Month: May 2013

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Balkans for the peoples of the Balkans

Andreja Živković and Matija Medenica

The Balkans struggles under a triple crisis of foreign debt, mass unemployment, and the productive sector. In reality this is a crisis of dependency on European capital. Economic life is completely dependent on importing expensive European capital to cover the yawning trade and budget deficits, representing a vast plunder of national wealth to the European bankers. With the crisis, the foreign bankers who control the financial system of the region stopped lending and the debt pyramid collapsed.

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All posts Video

VIDEO: Against capitalism, self-imposed colonialism and nesting orientalism – A Subversive Festival panel

Panel organized during the Subversive Festival, Zagreb 2013. The written versions of the interventions will soon be published on LeftEast.

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Why hiring academics is too important to be left to other academics

“Like virtually all academics, I used to have a phobia of managerial interference in what are traditionally considered academic matters. But my recent experience with the academic pseudo-job-market has convinced me that when it comes to recruitment, we should hand decision-making over to business-minded managers.

I have spent the past academic year applying for lecturer and reader positions in UK philosophy departments. Six years ago, when I applied for seven jobs worldwide, I quickly landed one at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.

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Beyond ‘realism’: notes on the situation in Greece, the challenges for the Left and the need for a radical strategy

Panagiotis Sotiris[1]

 

For the past 3 years Greece has been at the same time an experiment in neoliberal social engineering and a laboratory of movements and collective struggles. For the first time in many decades we have the case of a country entering a phase of profound social and political crisis that has the potential to turn into a crisis of hegemony opening up the social and political space for a sequence of social transformation.

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Slovenia: Manifesto of the Initiative for Democratic Socialism

“The ideological dominance of capitalism as the only feasible mode of production is coming to an end. In the second half of the 1970s, when rapid and stable economic growth came to a halt in the “developed” world, the forces of capital intensified their attack on workers’ rights that has not ceased to this day. The foundation on which the ideological domination of capitalism was based had started to wither away, and the advocates of capitalism increasingly justified its existence by turning to the mere fact of its existence.

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European Silence Over Bradley Manning

“Bradley Manning is a hero.

Nobody else has put so much classified evidence about the reality of America’s wars in the public domain. The “Collateral Murder” video which he released to WikiLeaks should be shown at the beginning of every academic course on international relations. It captures the nonchalance with which  the world’s most powerful army kills and maims civilians.

Once the soldiers recorded in it notice that they have injured a child, they react as if they have done nothing more sinister than step on someone’s toes.

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The Golden Dawn and the Demand for Security

Manuel Mireanu and Maria Gkresta

May 2013

We want to argue here that the success of the extreme right discourses and practices in the current capitalist crisis has to be seen also as a function of the need for security. That is, we cannot explain this success merely in terms of identity politics, state and media propaganda or as an effect of the retreat of redistribution policies. These and other factors may very well make us understand certain aspects of the right-radicalization of certain segments of the population.

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All posts Interviews

Socialism for the 21st century. An interview with Michael A. Lebowitz.

Socialism for the 21st century. Building a solidarity-based society which has the strength to fight against the repeating of history An interview with Michael A. Lebowitz by Darko Vesić and Aleksandar Stojanović

 

With Michael we talked about contemporary crisis and the possibilities of its overcoming, about the experiences and contradictions that characterized the societies of “real socialism” in XX century, and also about the possibilities of building socialist alternative that would not be limited within the boundaries set by similar attempts in the last century.

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Crisis Bulletin

“Crisis is the bulletin of the revolutionary left at the University of East London. We organize, agitate and educate around key political, social and economic questions on campus. We struggle against all forms of oppresion from racism and sexism to homophobia, we confront the fascists on every street and in every elections, and we oppose Imperialism in all its forms and manifestations.”

The whole bulletin, here.