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“Our office is an international hub where the international language of exploitation is spoken”

Note from LeftEast editors: This interview with Goran Lukić of the Counseling Office for Workers, Ljubljana, was conducted and translated within the framework of the East European Left Media Outlet (ELMO). The original will be published by Mašina. The illustrations included in this article are from Ivan Mitrevski’s comic book about the Counseling Office for […]

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Lenin’s Political Work

Note from LeftEast editors: this text was originally published in Czech on SOK-Socialistický kruh. Lenin and the Revolution: nothing is closed The contemporary view of Lenin and the October revolution is predominated by their historical images as provoking the impression that they are nothing more than pieces of history with no relation to the present […]

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How the Post-Soviet ‘Crisis of Hegemony’ Explains Class and War in Ukraine: A Review of Volodymyr Ishchenko’s Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War

Published this month by Verso, Towards the Abyss  offers a Gramscian account of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, alongside a personal perspective from its author, Volodymyr Ishchenko. Verso’s and LeftEast’s readership, likely familiar with Ishchenko’s polemical articles and his theoretical framework, is now offered an edited collection of texts composed and published across […]

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Voices from Gaza: Messages from Devastation

Note from LeftEast editors: we reprint this collection of posts with permission from Insaniyyat: Palestinian Society of Anthropologists. The original post is on their webpage, here, and is updated when possible. Since the beginning of this current, most vicious, Israeli war on the people of Gaza, family and friends, including members of our Insaniyyat community, […]

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Kolašin’s Construction Boom: Another Cautionary Tale of Mistaking Luxury Condos for Urban Development

Seemingly overnight, Kolašin has turned into a large construction site. After decades of aggressively promoted and poorly regulated real estate construction on the Montenegrin coast, which consumed the coastal space and its chances for sustainable future development, the same wave has reached Kolašin. Here, in this town of about 3,000 in the mountains of northern […]

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Uprooting Injustice: Exposing Georgia’s Housing Crisis and Predatory Lending

Interview with Vako Natsvlishvili from the political movement “Khma”. In this insightful interview, Vako, a member of the “Khma” movement, sheds light on the housing crisis in Georgia and the challenges faced by anti-eviction activists in the country. The recent incident involving the eviction of a family has sparked public outrage, leading to the arrest […]

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Free to Hate: How Media Liberalization Enabled Right-Wing Populism in Post-1989 Bulgaria (a book extract)

Free to Hate examines Bulgaria’s highly mediated populist right in light of the political and economic transformations of media institutions after 1989. The book highlights the negative effects of the abandonment of the cultural and educational features of socialist media and the complete shift toward entertainment and advertising in the 1990s. It also traces how the subjugation of state media to the new elites and the overhaul of the journalistic labor market secured the hegemony of anti-communism, which is the ideology that the populist right feeds on. A significant portion of Free to Hate examines the monopolization of the Bulgarian media market by the Western media giants WAZ and News Corporation, as it discusses the open colonization of Bulgarian media by individual capitalists who use it to denigrate one another. In sum, Free to Hate explains how these structural transformations of media institutions benefited the populist right and offers an inside view and in-depth analysis of the populist right’s own media outlets.

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Interviews

The Alternative University: Lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela: An Interview with Mariya Ivancheva

Note from LeftEast editors: An early version of this interview on the monograph The Alternative University: Lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela (Stanford University Press, 2023) appeared in the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory, and in Bulgarian at the pages of our kindred ELMO member platform dVERSIA. We publish the pre-print with some modification. The book explores […]

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Trade Unions Block Arms Exports to Israel: International Workers’ Solidarity

LeftEast publishes an English translation of this article from the Croatian portian Radnička Prava thanks to our cooperation within the framework of the East European Left Media Outlet (ELMO). Originally published on November 27, 2023. Around the world, trade unions and workers are refusing to participate in the production and transportation of arms intended for […]

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We Asked: How is Suppression of Palestinian Solidarity Unfolding in Hungary? (an Interview with Soma Ábrahám Kiss and Bernáth Lackó)

Most political parties and other actors of the political landscape, significant or niche, openly support the Israeli narrative and there are barely any public figures that condemn the oppression of anti-war protests and opinions in public statements, unless they are asked directly to do so.  On Hungary’s political palette, it is mainly the small and marginal leftist organisations that support peace or the Palestinian people.