Month: May 2014

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Impressive Performance of the Socialist Forces in Slovenia

Source: Transform-Network.Net

It is a rare occasion that a country in a period of less than 6 months experiences European, Parliamentary as well as local elections but this is exactly the situation in Slovenia right now. Results of recent European elections, being the first of all three, are therefore even more telling than they would be otherwise. On the basis of the outcome for these elections, one is tempted to draw conclusions or at least indications for the other two, especially parliamentary elections.

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Ukrainian elections results

Source: Transform-Network.Net

Exit-polls and preliminary results showed a decisive victory for Petro Poroshenko at the presidential elections in Ukraine on May 25. One of the richest man in the country (7th rank according to Ukrainian Forbes list) with liberal economic program is taking 54% according to over 64% counted protocols from electoral precincts. Yulia Tymoshenko – the major competitor – is far below with 13%. The third place got Oleh Lyashko who should be most precisely characterized as populist political clown.

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Romania’s Fragile New Left. An interview with Costi Rogozanu.

by John Feffer, original interview with Costi Rogozanu from the collective of CriticAtac to be read on Feffer’s blog.

Romania is perhaps the last place to expect an independent Left to take root. Unlike in Poland or Hungary or Yugoslavia, a critical socialist movement didn’t emerge in response to the orthodox Communists in power. And the Social Democrats that crawled from the wreckage of the 1989 revolution – first as part of the National Salvation Front and then in their own Social Democratic Party – embraced a politically and economically conservative platform.

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“The revolutionary process in Ukraine is not over yet”. An interview with Neil Davidson.

source: telegraph.co.uk

Note from the LeftEast editors: this interview is published in cooperation with the Ukrainian journal Спільне/Commons: Journal of Social Criticism. Questions were asked by Yuriy Dergunov. They were sent on February 28 and replies were received on May 2, 2014.

Neil Davidson is a Scottish historian and sociologist, a lecturer at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. His areas of research include theories of revolution and development since the Enlightenment, nationalism and ethnicity, the relationship between capitalist economy and the nation-state, neoliberalism, and right-wing social movements; he is also interested in the Scottish aspect of all these themes.

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The neoliberalization of Albanian higher education

sources: Modern Ruins contest, www.worth1000.com

One of the last public strongholds to be taken and transformed along neoliberal lines has been higher education. First introduced in Chile, and afterwards in other Latin America countries, these reforms are about to be experimented on even in Albania. Coming from a Stalinist socialist past, since the nineties Albania has been one of the testing grounds for neoliberal reforms. For example in the first half of the nineties the IMF considered Albania one of the models other East European countries should follow.

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Rather the Useful Idiot

by Gavin Rae

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article was officially published on the author’s blog Beyond the Transition.

The images from Odessa were truly horrific. Burnt corpses, a strangled pregnant woman, people jumping out of windows to their deaths. Yet perhaps the most disturbing of them all was the scene where a group of young educated looking teenage girls, draped in the Ukrainian flag, were happily making the Molotov Cocktails that would later help cause the deaths of over 40 people.  

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The Soma tragedy: Kadere karşı / Against Fate

Note from the LeftEast editors: this text is also published by the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle Eastern Conflict.

My class yesterday began with something close to an apology from me for holding the class at all.  Times like this can make anyone engaged in intellectual work feel inadequate.  To some it seems vain to make statements and take up positions when hundreds have died.  To this I can find no Spilling ink may be impious, but saying nothing is worse. 

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The Bulgarian “creative class” and the reproduction of neoliberal ideology

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been published in cooperation with the Balkan web-portal Bilten.Org. It can be read in Serbo-Croatian here.

The number of cognitive workers in Bulgaria has been on the rise over the last years with the newly outsourced contact/call/logistics centers, telecommunication firms and IT support and development. By the end of 2013 about 70 000 were employed in the sector, 30 000 in IT alone. This segment of the working class enjoys the highest income levels – average salary is about 850 EUR with a national average of solely 200 EUR.

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Will social protest be able to unite Ukraine after the Maidan protests?

Results of protests and repressions monitoring conducted by the Centre for Society Research (http://www.cedos.org.ua/uk/releases/33)

 

On April 29th at a press conference in the UNIAN information agency, sociologists from the Centre for Society Research, supported by the International Renaissance Foundation, presented the results of protests, repressions and concessions monitoring in Ukraine in 2013.

 

The main results of the research are the following:

 

At least 4822 protests occurred in 2013. This number is 33% higher than the number of protests in 2012 (3636) and is more than twice as large compared to the number of protests in 2010 and 2011 (2305 and 2277 respectively).
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CriticFest