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Volodymyr Ishchenko: “For Ukrainians, as for any other people in the world, the main threat is capitalism.”

Note from the LeftEast editors: We publish the transcript of Volodymyr Ishchenko’s interview on This is Hell! radio station with Chuck Mertz from the 19th of April 2014, organized in cooperation between the Chicago-based radio station, AntidoteZine.Com, and LeftEast. This is the complete transcript of the interview, including the last two questions which Volodymyr answered in writing after the show.

 

Chuck Mertz: On the line with us right now is Volodymyr Ishchenko.  He is a sociologist studying social protests in Ukraine. 

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Hungary: A Black Hole on Europe’s Map. An interview with Gaspar Miklos Tamas.

An interview with G. M. Tamás by Jaroslav Fiala (A2 magazine)

1/You were writing on post-fascism. In recent years, the growing rise of nationalist and racist forces has taken place across Europe. What is your explanation for this phenomenon?  

The whole nature of European politics has changed after 1989: the two hegemonic blocs had disintegrated, after the Soviet threat which forced the internal compromise in the West resulting in the welfare state and the toleration of large West European communist parties and communist-influenced trade unions, ceased to exist.

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How healthcare kills: lessons from neoliberal Bulgaria

 

 

Nоte from the LeftEast editors: Тhis article has been published in collaboration with the new Balkan web-portal Bilten.org. The publication in Serbo-Croatian is to be found here

In the last days of March 2014, a Bulgarian woman, Dobrinka Krumova, aged 26, died because neither private, nor public hospitals in Dupnitsa in South Bulgaria accepted her for treatment. A few years ago the woman was stabbed by her partner and father of her two under-aged children.

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European Left poised to take third place in European elections

source: AlexisTsipras.Eu

Poll results across Europe show a particularly encouraging rise in the popularity of the Left. According to some estimates, the European Parliamentary Group of the Left (GUE-NGL), is expected to increase its number of MEP’s from 35 to at least 60 in the upcoming Parliamentary elections this May.

Alexis Tsipras’ candidacy for President of the European Commission on behalf of the European Left has energized the Leftist movements across Europe fighting against neoliberalism, austerity and poverty.

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The unfolding of the Bulgarian political crisis of 2013

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been published in collaboration with the new Balkan web-portal Bilten.org. The publication in Serbo-Croatian is to be found here.

The upcoming EP elections will be a test for all major parties in Bulgaria, after a year of constant protests aiming to challenge the status quo. In February 2013 there were massive and spontаnеous nation-wide anti-austerity demonstrations, triggered by electricity price hikes. They finally resulted in bringing down the center-right government of the time, led by Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (abbreviated GERB in Bulgarian).

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Child beaten at EU Border: Brutal Push-backs continue in Bulgaria

source BorderMonitoring.Eu

On April 21st, 2014 Border Monitoring Bulgaria (BMB) recorded yet another case of a push-back of a single Syrian mother with her four children (10, 17, 22, 24 years old) accompanied by severe police violence. Relatives reported that in their attempt to receive protection in Bulgaria, the family was forcefully returned to Turkey. After a day spent in Bulgaria, the family now finds itself in Turkey without their request for asylum having been respected, heard, or evaluated.

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“We are witnessing an alarming revival of old-fashioned geopolitics”. An interview with Madina Tlostanova.

Madina Tlostanova is an internationally known scholar whose writing critically examines questions of epistemology, history, geography, power and identity. She has published widely and in multiple languages. She presently is a full professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. Her book Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands (2010) is widely regarded as an important intervention in feminist studies and decolonial theory. She also co-authored with Walter Mignolo, Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas (2012).

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Macedonia: Repeat Performance (2001)

Note from the LeftEast editors: In his text, ‘From the banality of elections to a new political situation’, published on LeftEast in cooperation with Bilten.Org, Artan Sadiku calls for a serious rethinking of left political perspectives since the widespread belief that the social question would inevitably trump national divisions has been disproved by nationalist struggles that may soon ‘put to test Macedonia as a county’. As a contribution to the discussion, LeftEast is republishing here an article by Panos Garganas , a leading member of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SEK), who was put on trial by the Greek state for defending Macedonian independence, written just after the Ohrid Agreement ending the secessionist war of 2001 (Socialist Review, No.255); together with an article from May 2012 by one our editors, Andreja Zivkovic, exploring the relevance of Garganas’s prescient analysis of the role of the Ohrid Agreement in creating a new terrain for the nationalist struggles over Macedonia, and proposing a  Balkan-wide approach to the solution of the Macedonian national question(s).

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Is Macedonia on the brink of war? (2012)

Note from the LeftEast editors: In his text, ‘From the banality of elections to a new political situation’, published on LeftEast in cooperation with Bilten.Org, Artan Sadiku calls for a serious rethinking of left political perspectives since the widespread belief that the social question would inevitably trump national divisions has been disproved by nationalist struggles that may soon ‘put to test Macedonia as a county’. As a contribution to the discussion, LeftEast is republishing an article by Panos Garganas, a leading member of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SEK), who was put on trial by the Greek state for defending Macedonian independence, written just after the Ohrid Agreement ending the secessionist war of 2001; together with an article from May 2012 by one our editors, Andreja Zivkovic, exploring the relevance of Garganas’s prescient analysis of the role of the Ohrid Agreement in creating a new terrain for the nationalist struggles over Macedonia, and proposing a  Balkan-wide approach to the solution of the Macedonian national question(s).

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A reflection on the Hungarian parliamentary elections

Spirits were low on Sunday night when the first estimations of the election results came in. FIDESZ appeared as clear winners, the only question being whether they would gather the 2/3 majority or not. This might define the entire narrative of these elections, especially for the center-left coalition. LeftEast talked to Ágnes Gagyi, Balázs Patkós and Tamás Gerőcs in order to discuss results but also their significance in the long run. The goal was to put these elections in a social and historical perspective and detect some wider social processes beyond the mere electoral numbers.