March 22, 2018

Manifesto of the Congress to the Peoples of the East (Baku, 1920)

by Philippe Alcoy   0

The congress of Baku (Azerbaijan), held in September 1920, was a major attempt on the part of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union to help organize peoples of colonial and semi-colonial countries to fight against class and national oppression; to help them in their struggle against imperialist countries, especially Great Britain, the main imperialist power at that time. Of course, it was a really difficult and complex task; but at the same time a crucial task for the international workers’ movement and the cause of international revolution.  The Baku Congress wasn’t just a symbolic meeting where only a small ..

March 19, 2018

The Very Best Day

by Ilya Budraitskis   1

Note from the editors: This piece originally appeared at Arts Everywhere. It is reprinted here with kind permission from the author. On March 3rd, 2018, the main pre-election rally for Vladimir Putin took place at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow. Tens of thousands of public sector workers were brought in from various regions of the country and were expected to listen to the President’s speech as well as those of actors and singers who came out in his support. Not long before Putin himself appeared, Grigory Leps, a popular singer with a criminal past, performed his song “The Very Best Day.” Precisely six year ..

March 15, 2018

So Trashy! A Review of EU Waste Management and Inequality Modeling

by Ana Tomicic   0

The policy of the European Union (EU) in the field of environmental protection and natural resources has, since the 1980s, continued to grow in importance. But some topics are of particular concern to European citizens. This is the case, in particular, with the production of waste, which is increasingly alarming, with the EU generating some 2 billion tons of waste every year. More than 40 million tons of this waste are classified as “hazardous waste.” Nearly 60% of the waste produced consists of mineral waste and soil, most often from construction and demolition as well as mining activities. Approxima ..

March 13, 2018

Belgrade’s Municipal Elections: A Class Analysis of the Vote

by Vladimir Unkovski-Korica   0

Belgrade held regular municipal elections on Sunday 4 March. These were the first municipal elections since the mass protests against the Belgrade waterfront project in spring 2016. As such, they were a major test for the conservative Aleksandar Vučić regime since his presidential re-election in 2017. The regime understood the dangers posed by a potential opposition breakthrough, and poured major resources into the municipal election. Serbian President Vučić increasingly distanced himself from the discredited and outgoing mayor, Siniša Mali, and made the election a referendum on himself personally. His party ..

March 8, 2018

A Story of one Banner

by Alona Liasheva   0

Today on the 8th of March, we, a group of left and anarchist feminists, set out to make visible several problems faced by every woman in contemporary Ukraine. These include poverty and bad work environment, domestic violence and the Church lobbying against the Istanbul convention. But there is one more problem that has become an everyday reality: far right violence against the feminist and LGBT+ activists. Basically every event addressing these issues, including talks and workshops, is facing threats of violence and actual physical attacks. And this is no news. This is what our banner meant to portray. As a symbo ..

March 7, 2018

Macedonia’s Grassroots Resistance to Mining: A Struggle for the South-Eastern Region’s Survival

by Simona Getova   0

Editors’ note: this text has been published in cooperation with Bilten.org, where it first appeared on 28.02.2018. “For fifteen years now my family and I have been investing in organic agriculture, working the land together with my children to build a better life for them in our homeland,” says Dimche Baleski, an organic producer from the municipality of Valandovo, during a public debate on proposed amendments to the Law on Minerals held at the Macedonian Parliament on 1 February 2018. He continues: “And now, without any consultation with us, the affected community, you set up a ticking bomb in our yards ..

March 5, 2018

How Serbia was systematically destroyed – by privatization: an interview with Marija Obradović

by lefteast   1

Note from the editors: The following interview with Marija Obradović was conducted by Vladimir Sudar for the Serbian publication, Sputnik. It is published here in translation with generous permission. If remaining state-owned strategic resources are sold, it will bring about enormous economic damage. Although the oligarchs that sell them will make great material gains, the situation of the working class will get even worse, says Dr. Marija Obradović, author of a new book Hronika tranzicionog groblja (Chronicle of the Transitional Graveyard). Privatisation cannot be fair. There is no empirical evidence that any ..

March 2, 2018

Bulgaria (not) only for Bulgarians

by Rositsa Kratunkova   0

At this year’s summit of G20, the newly elected French president Emanuel Macron stated that the problem with the slow economic development of Africa was civilizational. As an example, he noted that African women gave birth to 7-8 children, in which he saw a negative economic effect without accounting for its economic roots–the reason must be the “innate backwardness” of the people. Similarly, in Bulgaria the problem with the social and economic segregation of the Roma is viewed as civilizational, which can have negative consequences in the future such as becoming a burden to the social system. This se ..

February 28, 2018

On the Macedonian question: Statement from DEA and the Red Network

by lefteast   0

Concerning the recent developments in the Balkans, DEA and the Red Network state the following: The background to understand recent events is the initiative of USA-NATO and the EU to impose a new “stability” and control to the region, by establishing an immediate connection of all the countries with the major imperialist organizations. The timeframe that has already been announced (the EU Summit in Sofia at the end of May and the NATO Summit at the end of June) highlights that they are moving in a fast pace to address the difficulties that Western imperialism is facing in the Middle East, and the turn of Turk ..

February 26, 2018

The USS Strike: pensions are the trigger, but the strike is about discontent with academic working conditions in the UK

by Iskra Krstic   0

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article first appeared in Serbian on the comradely web portal Masina and was kindly translated and adapted for LeftEast by its author. The biggest strike in the history of British higher education started last Thursday. Lectturers and researchers at around sixty British universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, Exeter and Imperial College London, will discontinue work for 14 days in the course of the next four weeks. Members of University and College Union (UCU), the largest higher education union in the world, representing some 11 000 employees, decided to take industrial a ..