Month: March 2016

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An Open letter to Yanis Varoufakis

In the following open letter, George Souvlis and Samuele Mazzolini respond to the recent DiEM launch in Rome.

Dear Yanis,

We decided to write you this letter after following closely the launch of DiEM 25 in Rome on 23 March. The missive aims to discuss a series of issues regarding your initiative that we found unconvincing by offering a well-intentioned criticism of it. We clarify at this point that our aim is neither to dismiss a priori the project nor to appear like smarty pants that know better than anyone else how things should be done, something not totally foreign within the universe of the Left.

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Democracy in Europe: DiEM25 in Rome with Yanis Varoufakis

Our friends at #TalkReal have uploaded footage from the official launch of the Democracy in Europe Movement held at the Acquario Romano in Rome last week. Check back here in the weeks ahead for discussions of some of the ideas and strategies presented by DiEM and their relevance for the (East) European Left.

 

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Book Review: Carbonella and Kasmir, In Blood and Fire: Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor

The informal sector in the economy has been rising recently from a concept that designated marginal forms of labor occurring in Third World cities – that grew in the 1970s without formal growth and created a from Western perspective atypical ‘Third World unemployment’ (cf. Hart 2009) – to one designating flexibilized, temporary or quasi-self-employed work in the neoliberal era in cities around the world. The volume at hand provides six ethnographies from cities in Spain, India, Poland, Columbia, and US that use dispossession as analytical lens to conceptually frame these processes, which they call the multiplication of labor (informal, criminalized, military, child labor etc.)

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Accumulating the Myths of Lech Wałęsa

This piece by Gavin Rae originally appeared at Beyond the Transition.

As the news spread around the world about the discovery of new documents, concerning Lech Wałęsa’s alleged collaboration with the Communist authorities, the man himself was addressing the new right-wing parliament in Venezuela. This former trade union leader and avowed champion of democracy and human rights, was supporting the return of the right-wing in Venezuela. He then flew to Miami, to meet Cuban oppositionists and was once again received as a hero.

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Workers Control in Venezuela and Beyond: An Interview with Dario Azzelini

A still from Azzelini and Ressler's film, 5 Factories - Workers Control in Venezuela

Note from the LeftEast editors: The following interview was originally published in Serbian at Mašina.rs

Dario Azzelini is a theoretician and political activist splitting time between Berlin and Caracas. He recently stayed in Belgrade to participate in the conference “Let’s bring socialism back into the game“. That gave us an opportunity to talk about different topics he addresses in his work – ranging from the question of Maduro’s election loss, the interrelation of art and politics, to cases of recuperations of workers’ factories throughout Europe.

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VIDEO: #TalkReal London: #Brexit Europe?

The UK’s #EUreferendum coming up on June 23 is a momentous historic occasion, not only for British citizens but for Europe itself. TalkReal discussed the international implications of #Brexit and Europe’s ‘referendum fever’ with Ulrike Guérot (founder and director of the European Democracy Lab Democracy Lab), Federico Campagna (writer, philosopher and Rights Manager at Verso Books), Marina Prentoulis (Another Europe Is Possible) and James Schneider (Momentum, the campaign which supported Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership campaign).

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Democracy and Autocracies in the “Western Balkans”

Leader of the Albanian Socialist Party (PS), Edi Rama (left) and Ilir Meta, leader of the Socialist Movement for Integration (LSI).

A specific type of autocracy has been gradually installed in the so-called Western Balkans, the group of countries in southeast Europe that has yet to join the European Union (EU). The rise of autocracies is noticeable after the failure of the relatively short experiment with pluralism, which for some time carried the mask of democracy, even though it was nothing but the rotation in and out of power of corrupt leaders and parties serving as mere managers of the state and its privatization.

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Textile Factories City: Gender Violence and Housewifization in the Small City of Shtip in The Republic of Macedonia

The 'Makedonka' textile factory

After the Second World War, the textile industry in Macedonia greatly expanded, eventually reaching a point where it represented over 30% of the country’s total manufacturing. The largest portion of this industry was situated within Shtip, a small city located in Eastern Macedonia. Today, the city has a population of less than 50,000 people, the majority of whom are now retired. During the 1980s, approximately 6,000 people – a massive number in comparison to the Macedonia’s population – were employed by the biggest textile factory in the country: Makedonka (Македонка).

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We Demand Removal of the Fence on the Macedonian-Greek Border!

Note from LeftEast editors: We publish here a demand for removal of the fence on the Macedonian-Greek border as requested by a list of Macedonian grassroots movements and NGOs. At the beginning of March 2016, Slovenia announced the re-establishing of the Schengen zone and the visa regime- only people with valid documents and visas were allowed entry on its territory, which effectively meant a closure of its borders for refugees. Croatia and Serbia followed Slovenia’s example.

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The forgotten workers’ control movement of Prague Spring

Note from LeftEast editors: This article originally appeared at Systemic Disorder on 9 March, 2016.

At the time of the [August 1968] Soviet invasion [of Czechoslovakia], two months after the first workers’ councils were formed, there were perhaps fewer than two dozen of them, although these were concentrated in the largest enterprises and therefore represented a large number of employees. But the movement took off, and by January 1969 there were councils in about 120 enterprises, representing more than 800,000 employees, or about one-sixth of the country’s workers.