Lefteast
The first part of this essay explored the historical background for Germany’s fiercely enforced solidarity with Israel. In the decades after the war, support for Israel was cultivated by West German elites as a geopolitical investment and project of Westernization. Meanwhile the left struggled to force the country to take historical responsibility for its crimes […]
Note from LeftEast editors: Our member Sonja Dragović interviewed Dr. Lea Horvat about her work on the architectural and cultural history of socialist Yugoslavia, which has recently produced a book “Hard Currency Concrete: A Cultural History of Mass Housing Construction in Socialist Yugoslavia and its Successor States” (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlag, 2024; English translation […]
Please say a few words about your activities over time in Japan! I was born in 1951 and had been teaching Marx’s economics and critique of modern capitalism at a local Japanese university for over 30 years. Therefore, I am sometimes considered an “economic scientist.” Those who have read my book “Acid Capitalism,” which refers […]
Note from LeftEast editors: this is a reprint article which was originally published on January 26 2022 at FocaalBlog. The article is linked to a research workshop “Rethinking Surplus Populations: Theory From the Peripheries” that was held at Bergen University in December. 13-14 December 2021, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Frontlines of Value […]
Note from LeftEast editors: We are pleased to publish the second part of Ivan Rajković’s two-part series on anti-lithium mining protests that have erupted in Serbia over the last several months, and the broader environmental movement around it. See the previous entry here. With Rio Tinto’s extraction of lithium in Serbia, the European Union was […]
In the summer of 2017, I took a group of students and artists to a town in northeastern Poland called Suwałki, close to the Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Russian (Kaliningrad) borders. In this historically multiethnic, multireligious region, it is not uncommon for Jewish, Muslim, and various Christian cemeteries to stand side-by-side, on the same plot of […]
LeftEast was a cosponsor of an online conference on non-capitalist mixed economies from June 23–26 2021. Co-sponsors of the conference included the Karl Polanyi Center, Eszmélet Journal, Social Theory College in Budapest, Polanyi Institute, Geopolitical Economy Research Group, Institute of Political History Social Theory Research Group, The Study Group on Global Labour History and Social […]
This article takes up the problem of Russian neoliberalism – how to understand the relationship between the social state and neoliberal economic reforms/governmentality (which often seem contradictory). In turn, this relationship tells us about the alignment of state, digital governance, and capital interests in Russia. Based on long term ethnographic participant observation, my research has […]
Note from LeftEast editors: Between June and December 2020 the Hungarian Portal Mérce published a series on “Victimhood and Decolonization”. The following text is an English-language summary on the series, written by one of its co-editors. Despite notable early post-war attempts and several more in recent years, Eastern European discussions have surprisingly rarely interpreted the […]
The background for writing this review was Larry Wolff’s book, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilizations on the Mind of the Enlightenment, which was published in autumn 2020 in a Polish translation, more than 25 years after its first English edition. This review attempts to see how the book can be read today. This […]