Tag Archives: post-socialism

April 8, 2020

Czechia 30 Years on: The Coming-Out of the Oligarchy

by Ondrej Slacalek Daniel Sitera  

The pieces in the dossier 1989 Thirty Years Later were developed around the workshop “Eastern Europe after 30 years of transition: New emancipatory perspectives from the region,” held in Prague on 25-26 October 2019, organised by the Transnational Institute (Amsterdam) and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (Prague), coordinated by Agnes Gagyi and Ondrej Slacalek. In addition to their commentary on the present, these articles also give a virtual tour of the collapsing state-socialist world at the moment of its demise, through the memory of those who lived through it, and implore us to reconsider what critical mem ..

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 ..

October 13, 2016

Hungary: the Népszabadság Affair

by G.M. Tamás  

Note from the LeftEast editors: Last Saturday employees of  Népszabadság  newspaper, the widest circulated daily in Hungary, found themselves locked out of their workplace and told they were no longer needed. On the  Népszabadság  editorial team facebook page the team team wrote: “Our first thought is that this is a coup. We will soon come back with more” after the newspaper’s website , stopped working , and invited the public to join them to demonstrate at Parliament later that day. They were joined by some 2,000 people. This article is translated into English for LeftEast by Lolo f ..

September 15, 2016

Precarious employment and the role of trade unions in post-socialist Central Europe

by Tibor Meszmann  

Since the outbreak of the global economic crisis in 2008, precarious employment has increasingly become the focus of attention for socially responsive international organizations and critical scholars and activists. Precarious employment has found its place at the centre of employment and social policy debates. Common in the conceptualization of precarious employment is the “lack of decent jobs, security, protection and rights.” A recent ILO report, for example, underlines the most common forms of precarious employment relations, trends and features by noting that: “more than 60 percent of workers world ..

September 3, 2016

Housing and class (trans)formation in Romania

by Eniko Vincze Simona Ciotlaus  

The following piece was originally published in Croatian on the online platform Bilten. The article provides an overview on the political economy of housing in Romania as a key driver of the formation of capitalism after the dismantlement of socialist industries and related residential urban systems. It discusses statistical data and information on legislation at national and local level, in particular in the city of Cluj-Napoca, by addressing some central features of these transformations (such as privatisation and restitution, minimal social state, financialisation and class inequalities) in the tradition of cr ..

May 11, 2016

The Klinika squat: revitalizing anti-capitalism in Prague

by admin  

AUTHOR: Nikolay Savov ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: RoarMag.Org Over the past few years squatting has mostly been a marginal phenomenon in the Czech Republic. However, with the establishment of the autonomous social center Klinika in an abandoned former lung clinic in Prague, squatters came up with a new approach. Now, the movement is moving out of the periphery once again. Through its proposal for self-organized space sustained on the principles of autonomy, Klinika has reintroduced the critique of capitalist conceptions of democracy and freedom that remained largely unquestioned after the fall of the totalitarian comm ..

March 23, 2016

Accumulating the Myths of Lech Wałęsa

by admin  

This piece by Gavin Rae originally appeared at Beyond the Transition. As the news spread around the world about the discovery of new documents, concerning Lech Wałęsa’s alleged collaboration with the Communist authorities, the man himself was addressing the new right-wing parliament in Venezuela. This former trade union leader and avowed champion of democracy and human rights, was supporting the return of the right-wing in Venezuela. He then flew to Miami, to meet Cuban oppositionists and was once again received as a hero. Wałęsa was in his element – the heir of Reagan; the great anti-Communist who had he ..

February 17, 2016

NO to transition 2.0: Social recomposition, Decolonisation and Transautonomism

by OvidiuTichindeleanu  

This article was originally published as part of the Gazette of Political Art (GAP) #12 „In the Name of the Periphery. Decolonial theory and intervention in the Romanian context” December 2015, coordinated by Veda Popovici and Ovidiu Pop. It is the second out of a small series of materials from this issue, which LeftEast will present in English. The illustration was prepared for GAP by Alex Horghidan. (translated from Romanian for LeftEast by Raluca Parvu) In some of the biggest Spanish towns, the 2015 local elections have been won by women, and the left won in the top five biggest cities in Spain. Man ..

December 8, 2015

Subversive Festival: Balkan Forum – Situations, Struggles, Strategies

by admin  

Note from the LeftEast editors: with the kind permission of the Subversive Festival organizers we publish the .html versions of the Subversive Festival’s outputs “Balkan Forum: Situations, Struggles, Strategies”. A .pdf version can be downloaded by clicking on the image of the book collection here or from the website of the Forum’s principal sponsor, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Southeast Europe, which also provided the annotation of the volume. Please click on the images below to follow the link to each article. Towards Another Balkans! The first Balkan Forum took place within the Subversi ..

November 2, 2015

Scalable Communities

by admin  

By James Neimeister Words, like any signs, mean something. Not only do they allow us to string together thoughts, but they make an impact on the world. They structure what we see, as well as what we don’t. Searchable online words, went the commonly held view, would usher in a new era wherein each person could be free to discover their “tribe” and form new communities of like-minded individuals. Signs, after all, are markers of identity, a way of waving “Hey!” to other people, to recognize tribes. But, bounding unpredictably across the planet, signs take on new meanings as they move from contex ..