Lefteast

Hegemonic Turbulence and the End of the Global Project of the EU

Note from LeftEast editors: This talk was recorded at the workshop on After US Hegemony: Geopolitical Economy in the 21st Century, held at the Karl Polányi Center for Global Social Analysis at Corvinus University, Budapest, on February 11, 2020.

[INTERVIEW] Kimberlé Crenshaw: Liberty. Equality. Intersectionality. An antidote against fascism.

I met Kimberlé Crenshaw at the Sorbonne University in Paris in January 2019, at a conference organized by Marta Dell’Aquila and Eraldo Souza dos Santos to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of intersectionality. Kimberly Crenshaw developed the notion of intersectionality in 1989 in her paper “De-marginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”. On that occasion, her goal was to challenge the limitations of anti-discrimination laws that looked at gender and race as separated and mutually exclusive categorie ..

Broken Windows and Broken People: the Cost of Class Order

Engels once said that the way a capitalist city is organized tends to hide production’s ugliest and most dangerous surplus: poverty. And where it cannot be hidden, it has to be attacked. Could this help explain why the state often seems to be at its most violent when the smallest sums are at stake? In 2014, police killed Eric Garner over selling a pack of cigarettes on the street: an offense worth maybe a couple of dollars. This spring, we saw George Floyd murdered over (maybe) a fake twenty-dollar bill. And since the first draft of this article was written, yet another working-class Black American has lost his ..

Cartographies of Baltic labour resistance

Note from LeftEast editors: This article originally appeared on Andreas Bieler’s blog: Trade unions and global restructuring . The conjuncture between the thirtieth anniversaries of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the USSR is an apt occasion to revisit the trajectories of change in the post-Soviet space. In their article ‘Baltic Labour in the Crucible of Capitalist Exploitation: Reassessing “Post-Communist” Transformation’, recently published in the Economic and Labour Relations Review, Andreas Bieler and Jokubas Salyga assess ‘post-communist’ transformation in the Baltic s ..

[INTERVIEW] The Serbian opposition to Vučić without a plan

Note from LeftEast editors: Ahead of the parliamentary elections in Serbia on June 21st, we publish an interview with Aleksandar Matković. A shorter version of this interview was originally conducted by Dimitris Givisis for “Epohi.gr”. Questions 3, 6 and 7 were added by LeftEast editors. 1) What do you think the elections on June 21st will mean for the future of Serbia? I think that the current president – Aleksandar Vučić and the ruling party, the Progressive Party of Serbia – will win. There’s no doubt about that. They are too embedded in the domestic political life and international ..

Imperial partition: Trump’s new order in the Balkans

Note from LeftEast editors: The article is published in cooperation between Counterfire and LeftEast. The US President is hoping that he can broker a Serbia-Kosovo deal ahead of the November elections, writes Vladimir Unkovski-Korica. Donald Trump is a man in a hurry. There is an election to fight, and success is in short supply. His domestic record is looking dubious after his poor handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Unemployment is sky high and US race relations after the police murder of George Floyd compound the picture. And Trump’s international breakthroughs…well, North Korea’s literal blowing up of ..

The Romanian “economic recovery” plan and the impoverishment of Romanian Workers

The Romanian version of the article was published in Gazeta de Artă Politică G on 27 May 2020. Many thanks to comrade Ioana Florea. On May 25, 2020, Romanian Finance Minister Florin Cîțu declared that the government’s recovery plan would be presented to the public on June 1st. The plan has yet to be launched, and thus Romanians must rely on various declarations of political leaders to reconstruct their economic paradigm. The list of measures the Romanian government did not take during the state of emergency – some of which were proposed by the Bloc for Housing in this period – is helpful in this endeavo ..

Splintered but not broken: A history of Israel’s independent left

Note from LeftEast Editors: We re-post this article which was originally published on May 28th by +972 Magazine – an independent, online, non-profit magazine owned and run by a group of Israeli and Palestinian journalists, providing fresh, in-depth reporting and analysis directly from the ground in Israel-Palestine. Born in 1953 to immigrants from the United States who had joined the Communist Party of Israel (CPI), Noam Kaminer was a stalwart of the Israeli radical left until his untimely death in 2014. His political way-stations, including the joint Arab-Jewish student group CAMPUS, the Israeli Socialist ..

Interview with the Global Prison Abolitionist Coalition

Lefteast 1: Can you tell us a bit about the Global Prison Abolitionist Coalition? What are its basic demands? How did it form and how does it relate to previously existing organizations? In May 2020, the Global Prison Abolitionist Coalition emerged from dialogues betweenorganizations such as the Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists, the Lausan Collective (Hong Kong and diaspora), the Emergency Committee for Rojava, various Brazilian socialist andanti-racistorganizations, Socialist Workers Alliance of Guyana Abolitionist Collective of Canada/U.S., Black and Pink, along withvariousEgyptian,Indian ..

Covid-19 as an occupational hazard: the case of Bulgaria

Bulgaria—and most East and Central European countries—have not had the devastating COVID-19 numbers that Western Europe has exhibited and unlike the US, for example, have managed to significantly bring down the number of infections. However, far from a major success on part of the country’s leadership, the pandemic revealed in even starker relief the near-complete absence of any labor protections. This article is published in collaboration with the regional portal Bilten. As of June 4th, 2020, when COVID-19 clocked in at 2582 infected and 147 deaths, the Bulgarian PM Boyko Borisov announced the lifting of a ..