Month: June 2015

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Petition of Solidarity of the Romanian Left with the SYRIZA government and the Greek people

Note: this petition has been widely circulated and received a lot of support in Romanian. We publish here the English version. 

For the last five years ordinary people from all across Europe have been paying for a crisis they didn’t create. For the last five years we have been paying for the irresponsible quest for profits of the financial system and for the failure of governments to control that system. From our money, the banks have been bailed out and the bankers have given each other outrageous bonuses.

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European Strategies of Managing the Crisis

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (C) and his delegation arrives at a conference of the European Investment Bank (EIB) on innovation and competitiveness in Berlin, on March 2, 2015. AFP PHOTO / ODD ANDERSEN

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article was originally published in collaboration with the Balkan web-portal Bilten.org.

For the past five years the bureaucracy in Brussels has been embroiled in constant political and institutional struggle to rein in the economic crisis and ensure the stability of capital accumulation. Its strategic plan has relied above all on pushing through structural reforms and fiscal discipline. The insistence on such structural reforms is nothing but a euphemism for cutting workers’ rights, lowering wages and restricting collective bargaining.

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Ilya Orlov: A Revolutionary Museum after Ideology [TheRussianReader]

CuMMA Discourse Series #25 May 20, 2015

Descents into the past and appeals to history have been symptomatic of recent Russian politics, which is literally obsessed with re-enactments. It has recreated the “Soviet imperial,” the “pre-Revolutionary imperial,” the “Orthodox,” and the “patriarchal” visual and rhetorical discourses. As has been recently pointed out, President Putin has become a genuine performance artist himself. He has piloted a hang glider, flying alongside rare birds; retrieved an ancient Greek amphora from depths of the Black Sea; and shown off his physically fit body.

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Kazakhstan: legal shackles on workers’ movement challenged

source: PeopleAndNature Blog

A challenge to laws that shackle trade unions in Kazakhstan was mounted at the International Labour Conference this month – and activists hope this will boost workers’ efforts to rebuild grass-roots organisation.

The conference, staged by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), a United Nations agency,

in Geneva, said Kazakhstan would have to amend the Trade Union Law it passed last year – or face action for breaching its obligations under international treaties.

The conference said that “excessive limitations” on unions, that “limit the right of workers to form and join trade unions of their own choosing”, had to be removed, and laws banning financial assistance to unions from trade unionists in other countries scrapped.

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947 Labor Migrants Deported during “Cleanup” of Petersburg for Economic Forum

June 17, 2015 Fontanka.ru

Almost a thousand people have been deported from Russia during a “cleanup” of Petersburg for the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum, which starts tomorrow, June 18. Regional units of the Federal Migration Service carried out large-scale raids on apartments and hotels in search of suspicious foreigners.

As Fontanka.ru has learned, the cleanup had been planned several months ago and had been underway since April in eight districts of the city, those that will host SPIEF events.

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The struggle that holds the future of Macedonia

Anti-government demonstration outside the prime minister's office by thousands supporters of the main opposition SDSM party, demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, in FYROM capital Skopje on May 17, 2015. SOOC / Konstantinos Tsakalidis

Macedonia in 2015 has experienced the deepest turmoil in its political history of 24 years of independence. In the last nine years the country has been ruled by a conservative ethnic Macedonian political party – VMRO-DPMNE which in coalition with the Albanian partner – DUI created a particular political model of governance in the Balkan region, termed by many as a hybrid authoritarian regime.

Many internal analysts, journalists, political actors and activists have used authoritarian regime, state of dictatorship and even fascism to describe the rule of the increasingly personalized government of the Prime Minister Gruevski.

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Reclaiming the factory: a story from Bosnia (opendemocracy)

                                Workers on break in Tuzla, Bosnia. Flickr/Kingmoor Klickr.

by Andjela Pepic. 15 June 2015

Privatisation processes in Bosnia and Herzegovina from the 1990s onwards have gradually transferred ownership and power from the socialist state to private entrepreneurs. As elsewhere in Europe and the rest of the world, this process, in most cases, was accompanied by a large number of lay-offs. Company assets floated in the market and were bought and sold at unusually low prices, dismantling large factories and industrial giants of former Yugoslavia.

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Victory and defeat: 1945, 1989, 2015 – a perspective from Hungary

“The gentry could not abide familiarity in public. I remember years later working as a day-labourer on a nearby puszta, tying up vines, I suddenly jerked up my head in surprise when I heard a farm official who had been sent out to supervise us attacking one of the girls who was falling behind. “Do you imagine,” he roared, “that you can lounge about all day long because last night…” and here he used a word for intimacy which even the farm servants employ only to show their contempt.”

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Days of Promise and Danger: an in-depth look at the recent Turkish election

By the time you read this you will have no doubt already absorbed initial reactions—from euphoria to guarded optimism—of the international Left to the June 7 parliamentary elections in Turkey, the first ever in which the neoliberal Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) in power since 2002 has fallen out with its much touted “national will” (milli irade). Though its 40% showing at the polls still leave the AKP by far the most popular party, it fell just short of the parliamentary majority needed to form a single-party government, not to speak of the super-majority it would need to realize President Erdoğan’s plans to rewrite the constitution in his own favor by transforming Turkey into an executive republic.

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Kurds, Labor, and the Left in Turkey. An Interview with Erdem Yörük

With Turkey’s parliamentary elections on Sunday fast approaching, all eyes are on the Peoples’ Democracy Party (HDP) contesting its first ever election as a party, rather than a coalition of nominally independent candidates: a momentous decision on the part of the party leadership, which stands to gain clout in parliament and solidify its position as the electoral standard-bearer of the radical Left—or fall below the constitutionally mandated 10% barrier and be excluded from parliament entirely. At issue is whether the party has succeeded at building a leftist coalition including, but not limited to, its base of support in the Kurdish national movement.