Tag Archives: neoliberalism

March 13, 2020

How “love what you do” went wrong in an ‘academic sweatshop’ in Siberia

by Natalia Savelyeva  

LeftEast reprints Natalia Savelyeva’s article with the permission of OpenDemocracy-Russia. We’re told that we should “do what we love” when it comes to our jobs. But what if loving what you do leads – slowly, imperceptibly – to abuse? In social sciences, a lot of work is dedicated to why people become committed to organisations. The classics, like Erving Goffman or Lewis Coser, claim that organisations can separate an individual – partly or totally, socially and sometimes physically – from her everyday environment and provide her with a new life-world and identity. Other resear ..

December 20, 2019

What Has Just Happened in Chile?

by Pablo Aravena et al.  

Note from LeftEast editors: This text, composed cooperatively by four Chilean academics, was read during the opening ceremony of the Sixth International Days of Latin American Problems (VI Jornadas Internacionales de Problemas Latinoamericanos 2019), a biannual conference that in 2019 set out to examine contemporary social, political, cultural and democratic movements in the light of the neoliberal restoration and the alleged end of the ‘progressive cycle in Latin America. The conference took place on the 27-29 November 2019, in the History and Social Science Department of the Faculty of Humanities and Educ ..

December 17, 2018

The gilets jaunes have shattered the false opposition between “reasonable politicians” and “populists”

by Marko Kostanic  

Originally published in Croatian at Bilten. Translated by James Robertson. One of the key characteristics of populism, if we are to believe concerned Europeans, is a certain fiscal nonchalance. Populists, that is, are not worried about the “social physics” which stand behind a balanced budget. They throw money around as if there is no tomorrow. And thus they threaten both economic and political stability. Such are the fears raised among the European establishment by the current Italian government, a coalition of the League and the Five Star Movement. For a month now, the Italian government has been in ..

December 14, 2018

Student protests in Albania: “What we are witnessing is the direct effect of the neoliberal reform in education”

by Philippe Alcoy  

Note from LeftEast editors: This interview originally appeared on the Revolution Permanente website. Albanian students are protesting en masse against a new hike in tuition fees in one of the poorest countries of the continent. While the medium wage in Albania is 350 euros per month, the tuition fees can go up to 2000 euros per year. Government wanted to make students pay for retake exams but it was forced to retreat to try to calm down the movement. But it seems not enough. We interviewed Redi Muçi, lecturer at the Faculty of Geology and Mining and member of Movement For University (Levizja Për Universitetin), ..

December 13, 2018

Albanian Students Revolt: What Is to Be Done?

by Griselda Qosja  

In the last days, thousands of students have flooded the narrow street where the Albanian Ministry of Education, Sport and Youth is located. Demonstrations of this magnitude are not alien to the public. In the last three decades there have been plenty of anti-government demonstrations in Albania, and apart from a few notable exceptions, they have been successfully co-opted by various mainstream political parties. Thus, one of the main features of this protest has been a clear collective attempt to keep it unaffiliated with any political party, the main reason for this being the fear of losing the credibility. The ..

June 12, 2018

Teaching insurgence – the revolutionary potential of education in a neoliberal era

by Mariann Dosa  

Gramsci argued that ‘democracy, by definition, cannot mean merely that an unskilled worker can become skilled. It must mean that every ‘citizen’ can ‘govern’ and that society places them, even if only abstractly, in a general condition to achieve this’. Therefore, he argued that the task for the working class was to become intellectually autonomous, as this was the way for them to lead their own movement and thus, become a ruling class. He relentlessly sought the ways for accomplishing this historical task, among others, in the field of education. His pedagogical program was based on the radical idea ..

February 23, 2018

Dialoguing Between the Posts: Can We Think Postcolonially about Central and Eastern Europe? Perspective from Poland.

by lefteast  

Note from the LeftEast editors: we are sharing this video with the kind permission of Mithilesh Kumar. Inspired from the workshop with the same title which took place in Beograde, TISS Patna has designed a series of events on the topic. As one of the groups present at the Belgrade seminar, the LeftEast editorial collective endorses fully this series of events and its courage to break with Cold War taxonomies, methodological nationalism and nesting orientalism, and look for commonalities among different peripheries in the world system. We are proud to feature this and further videos from the event series on our we ..

September 12, 2017

Contradictions in Russian Cultural Politics: Conservatism as an Instrument of Neoliberalism

by Ilya Budraitskis  

Note from the editors: The following piece is scheduled to appear in the edited collection The Art of Civil Action, edited by Philipp Dietachmair and Pascal Gielen and published through Valiz in November 2017. Today, it is common to contrast the statism of today’s Russia with the Western neoliberal order, which is based on the primacy of political and economic freedom. European journalists and experts discuss Putin’s Russia as though it were a revisionist state that is not only ready for military aggression but is also driven by internal destructive forces: a “populist international” of right and left par ..

September 4, 2017

The open violence of the Balkan labour reforms: an interview with Aleksandar Matković

by Aleksandar Matkovic  

The following interview between Petar Protić and Aleksandar Matković originally appeared in Serbo-Croatian at Al Jazeera Balkans and concerns the recent labour laws that have been carried out almost simultaneously across several Balkan countries, each bearing similar tendencies: a weakening of workers’ rights and a strengthening of the rights of employers, the increase of precarious work and employers arbitrarily assigning work times as they see fit. These labour reforms form one of the central topics of the interview. Protić: Recently the Chinese company Hesteel Serbia, which operates the Smederevo ironwork ..

August 3, 2017

Of Fences, national securities and solidarity: An open letter to Momentum

by lefteast  

Note from the LeftEast editors: As we move towards the 2018 parliamentary elections in Hungary, the Momentum Movement, recently chartered as a party, is being touted in the international liberal media as a pro Europe party with potential to threaten the right-dominated political space where the main challenge to Fidesz comes from the extreme right party Jobbik. After becoming known this spring through it’s a successful campaign against Hungary’s the government’s plan to bid to host the 2024 Olympics, Momentum is now poised to run in the elections. Momentum drives a campaign designed by communication profess ..