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Anxiety, Stress and Depression in Macedonia – or how neoliberal capitalism turns its symptoms into profit

“…As it happens, the whole internal tragedy of capitalism consists of the fact that at the time when this objecive, i.e thing-orientated psychology of man, which contained within itself infinite potential for mastery over nature and development of his own nature, was growing at a fast pace, his actual spiritual life was degrading and went […]

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Nationalism at the rescue of Macedonia’s Criminal Elites

The political temperature has been exponentially rising in Macedonia for some time now. It reached boiling point on March 1st when President Ivanov refused to grant SDSM (Social Democratic Union of Macedonia) the mandate to form a government. Neither the governing right-wing populist VMRO-DPMNE, nor the opposition party SDSM managed to obtain the majority necessary […]

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Layoffs of pregnant workers in Macedonia

The following article was originally published by the Serbo-Croatian online platform, Bilten. It is republished here with that site’s kind permission. Almost as shocking as the news of the targeted expulsion of 10 pregnant women mid-2016 from a textiles factory in Kriva Palanka, a town in north-eastern Macedonia, was its coverage in Macedonian media: “Pregnancy […]

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Macedonia in a stalemate following the latest electoral “victory” of its managed democracy

This article is published in collaboration with the regional portal Bilten, where it originally came out on the 15th of December . On the 11th of December this year, Parliamentary elections in Macedonia saw the ruling DPMNE just managing to scrape by another electoral victory, winning a majority of 51 seats, compared to the 49 […]

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“A Spark in the Dark”- new left party Levica determined to enter Macedonia’s Parliament?!

For a decade now, Macedonia has been systematically devastated by the deeply criminal rightwing populist Gruevski regime, which has demolished the rule of law, media, democracy in the country and has put the commons in the Party’s private possession resulting in rising poverty and unemployment, and a huge exodus of young people in particular. Following two waves of […]

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Prisons in Macedonia: the Infected Wounds of a Fractured Social State

Note from LeftEast Editors: This article has been published in collaboration with the web-portal Bilten.org. A month and a half has passed since a Presidential blanket amnesty of over 50 corrupt government figures and their collaborators sparked social upheaval across Macedonia. The action laid bare deep societal rifts, cracked open by double legal standards, dividing […]

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Social upheaval in times of neoliberalism: The deep roots of Macedonia’s protest wave

“In a neoliberal universe, where markets are the gauge of value, money becomes, more straightforwardly than ever before, the measure of all things. If hospitals, schools and prisons can be privatised as enterprises for profit, why not political office too?” Perry Anderson in London Review of Books, 2014, 36:10, pp. 5 Mass protests have vigorously […]

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The case of the Macedonian Telekom: An entangled web of international political and business corruption

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been published in collaboration with the Balkan web-portal Bilten.  One of the foundational myths used to assess the political climate in the Balkans juxtaposes a western, genuine capitalism to a primitive balkan kind. Corruption lies at the core of this distinction. The story of the Macedonian telecommunication market not […]

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Spring has arrived in Macedonia: thousands of pupils and students protest against education policies. An interview with High School Plenum.

Thousands of pupils, students  and teachers marched today across the country, in a renewed challenge to governmental education policies. Organised by the High School Plenum,  the protest comes two months after the Student Plenum declared victory against reforms in Higher Education on the 24th of February, 3 months after the students’ first march on the […]

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All posts FeminEasts We Asked

Was the 8th of March cancelled in the Balkans this year?

Wrapped in a perfumed Valentine’s-meets-Mother’s-Day packaging, year after year International Women’s Day seems to become further stripped of its political flavour. What is worrying is that this occurs at a time when women face deteriorating conditions across the region, in their homes, at the work place and society at large. We asked activists, researchers and […]