Month: January 2014

A note from the editors of LeftEast: This is the first of a number of articles on Turkey we will be publishing over the next two weeks. With this series, we wish to introduce our readers to the dynamics of the Turkish society beyond the Gezi protests. We will do that through the discussion of topics without which contemporary Turkish politics cannot be understood: the longue duree history of AKP’s neoliberal rule, the ethnic composition of the Turkish working class, and the Kurdish question.

On January 8, 2014 Greece inaugurated the beginning of its 5th Presidency of the EU with a big show held at the Zappeion in Athens. Hardly anybody was missing who had contributed to the destruction of the country in the past crisis years. It was the celebration of a paradox: A country presiding over an organization that is destroying its nation and its people!

Of course, democracy and freedom were topics in the speeches made by the participants.

A note from the editorial board of LeftEast:  In the view of LeftEast editors, this manifesto, while representing a minoritarian position within the Ukrainian left, is a very serious and considered document that deserves a wide audience. We are posting it to add nuance to the positions represented thus far on our pages. Editors at LeftEast are quite familiar with debates on “what to do with the protest movement” taking place among the Bulgarian and Russian left, as we have occupied different sides in them.

On December 20 2013, state sponsored hearings on the new labor law in Serbia were cancelled just as they were supposed to begin. The first public hearings were scheduled for Novi Sad, while subsequent hearings were to take place in Kragujevac and Belgrade. However, before the day was over, all the hearings had been called off. Serbia’s Ministry of Labor, Employment and Social Policy (MLESP) first blamed the unions for ‘obstructing’ the proceedings, and then canceled all further hearings, arguing that: “All those interested may submit their proposals, suggestions and complaints on the Draft of the Law on the Amendment of the Law on Labor in written form and in the manner prescribed by the Public discussion program.”

Recently a number of internationally recognized scholars and public intellectuals signed a letter in full support of Euromaidan protests, backing ‘Ukrainian society’ against ‘Ukrainian government’. Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Craig Calhoun, Claus Offe, Saskia Sassen, Charles Taylor, Michel Wieviorka, Slavoj Žižek and many others celebrated the ‘legal’ and ‘peaceful’ protests embodying, as they claimed, ‘the best European values’, demanded a ‘Marshall-like plan’ for Ukraine, and expressed the hope that, if welcomed to EU, Ukrainians would help to build ‘a new Europe and a fairer world’.