Lefteast
First published in Viento Sur. Translated from the original French by International Viewpoint. After its overwhelming victory in the early parliamentary elections held on 13 February 2021 in Kosovo (1.8 million inhabitants, 90% Albanian), the Vetëvendosje (VV) party – the name means “Self-determination” – completed the consolidation of its institutional powers on Sunday 4 April 2021. Winning […]
One of the received ideas that became a ‘truth’ after the fall of the Berlin Wall was that the Soviet bloc’s populations cursed communism, yet obeyed it slavishly. In fact, many social movements within the Eastern bloc had long aspired to genuine socialism. This article was first published in the French edition of Le Monde […]
Those embryonic revolutions towards a third way were repressed and dismantled by the bipolar world’s dominant forces through different episodes, because the mobilised democratic forces were an alternative to the existing political order which tried to impose its own end, a reality hidden by Cold War concepts and the transformation that followed 1989.
This book review was originally published by New Left Review. Darko Suvin, Splendour, Misery and Possibilities: An X-Ray of Socialist Yugoslavia. Haymarket Books: Chicago 2018. How is it, asks Darko Suvin, with Brechtian directness, that socialist Yugoslavia started out so well, yet ended up so very badly? In answering that question he has produced an extraordinary work […]