Categories
All posts

Neoliberal assault on working class rights in Serbia: Can the trade unions lead the struggle?

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 […]

Categories
All posts

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 […]

Categories
All posts

Housing poverty and (missing) housing policies in Hungary: A radical re-imagination of housing is what we need (part 2)

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 […]

Categories
All posts

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 […]

Categories
All posts

A groundbreaking result: Slovenia’s United Left Coalition gets 6 seats in Parliament

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, […]

Categories
All posts

Anti-corruption, another name for economic abuse

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 […]

Categories
All posts

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 […]

Categories
All posts

Maidan: Democratic Movement or Nationalist Mobilization?

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 […]

Categories
All posts

How Not to Debate: My Reply to Agon Hamza (Part 1)

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, […]

Categories
All posts

Housing poverty and (missing) housing policies in Hungary (part 1)

Housing has recently become a hot topic in Hungarian public discourse. This increase in attention was caused by the alarming hardships caused by the steep increase in the interest on foreign currency (in which most mortgages taken in the 2000’s were taken) and the increasingly harsh, systematic, and overt criminalization of homeless people in the […]