Categories
All posts Interviews Theory

“Things you might consider impossible have been accomplished before”: An Interview with Lea Horvat on the History of Mass Housing in Yugoslavia

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 […]

Categories
All posts

Ruins and Ruined, the Victory of Capitalism in Georgia

I went to Georgia to take part in the annual meeting organized by LeftEast, and this gave me the opportunity to visit the small town of Tskaltubo for a few days with some comrades. Here I share a few thoughts, feelings, impressions and a photo essay of what I observed there. We arrive in front […]

Categories
All posts ELMO series: CEE housing movements resisting neoliberal urban transformations

Becoming Western: the story legitimising neoliberalism, violence and dispossession in Central and Eastern European cities

This article is part of the multilingual ELMO series CEE housing movements resisting neoliberal urban transformations. The smart city, the civilised city, the city for the respectable tax-paying citizens – in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), what all of these urban imaginaries have in common is that they cater to a performative, aspirational desire of becoming […]

Categories
All posts

Non-capitalist Mixed Economies: the case of (political) socialism

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 […]

Categories
All posts Insert

How Capitalism Erases the Human Costs of Post-1989 Transitions

Note from LeftEast editors: We reprint this article, which appeared in the Black Box East section of the Berliner Gazette in German on December 2, 2021.  After the post-1989 shock therapies imposed on “communist” regimes forced countless workers to move to Greece, where they became essential to the country’s economy, Troika’s austerity measures imposed on Greece at […]

Categories
All posts

One modernity lost, the other out of reach – Contested post-Soviet infrastructures

Note from editors: This text is a contribution to the Berliner Gazette’s BLACK BOX EAST text series; its German translation is available here on Berliner Gazette. You can find more texts, works, and conference information on the English-language BLACK BOX EAST website. Infrastructures serve as basis for developmental discourses, preconfigure our ideas, and literally build futures because of their decades-long lifespans. Debates on […]

Categories
All posts

The political economy of the post-socialist mortality crisis

Surviving and dying are life chances in the most profound sense, a truism that the corona pandemic has powerfully underpinned. Already before the pandemic hit, the declining life expectancy in deindustrialized, rustbelt areas and the accompanying deepening of health inequalities have been signaling the existential crisis of contemporary economic arrangements. Recent research by Ann Case […]

Categories
All posts

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

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 […]

Categories
All posts Video

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

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 […]

Categories
All posts

Hungary: the Népszabadság Affair

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” […]