The laws have been passed and the cards have been dealt: the new reform of the labour and pension laws which were so hastily proposed to parliament this January, have finally been adopted[i]. These “reforms” legitimize precarious work from the cradle to the grave: they do so, among else, by increasing and flexibilizing work hours, […]
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July 17th witnessed one of the largest social protests in Serbia since the beginning of the global financial crisis. Around 10000 people, mainly public sector workers, marched through the streets of Belgrade against the “economic reform legislative package” including the latest incarnation of the Labour law. This will, among other things, severely deregulate the labour […]
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Boeing 777: Between “Yes” and “No”
We can say with confidence that the tragedy of Boeing 777, which took the lives of 298 people, has brought the conflict in Eastern Ukraine to a principally new level. Now the main centers of power—Russia, the US, and the EU—must make themselves known and must take the responsibility for stopping the war or conversely—for […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: the first part of Mariann Dosa’s text on the housing policies in Hungary can be read here. Any housing policies that prioritize equity need to be based on broadly accessible public housing, because it is the only way forward that transcends the structure of neoliberal capitalism and hence, offers radical […]
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Serbia’s Sleepwalkers
In the post-Yugoslav transition space, we have never – until now – found ourselves in a situation in which a single party has managed to win an absolute majority in parliamentary elections. But this is exactly what has happened in the recent elections in Serbia, where a faction that split from the ultra-right Serbian Radical […]
Dear all, dear comrades, dear friends, dear (new) new Left, We have broken the vicious circle of anticommunism in the post-Yugoslav context. What follows is a slightly longer piece on the campaign to give you a a sense of the historic results! On the electoral campaign of United Left Coalition (ULC) As you can imagine, […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: this article was published in cooperation with the web-portal Bilten.Org During May and June 2014, Romania was invaded by high-ranking officials: the US Vice President, the head of Pentagon, the head of CIA, the head of NATO, American senators, all having only one message: fight corruption! After which they added […]
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An apology to Dragan Plavsic
Dear Dragan Plavsic, We extend our apology for publishing a text by Agon Hamza that contained a defamatory statement against you. We did that because we did not want to dismiss Agon Hamza’s point of view. We deeply regret that our publishing his text has had the effect of furthering his defamatory statement. Sincerely, LeftEast […]
Introduction It is conventional wisdom in the West to describe the ‘Maidan’ that brought to power the current regime in Kiev as an anti-authoritarian mass movement guided by democratic ‘European’ values [1]. While not denying the presence of such themes in the Maidan, I wish to argue that the Maidan was and is primarily a […]
Containing a personal appeal to Agon Hamza and the Editorial Board of LeftEast Introduction When I was informed that Agon Hamza was preparing a response to my critique of Slavoj Žižek’s views on the Balkans, I made an assumption that I now realise was naïve. For I assumed that Hamza would engage in a constructive, […]