by Zara Harutyunian and Anton Ivchenko, leftists and anti-war activists Azerbaijan president Ilham Aliev, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Serzh Sargsyan, President of Armenia The end of July saw a flaring up of the simmering conflict around the unrecognized Nagono Karabakh republic. The confrontation between the militaries of Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbajan, in the […]
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Ukraine: The Normality of War
“What’s abnormal is not the worst. What’s normal, for example, is world war.” (Franz Kafka) The 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War takes place in a growing atmosphere of global conflict. The world seems to be once again teetering on the verge of catastrophe. A wave of violence is spreading around […]
With special thanks to MC, a LeftEast reader For a rounded view of the Kosovo Question It might be valuable, at this juncture, to go back to another key issue where there is a significant measure of agreement between my view and Hamza’s, even if Hamza is, much to my disappointment, so set on […]
Michael A. Lebowitz, The Contradictions of Real Socialism. The Conductor and the Conducted. Monthly Review Press, New York, 2012, 222 pp., $ 11.62 Rather than a historical or dialectical analysis of “actually existing socialism”, ‘The Contradictions of Real Socialism. The Conductor and the Conducted’ should be read more as an exercise in the moral […]
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Hope in a Hopeless Place
Why is there no anti-war movement in Russia? Because today there are so few who are ready to go into the streets in order to publicly throw in the face of the state accusations of prolonging the war in Eastern Ukraine? Such are the questions that we continue to pose to each other, those […]
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War for the Map
The political map does not show corruption schemes, diagrams of wealth, transactions to the offshore zones, structures of the world economy, hidden political agreements, maps of domination and alienation. When I listen to the conversations about “United Ukraine”, I get a feeling that translators of this message do not really understand what they are […]
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Lithuania: The Myth of the Passive Mass
“Not every recession-hit country in Europe is like wayward Greece, Portugal and Spain, amazingly Lithuanian unions went along with the government’s policies. There were no street riots a la Greece” -Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 2010 caption on a Mayday poster in Lithuania (on the left): “He who saws hunger, reaps anger.” In the wake […]
On July 24 the speaker of the Ukrainian parliament Oleksandr Turchynov announced the disbanding of the parliamentary group of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) over a ridiculous technicality. The court trial over CPU’s ban as a political party started the same day with the next session of the court scheduled for mid-August. The CPU […]
The need for a “third way,” one that is different from the rabid support for one of the sides in the Ukrainian crisis, a way about which several of have written in the last few months, is especially evident today, because it is the only chance to reconstitute the almost completely broken democratic opposition in […]
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, […]