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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 […]

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On the Possible Banning of the Communist Party of Ukraine and Its Meaning for Democracy and the Left

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 […]

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Peace-Fighters: Kirill Medvedev on the Need for a New Democratic Opposition

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 […]

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Struggling Against Serbia’s New Labour Law (part 2)

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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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]