Tag Archives: Yugoslavia

August 28, 2017

The Life and Death of Yugoslav Socialism

by James Robertson  

The following originally appeared at Jacobin. During the Cold War, the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia represented to many a viable alternative to the Soviet model. Grounded by workplace self-management, the Yugoslav system seemingly gave workers the right to exercise democratic control on the shop floor. The distinct Yugoslav path to socialism found admirers around the world. In Eastern Europe, the combination of market socialism and self-management offered a model for anti-Stalinist reformers. In the capitalist West, democratic socialists hopefully viewed the experiment as a more “human” sociali ..

January 20, 2017

Tariq Ali speaks with Igor Štiks

by lefteast  

Over at teleSUR, Tariq Ali spoke with leftist writer and intellectual Igor Štiks about politics in the Balkans today.

February 7, 2016

Montenegro and Serbia between NATO and Russia

by Dragan Plavsic  

In December last year, NATO officially invited Montenegro to become the 29th member state of the most powerful military organisation of our times, if not, in fact, of all time. That the invitation will have flattered the already over-inflated ego of country’s Prime Minister, Milo Djukanović, and his ruling clique, there is, of course, little doubt. Nevertheless, this was flattery to deceive, for as everybody knows, Montenegro’s voice in NATO will be like a whistle in a whirlwind.[1] To be sure, the invitation had nothing to do with the direct military contribution that Montenegro – a country with a populat ..

February 2, 2016

BOOK REVIEW: “Welcome to the desert of post-socialism!”

by Philippe Alcoy  

Note from the LeftEast editors: This review of Igor Stiks and Srecko Horvath’s edited volume “Welcome to the desert of post-socialism: radical politics after Yugoslavia” (Verso, 2015)  has first appeared on LeftVoice under the title Yugoslavia after Capitalist Restoration. It has been reprinted with the permission of the author. by Philippe Alcoy Released in January 2015 by Verso Books, Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism: Radical Politics after Yugoslavia is a collective work coordinated by two of the best-known leftist intellectuals in the region, Croatian Srećko Horvat and Bosnian Igor ..

October 13, 2015

Serbia: October 5th and the Student who Surpassed the Teacher

by Matija Medenica  

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article was originally published in Serbian at Mašina. Rs . It was translated into English for LeftEast by Vladimir Unkovski-Korica. The commemoration of the October 5th Revolution on its fifteenth anniversary has been reduced to a marginal event. One public meeting, several round tables and an equally small number of statements and wreaths, were enough to generate a couple of boring media reports about the importance of this date. Few mourn before the faded image of October 5th, least of all the once divided political elites who today all serve the same economic elites, and ..

August 17, 2015

Longing for lost agency – Tanja Petrović

by admin  

This article is part of the regular assembly “New authoritarian tendencies – a legacy of the past?“ of the Cross-border Committee. It brings four perspectives that zero in on the post-Yugoslav space. Croatian philosopher Boris Buden speaks about post-socialist subjects as children of communism, warning that it is not a metaphor, but a symptom of an imagination in which transition to democracy as a radical reconstruction starts from scratch: ‘Eastern Europe after 1989 resembles a landscape of historical ruins that is inhabited only by children, immature people unable to organise their lives democratically ..

August 17, 2015

Authoritarian tendencies in the region between “then” and “now”: the lacking visibility of materiality of regional authoritarianism- Danijela Majstorović

by admin  

This article is part of the regular assembly “New authoritarian tendencies – a legacy of the past?“ of the Cross-border Committee. It brings four perspectives that zero in on the post-Yugoslav space. When thinking about authoritarian tendencies in the Balkans, one inevitably envisages the regional ‘strongmen’, who, despite their intrinsic differences, will here for a moment be thought of as amalgamated. One thinks of them as pandering to the populist temptation, living luxurious lives and doing shady business without being accountable to the public, and some liberal democratic telos, which, if reached, ..

April 15, 2015

Where is the line between us: evolving East/West positions in a post-socialist world. Interview with Rastko Močnik

by Ilya Budraitskis  

Note from the LeftEast editors: “Where is the line between us?: cautionary tales from now” was the title of the 3rd Garage international conference which brought to Moscow practitioners and thinkers from the fields of art, history, and sociology to examine the evolving positions toward the East/West axis in a post-socialist world. The speakers revisited selected regional histories since 1989 to show how our understanding of the past can change and develop through the lens of present circumstances, and vice versa. LeftEast’s Ilya Budraitskis interviewed one of the speakers: Rastko Močnik, sociologist, liter ..

March 13, 2015

International Women’s Day in the Balkans: Ankica Čakardić

by admin  

Ankica Čakardić is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Zagreb. She coordinates educational programmes at the Centre for Women’s Studies in Zagreb, is a member of The Organisation for Workers Initiative and Democratisation, Croatia, Women’s Front for Labour and Social Rights and the Feminist-Marxist reading group FemFront. “Unfortunately we can really only speak of a decline in the situation of women. During the 1990s the ground was prepared for the further accumulation of capital and privatisation of common/public goods. The attack on the public sector has brought ..

March 13, 2015

International Women’s Day in the Balkans: Anita Tolić

by admin  

Anita Tolić is a member of the Initiative for Democratic Socialism and Institute for Labour Studies in Slovenia. “In the relative absence of an organized, progressive feminist struggle, the economic and social circumstances, which generate re-traditionalisation, re-patriarchalisation and re-domestification of women, threaten to cause even further regression of the historical achievements for which women (and men) have struggled.” What does the 8th of March mean in Slovenia? How is it celebrated today, and how do you think its meaning/celebration has changed in recent years, and especially in comparis ..