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Austerity Russian Style

by Ilya Matveev, a researcher and teacher November 19, 2014 OpenLeft.ru

Translated into English by TheRussianReader.

Despite attempts to confuse and misinform the public, protests in the social sector will continue to grow.

“Only the rich will survive”

Reforms of the social sector in post-Soviet Russia have always had a very important feature: their course has been completely confusing and opaque, and everything connected to the reforms, even their strategic goals (!), has been shrouded in mystery.

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Romania: No Country for Poor Men

Class as Fate

Nothing is more real and abstract at the same time than class interest. Class itself is a real abstraction, something which defines and conditions the social status and the economic possibilities of a person without actually being an identity. It’s the shadow you can’t jump over. In capitalism, class is fate; it is its specific product. Postponing the becoming of a class-for-itself – linking its economic interest with political action – is the great accomplishment of capitalism.

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Reclaiming the True Meaning of ‘Student’ on the Streets of Skopje

On Monday, the 17th of November, around three thousand students demonstrated on the streets of Skopje. Size-wise, this may appear relatively insignificant. On the same day, 700 km southwards, over 20,000 demonstrators joined a rally in Athens to mark the 41st anniversary of a student uprising against the country’s former dictatorship. The news story on the protests in Skopje, as it appeared on Revolution News the following day, only highlights this contrast: merely a handful of stories on Macedonian activism figure on the site.

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New Publication: The Balkan Forum: Situations, Struggles, Strategies

Source: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe

Towards Another Balkans!

The first Balkan Forum took place within the Subversive Festival in Zagreb, in May 2012, and gathered up to 40 progressive organizations and movements from across the post-socialist states of the region. It was for the first time since the collapse of state socialist regimes and Yugoslavia, that progressive leftist forces – from Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria and Romania – came together to discuss and imagine a common future for their region.

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Monopolising Dayton or how Ivica Todorić’s empire swallowed Bosnian markets

A shorter version of the article was originally published on Bilten.Org and this is a revised and expanded version of that article.

For some time now it has been been impossible to find a supermaket in the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina (and more widely in Bosnia) that does not belong to the Agrokor concern of Ivica Todorić. The expansion of his food production, distribution, retail and wholesale empire to the Bosnian market already began in the 2000s when Agrokor bought Kiseljak of Sarajevo.

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Why Kristallnacht matters to European Roma today

source: Romea.Cz

We have just marked the 76th anniversary of the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht or Novemberpogrom). In different cities across Germany and Austria a series of pogroms were perpetrated against Jewish civilians, stores and synagogues on the night between the 9th and the 10th of November while German authorities did nothing to prevent them. Those attacks were the prelude to the criminal racial policy that led to the Holocaust, in which six million Jews and five hundred thousand Roma were murdered.

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Intellectuals and the “The New Cold War”: from the Tragedy to the Farce of Choice

Observers speak of the “New Cold War” as a self-evident and incontrovertible reality. Already in the spring, the new contours of international politics, demarcated by sanctions and mutual rhetorical incursions, were fully recognized by the broadest segments of the public in Russia, Europe and the United States—including those who were very far from decision-making processes—as a return to the familiar and frightening principles of the second half of the twentieth century.

Nearly seven decades ago, these principles were first spelled out by the ruling elites and then established themselves on all levels of society, from the consciousness of intellectuals to the everyday practices of the majority.

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Crisis and Class-Struggle in Slovenia: The Growing Momentum of Socialist Politics

Jaša Lategano

For many liberal spectators, Slovenia was for a long time considered a success story of transition from a ‘socialist dictatorship’ into a ‘parliamentary democracy’ based on a market economy. In the winter of 2012, however, mass popular uprisings swept through the larger cities and eventually brought down the far-right neoliberal government of the Slovenian Democratic Party. What followed was more or less a continuation of the same policies under a nominally ‘centre-left’ government. In a similar way that Tony Blair could be considered Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement, the technocratic approach to dealing with the manifold crisis devastating Slovenian society in general and the historical achievements of labour movement in particular, has become the universal language spoken by all political forces, often including those of organized labour.

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Albanian-Serbian Match – A War Minus the Shooting

In the preface to Tractatus Philosophicus Wittgenstein makes the widely quoted claim that Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. Unfortunately there are some cases when one cannot speak but cannot and must not be silent and the football match Serbia and Albania played in Belgrade on the 14th of October is doubtless one of them. Not only because of the few incidents that occurred, but mostly because of what followed.

I would start with the simple consideration that if one must write about the event, it should be done through an angle or point of view independent of the radicalized nationalistic rhetoric and that displays a sincere commitment to not sustaining or  justifying any of the violent outbursts from either side.

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Oxford advertises for “casual researchers”

via Third Level Workplace Watch

…[A] job offer came through a mailing list yesterday. The positions offered were for five ‘casual researchers’ to be paid by the hour to work on a project for one of the most prestigious and best endowed institution in the field of migration studies and labor migration: Oxford’s COMPAS migration studies center. A response to the mailing list “Anthropology matters” by a member of Third Level Workplace Watch, not only made it clear what was wrong with the ad but also resulted in many people coming out to express their anger at a new precedent in the intensifying casualization of our work…now we are even to be openly referred to as ‘casual’!