Articles by admin

July 2, 2018

The Five Star Movement and the League Constitute a Lethal Political Cocktail

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The interview was first published in Hungarian, on the Mérce.hu website. Tensions between Rome and Brussels are going to increase, says Italian scholar Lorenzo Cini. The centrist populist Five Star Movement and the extreme right-wing League managed to replace the traditional mainstream parties, however aside from belligerent anti-EU and anti-migration rhetoric, their governance will not bring relief to Italians suffering from the effects of crisis and austerity. I think I am transmitting the puzzlement of many people not familiar with Italian politics when I ask: what exactly is the Five Star Movement (M5S)? How ..

June 28, 2018

‘Stop Treating Us Like Dogs!’ Worker Resistance at Amazon in Poland

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This article originally appeared on the PlutoPress blog and is authored by Amazon workers and their supporters. Global capitalism is a precarious system, relying on the steady flow of goods across the world. When Amazon arrived in  Poland, it was attracted by cheap labour costs and strict union laws, little did it know that the high-pressure working conditions it institutes would produce wildcat strikes and cross-border solidarities amongst its Polish workforce. In this blog, Amazon warehouse workers provide a first-hand account of their work and their struggles. This blog is extracted from Choke Points, a coll ..

June 26, 2018

Desperately seeking socialism: why the Soviet Union’s left-wing dissidents matter today

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The following text appeared on OpenDemocracy, and features a review by Gabriel Levy of Ilya Budraistkis’ book ‘Dissidents Among Dissidents,’ a new collection of essays published in Russian in 2017 by Free Marxist Publishers. It was originally published on People and Nature.  This new collection of essays seeks to rebalance our understanding of dissent in the late Soviet Union, drawing attention to democratic socialists from the 1950s into the 1980s. The “New Cold War” is the subject of the most politically compelling of the essays in this book by the Russian socialist Ilya Budraitskis. He w ..

June 23, 2018

A Disharmony of Powers: Five more years of Erdoğan?

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This article originally appeared on N+1mag and was penned by an anonymous author. SUAVE AND SYMPATHETIC, Beyazıt Öztürk is known for making even his most troublesome guests feel at home. The veteran comedian was in the middle of his call-in talk show, the most popular program on Turkish TV, when he received an unexpected call. A woman’s voice, trembling but persistent, admonished him and his guests to remember the children. Are they aware that children are dying? Do they know what is happening in Diyarbakır as the armed forces hunt Kurdish insurgents and the civilians who failed to leave have become fair ga ..

January 17, 2018

Call for Solidarity from Bulgaria: No Nazis on Our Streets, No to Fortress Europe

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Note from the LeftEast editors: In January 2018 Bulgaria has taken the presidency of the Council of the European Union for the first six months of 2018. Meanwhile Neonazis will still be marching the on the streets of Sofia in February to commemorate General Hristo Lukov: the head of the interwar Legion and Minister of War in the late 1930s. Known as a stark nationalist and anti-semite, he was killed by a partisan woman. The march that commemorates him combines nationalist, chauvinist, anti-communist and racist rhetorics. It is a feast of the international right extreme, whose members come to Bulgaria in big num ..

February 15, 2017

Open Letter to the University of Vienna

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We, the undersigned, condemn the invitation of Ayelet Shaked, minister of Justice and member of far-right party HaBayit HaYehudi in Israel who openly called for mass murder of Palestinians to hold a roundtable discussion at the University of Vienna on the 15th of February, called “Protecting Human Rights While Countering Terrorism – The Israeli Case”. In July 2014, Shaked, who is known for her radical incitements on social media, publicly shared a quote from Uri Elitzur, who was a leading pro settler journalist and a close adviser to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. What follows are some excerpts of this ..

December 23, 2016

Undermined: how the state is selling out Ukraine’s coal workers

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Vitalii Atanasov// Dec. 19, 2016// OpenDemocracy-Russia Ukraine’s miners were once heroes of socialist labour. Today, after years of sector-wide neglect and corruption, there are new plans for further mine closures, leaving thousands of people without work. September 2016: miners from Novovolysnk No.10 in west Ukraine protest the government’s plans to close their mine. (c) RIA Novosti. All rights reserved. Since 2014, war has redrawn the map of Ukraine, removing many of its mining operations. Half of Ukraine’s 150 mines operational before 2014 are now in the territories of the so-called “Peoples’ R ..

December 16, 2016

‘Tyrants across the world know now they can maintain power through mass slaughter.’ Interview with Leila al-Shami for Open Left

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by Gabriel Levy and Ilya Matveev Leila al-Shami, co-author of Burning Country, a writer who has worked with human rights movements in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, gave this interview to Ilya Matveev and Gabriel Levy on 29 November for OpenLeft (before the fall of Aleppo to the government forces). It sheds some light on the social and geopolitical situation which has rendered the Allepo crisis so severe in these past weeks. It is also, however, part of an emerging transnational conversation between anti-war activists in Russia and Syrian activists, spearheaded by portals such as OpenLeft, where the int ..

December 14, 2016

József Böröcz: “An incapacity to see ourselves as part of the whole world, and the insistence to see ourselves as part of Europe”

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This interview with József Böröcz, professor of sociology at Rutgers University, was conducted by Ágnes Gagyi and Gergő Pulay in 2012. In a way, it is a dense summary of the conceptual perspective which had informed the new wave of  intellectual left emerging in the region – including LeftEast – especially in regard to Eastern Europe’s post-socialist transformation and EU accession in the context of global capitalism. Four years later, further mired in the conflicts that this perspective foreshadowed, this concise summary is colored by the experiences, fatigue and different social geography of the ..

November 30, 2016

Open Letter in Solidarity with Students and Professors at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb

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IN DEFENSE OF SECULAR, FREE AND DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION AND RESEARCH! We, the undersigned, Express our deep concern over continuous pressures on the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, which threaten basic academic freedoms, free research and thinking, democratic governance and participation, and, last but not least, the secular character of the University. After unsuccessful attempts by the former dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences to merge the Faculty’s curricula with the curriculum taught at the Catholic Faculty of Theology, the situation has moved from bad to worse. Violatin ..