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Students Against Cuts Shake Up the Walls of the University 

On the 19th of September at 8:00, a group of students marched into the main building of the University of Helsinki and announced that it was now occupied. We, “Students Against Cuts,” are behind this occupation, through which we have made noise about the rights of all students. In occupying the main building of the University of Helsinki, we wished to draw attention to the precarious past, present, and unknown future faced by students, which is being exacerbated by the government’s plans to cut housing allowance and affordable housing and to pursue racist immigration policy. 

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Coronavirus: scientific realities vs. economic fallacies

Note from LeftEast editors: this article first appeared in Bulgarian under the title “Some coronavirus considerations” and was published by the investigative journalism portal Bivol.Bg, and was then translated into English and Russian. It is hereby reprinted by LeftEast with the kind permission of the author and by the editorial team of the portal. With […]

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Irish voters reject the Right: a new opportunity for the Left?

Sinn Féin, a nationalist party that sits with the left/far-left group in the European parliament and from the 1970s to ’90s was attached to an armed insurgency in Northern Ireland, won the most first-preference votes in this month’s general election in the Republic of Ireland. It now has about the same number of parliamentary seats […]

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Sinn Féin and the land issue: notes on the 2020 Irish general election

A century ago a change began in Ireland but some radical change can take centuries. An Irish Countess (married to an undocumented polish immigrant) was elected Minister for Labour for Sinn Féin. This was a first as women had yet to gain the right to vote. The US-based Irish Republican Brotherhood had pushed through an […]

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Austerity Economics Russian Style: “The state never asked you to be born”

Translated by Joseph Livesey For two decades steadily rising living standards and high rates of economic growth have served as the standard explanations for Vladimir Putin’s overwhelming support among Russian voters while a key theme of Russian state propaganda has been the championing of Putin-style “stability” (as opposed to the chaos and poverty of the […]

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Introducing the Five Senses of Austerity

This podcast was originally published at podcasts.ceu.edu as part of the Sound Relations Project based at Central European University, Budapest, and is done in collaboration with the Blinken Open Society Archives. In recent years, most of us have become used to hearing about austerity. Following the 2007 financial crisis, it was said that austerity was […]

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Belarusian activists: Freedom or Prison – It’s All the Same

How ‘Freedom Day’ went in Belarus, and what to expect next: comments from Belarusian activists On 25 May 2017, demonstrations marking Freedom Day took place in cities across Belarus (Freedom Day is the anniversary of the announcement of the self-proclaimed Belarusian People’s Republic on 25 March 1918; it is celebrated mainly by Belarusian nationalists). The […]

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The pain goes on: Greece and the European Union (EU)

As the UK’s referendum on the European Union approaches, Greek workers are facing more pain from Greece’s European creditors The Eurozone last week pushed Greece to accept more austerity in exchange for a loan of 7.5 billion euros to pay off the country’s debt. This comes less than a year after Greece was promised debt […]

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Post-Capitulation Greece: Interview with Stathis Kouvelakis

While at the Marx Is Muss 2016 conference earlier this month, Anja Ilic and Pavle Ilic (Marx21) interviewed Stathis Kouvelakis, a member of a party called Popular Unity, which split from Syriza last summer after the referendum. Kouvelakis served at Syriza’s central committee from 2012 to August 2015 and is also a professor of political theory […]

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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 […]