Tag Archives: Yugoslavia

June 17, 2019

Socialist Yugoslavia and the Antinomies of the Non-Aligned Movement

by Paul Stubbs  

This is a revised version of a talk given by the author at the Workshop ‘Dialoguing Between the Posts 2.0: (im)possible dialogue between the progressive forces of the ‘posts’’, Belgrade, Serbia 15 June 2019. He expresses his gratitude to workshop participants for their comments, and to Čarna Brković, Konstantin Kilibarda and Christian Axboe Neilsen for their helpful feedback on an earlier draft. INTRODUCTION Two moments from the archive serve to illustrate some of the points I want to make here, focusing on socialist Yugoslavia’s role in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) between 1961 and 1979. In the fir ..

May 17, 2019

A Utopian in the Balkans

by Catherine Samary  

This book review was originally published by New Left Review. Darko Suvin,Splendour, Misery and Possibilities: An X-Ray of Socialist Yugoslavia. Haymarket Books: Chicago 2018. How is it,asks Darko Suvin, with Brechtian directness, that socialist Yugoslavia started out so well, yet ended up so very badly? In answering that question he has produced an extraordinary work on the philosophy of emancipation, the lived possibilities of workers’ self-management and the horizon—in Ernst Bloch’s sense of the willed and worked-for future—of democratic communism.Studded withaperçusfrom Aristotle, Dante, Montesquieu, ..

January 29, 2019

Letter to citizens of the EU from the “periphery”: Politics of the closed borders are bringing us closer to fascist rules

by lefteast  

Note from LeftEast editors: This article has been reprinted from the Medium account of Are You Syrious. We, the human rights defenders and citizens from the countries relegated to the “periphery” of the European Union (EU) and the Schengen space, want to express our deepest concern for the current situation in which we can see the rise of fascism and a deterioration in basic human rights, such as freedom of movement and the right to seek asylum. The leniency towards and acceptance of the rise of the far-right in European countries is worsening living conditions for people on the move and increasingly endanger ..

January 8, 2019

The Antifascist Women’s Front (AFŽ) and the Reconfiguration of Women’s Citizenship Rights in Early Socialist Yugoslavia (1945-1953): a Video-Lecture by Chiara Bonfiglioli

by Chiara Bonfiglioli  

Chiara Bonfiglioli in Ljubljana, 10.11.2018, at a ERC Eirene project workshop entitled “Women and Post-War Transitions: Politics”. Her presentation was titled “The Antifascist Women’s Front (AFŽ) and the Reconfiguration of Women’s Citizenship Rights in Early Socialist Yugoslavia (1945-1953).” Chiara Bonfiglioli is a lecturer in Gender & Women’s Studies at University College Cork.

November 7, 2018

Reflections on Marxism and Welfare: East and West

by lefteast  

Video of lecture and text of presentation. The text originally appeared on Paul Stubb’s website, Paul’s thoughts on the multi-level, complex and contested nature of everything. Presentation for “Marx and the Modern History of Welfare”, University of Trier 24 May 2018 Introduction Let me start by saying what an honour it is to have been invited to this event. I hope, however, that the rather pretentious title of my intervention will not raise your expectations too high. In the time available, I really want to present some personal, even idiosyncratic, reflections only on two moments – one involving Marxi ..

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 ..