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[Video] WATCH! MR CONVERSATIONS: BEYOND LEVIATHAN (Plus excerpts)

Note from LeftEast editors: the following piece was first published by Monthly Review. We reprint with permission. In MR Conversations: Beyond Leviathan, Monthly Review’s Editor, John Bellamy Foster, and Hungarian Sociologist Attila Melegh, come together to discuss István Mészáros’ final work, Beyond Leviathan—one of the few books in the last fifty years to return to one of the deepest […]

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The Huge Task of Repoliticizing the Question of Housing: Reflections on the Reading Workshops about the Economy of Housing Inequality in Serbia and Beyond 

Throughout the fall of 2021, the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (IFDT) of the University of Belgrade and the Housing Equality Movement have jointly organized a series of five reading workshops under the title “Housing Issue: the Economy of Housing Inequality”. The aim was to bring together those interested in contemporary housing issues and offer space and opportunity to read and analyze some of the most important texts enlightening the topic from the perspective of political economy. Sara Nikolić from the IFDT and Jovana Timotijević from the Housing Equality Movement, in an interview by Sonja Dragović from LeftEast, who also took part in the workshops, tell us more about this program and about critical engagement with the politics of housing in Serbia and beyond. 

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The rise of the new Macedonian Left: an interview with Dimitar Apasiev and Recep ‘Haktan’ Ismail

Note from LeftEast editors: The Italian version of the article was originally published on  the Italian left-wing website Sinistra in Europa. On 17th and 31st October this year the first and second rounds of local elections were held in North Macedonia, a country which in recent times has seen the gradual growth of a left-wing party (Levica) […]

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Art and Politics in Cuba Today: Amilcar Navarro and Mary Taylor in conversation

Mary Taylor: Envisioned by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as an important revolutionary institution, The National School of the Arts (la ENA, Escuelas Nationales De Arte- also known as “the City of Arts”) was founded in March 1962 in the Cubanacan neighborhood of Havana. The campus, with five buildings set on the grounds of what was once […]

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Conspiracy Theories, the Staple Diet of European Populism

Many thanks to our colleagues at Voxeurop for inviting us to republish this interview with Andreas Önnerfors, Professor in Intellectual History in Salzburg, Austria. He specializes in far-right ideology in Europe, radicalisation, and conspiracy theories. His latest book, coedited with André Krouwel, is Europe: continent of conspiracies, an overview of conspiracy theory with contributions by […]

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Misha Lobanov: a democratic socialist running for Russian parliament

In this fantastic interview conducted by Dmitry Sidorov for OpenDemocracy and generously shared by them with LeftEast, Mikhail Lobanov explains how United Russia can be beaten. Thirty years after the collapse of the totalitarian Soviet Union, Russian society is just beginning to get rid of its allergies to left-wing rhetoric and politics. For a new […]

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In Search of Afghanistan: An Interview with Ali Abdi

To offer our readers an inside look at contemporary Afghanistan, we have conducted an interview with Ali Abdi, a researcher who has been living there since 2015 and working with a queer community in Kabul. The Taliban’s speedy takeover of Kabul last week surprised many political observers. Yet, this is exactly what many in Afghanistan […]

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Fighting Back against the Patriarchal Backlash in Bulgaria. Interview with Kalina Drenska (LevFem, Bulgaria)

The EU recovery plan is reinforcing an idea of welfare and economic reconstruction which reproduces patriarchal and racist hierarchies and exploitation, while some EU member states like Italy and Greece are already promoting measures – like divorce regulations and child allowances laws – that materially make Istanbul Convention void of any meaning. But women have not been silent in these months and are organizing their counterattack. During the last E.A.S.T. public assembly we started to discuss the multifaceted dimensions of these patriarchal attacks and the struggles we can build together towards a big transnational mobilization. This interview with Kalina Drenska, member of E.A.S.T. and LevFem (Bulgaria) is the first of a series of texts that wants to start from Istanbul Convention to explore ongoing fights against violence against women and lgbtqi+ people, in their connections with the struggles against racist and exploitative policies. Kalina talks about the stratified political meanings attributed in Bulgaria to Istanbul Convention and shows the links between attacks on women and lgbtqi+ people and the policies of cutbacks that lead many women to find better living and working conditions abroad. Furthermore, she unveils the hard pathways that feminist struggles must take – in Bulgaria and beyond – to overturn isolation and accumulate power on the transnational level.

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“Twenty thousand farmers commit suicide in India every year” – Interview with Madhuresh Kumar

“The moment the more corporations are coming and the market players are coming, the prices will go further down. So as a result, when the input cost is very high, the farmers will not have the desired output. So I think the whole contention is around the fact that the laws are to benefit the corporate houses and the commercialization of agriculture. That’s the one, the second is that the minimum support prices structure and the government subsidies for the farmers, that will end, slowly the government will withdraw from it.”

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Interview with Wolfgang Streeck: “I definitely prefer a cooperative over an empire”

Note from LeftEast editors: This interview was originally published in Mérce, a left-wing news site in Hungary. It was conducted via e-mail and published on the occasion of Merkel’s departure from power, and to provide context for Hungary’s and Poland’s initial veto on the EU COVID19 recovery package. NL: For many Hungarians Germany is a […]