Month: April 2016

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THE NEOLIBERAL SELF: SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY NEOLIBERALISM

Editors’ note: This article was originally published on Eszmelet.hu. 

Talk delivered at the conference “Человек vs. отчуждение” in Moscow (supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Moscow) by our editor Mihály Koltai.

In my talk I would like to provide some observations and intuitions on what one might call the psychological basis of contemporary neoliberalism. These are attitudes and engrained habits that one is essentially forced to adopt, contributing to the day-to-day reproduction of the current form of highly unequal and – as I would argue – more and more sadistic form of capitalism, that we can call neoliberalism.

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What Europe are we sacrificed for? TTIP and its lasting consequences

The following piece was originally published in Serbian at Masina.rs.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a free trade agreement that will soon be signed between the United States and the European Union. According to the website of the European Commission (EC), this agreement ‘removes custom duties’ and ‘barriers to investment’, which allegedly impede trade between the US and EU. However, as the US already has agreements on the abolition of custom duties with the majority of countries with which it trades, and as the very existence of the EU was founded on such agreements, the ‘barriers’ mentioned by the EC can in no way be related to customs.

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What’s DiEM25, really? Reply to Open Letter by Souvlis & Mazzolini

Note from the LeftEast editors: this is the reply of Yanis Varoufakis to the Open Letter by George Souvlis and Samuele Mazzolini about the Democracy in Europe Movement 2015 DiEM25, which appeared earlier this week on LeftEast. Varoufakis’s reply first appeared on the personal blog of Yanis Varoufakis.

Shortly after DiEM25’s Rome launch, I received a splendid Open Letter from George Souvlis and Samuele Mazzolini. It reminded me of another such letter I had received from John Malamatinas prior to DiEM25’s Berlin launch.

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Solidarity with Oktobar against Fascist Violence

The following is a report from Oktobar, in Belgrade. LeftEast stands in solidarity with our friends in Belgrade against this fascist attack and wishes those harmed a speedy recovery.

Last night, on March 31st 2016, neo-Nazis attacked the Social Center Oktobar.

Seven men with sticks barged into the Oktobar Center, at a time when four members of our collective were there. One person of our collective has had his nose broken and his hand wounded during the attack, while another member has had his hand broken.

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Freedom of Movement and Benefit Tourism: Paying Attention to the Background

The following article first appeared at Novara Media.

We know that a good director contrasts the foreground and the background of movie scenes in order to show us details that otherwise would go unnoticed. These details are what make the movie complete by virtue of their potential to change the perception of what we consider to be true or not. David Cameron would be a bad film director. But I am afraid that the audience is not paying much attention either.