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The Five Star Movement and the League Constitute a Lethal Political Cocktail

The interview was first published in Hungarian, on the Mérce.hu website. Tensions between Rome and Brussels are going to increase, says Italian scholar Lorenzo Cini. The centrist populist Five Star Movement and the extreme right-wing League managed to replace the traditional mainstream parties, however aside from belligerent anti-EU and anti-migration rhetoric, their governance will not […]

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‘Stop Treating Us Like Dogs!’ Worker Resistance at Amazon in Poland

This article originally appeared on the PlutoPress blog and is authored by Amazon workers and their supporters. Global capitalism is a precarious system, relying on the steady flow of goods across the world. When Amazon arrived in  Poland, it was attracted by cheap labour costs and strict union laws, little did it know that the […]

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Desperately seeking socialism: why the Soviet Union’s left-wing dissidents matter today

The following text appeared on OpenDemocracy, and features a review by Gabriel Levy of Ilya Budraistkis’ book ‘Dissidents Among Dissidents,’ a new collection of essays published in Russian in 2017 by Free Marxist Publishers. It was originally published on People and Nature.  This new collection of essays seeks to rebalance our understanding of dissent in […]

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A Disharmony of Powers: Five more years of Erdoğan?

This article originally appeared on N+1mag and was penned by an anonymous author. SUAVE AND SYMPATHETIC, Beyazıt Öztürk is known for making even his most troublesome guests feel at home. The veteran comedian was in the middle of his call-in talk show, the most popular program on Turkish TV, when he received an unexpected call. […]

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Call for Solidarity from Bulgaria: No Nazis on Our Streets, No to Fortress Europe

Note from the LeftEast editors: In January 2018 Bulgaria has taken the presidency of the Council of the European Union for the first six months of 2018. Meanwhile Neonazis will still be marching the on the streets of Sofia in February to commemorate General Hristo Lukov: the head of the interwar Legion and Minister of War […]

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Ukraine’s Civil War Crimes: Facebook Post As Bad As Kidnapping, Torture, and Murder

On May 12th, the Artemovsk court in the Donetsk oblast (province), sentenced a soldier to five years of prison with a three year probation period for the kidnapping of a local civilian that resulted in his death. The ruling cited the soldier’s ‘sincere confession and military engagement in the Anti-Terrorist Operations in the East of Ukraine’ […]

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Open Letter to the University of Vienna

We, the undersigned, condemn the invitation of Ayelet Shaked, minister of Justice and member of far-right party HaBayit HaYehudi in Israel who openly called for mass murder of Palestinians to hold a roundtable discussion at the University of Vienna on the 15th of February, called “Protecting Human Rights While Countering Terrorism – The Israeli Case”. […]

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Undermined: how the state is selling out Ukraine’s coal workers

Vitalii Atanasov// Dec. 19, 2016// OpenDemocracy-Russia Ukraine’s miners were once heroes of socialist labour. Today, after years of sector-wide neglect and corruption, there are new plans for further mine closures, leaving thousands of people without work. September 2016: miners from Novovolysnk No.10 in west Ukraine protest the government’s plans to close their mine. (c) RIA Novosti. […]

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‘Tyrants across the world know now they can maintain power through mass slaughter.’ Interview with Leila al-Shami for Open Left

by Gabriel Levy and Ilya Matveev Leila al-Shami, co-author of Burning Country, a writer who has worked with human rights movements in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, gave this interview to Ilya Matveev and Gabriel Levy on 29 November for OpenLeft (before the fall of Aleppo to the government forces). It sheds some light […]

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József Böröcz: “An incapacity to see ourselves as part of the whole world, and the insistence to see ourselves as part of Europe”

This interview with József Böröcz, professor of sociology at Rutgers University, was conducted by Ágnes Gagyi and Gergő Pulay in 2012. In a way, it is a dense summary of the conceptual perspective which had informed the new wave of  intellectual left emerging in the region – including LeftEast – especially in regard to Eastern […]