the East in Moscow (1921-1938) seeks to counter the prevailing tendency among scholars of the Global South to foreshorten the history of their subject. For a long while, Edward Said’s magisterialOrientalism(1978) was regarded as the point of origin of postcolonial thought. More recently, it has been replaced in this capacity by the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung. Inde ..

Revolutionary Trans Montenegro: an activist & an anthropologist in conversation

This text, published in English by the print and online journal Kuckuck: Notizen zur Alltagskultur, includes material (see below) published originally in Montenegrin on the website Viesnik Slobode, and then on the website of the LGBT Activist Association Spektra. Many thanks to all of these forums for permitting republication. This text presents snippets of an ongoing conversation between two friends from Montenegro, Jovan Džoli Ulićević, a trans activist and biologist, and Čarna Brković, an anthropologist. We met many years ago, during the activist meetings that led to the creation of one of the first Monte ..

Gift or Data Platform? Capitalist Hospitality and Couchsurfing’s New Paywall

Like most major corporations, Couchsurfing.com is a C Corporation, for-profit and subject to corporate taxes, though it was a non-profit from 2003 to 2011. Hosts on the platform offer free accommodation to travelers. However, lately it seems to have taken a turn toward becoming yet another scheme to extract money from online users. In mid-May 2020, many users received a message that they needed to pay a monthly or yearly fee if they wanted to continue using the platform. Some people who did not want to pay cannot access their profile, including information that they themselves left on the website. It is still pos ..