Lefteast
Recently a number of internationally recognized scholars and public intellectuals signed a letter in full support of Euromaidan protests, backing ‘Ukrainian society’ against ‘Ukrainian government’. Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Craig Calhoun, Claus Offe, Saskia Sassen, Charles Taylor, Michel Wieviorka, Slavoj Žižek and many others celebrated the ‘legal’ and ‘peaceful’ protests embodying, as they claimed, ‘the […]
In Moscow this week Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich accepted Russia’s offer of a $15-billion bailout loan in addition to reduced gas prices, the combination of which (if managed smartly—not inevitable given Yanukovich’s track record) should be sufficient to prevent at least the direst scenarios in an already economically depressed country facing crises of credit default […]
Yesterday evening, South Korea’s 2nd largest national trade union center, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), announced a general strike, which is due to commence on December 28, 2013. This most drastic move by KCTU, a leftist organization that unites roughly 700.000 South Korean workers under its umbrella, came at the end of long […]
The political face of the Kiev protests causes grave pessimism. But a revolution is a revolution and the left has no right to stay on the side, says Ilya Budraitskis. Originally published in Russian in http://openleft.ru/?p=682 What is happening in Ukraine right now increasingly corresponds to the classical definition of a revolutionary situation. The mass […]
There are not many occasions on which the daily news from Croatia can be spotted in the blurred waters of Western media. Unfortunately, last week one of that occasions occurred. Croatian voters decided to prohibit marriage equality, or to be precise – to constitutionally define marriage as a union only between a man and a […]
by Gabriel Levy Oil workers in western Kazakhstan in 2011 mounted one of the largest-scale strike movements in post-Soviet history, and then suffered one of the most brutal massacres in post-Soviet history – in Zhanaozen on 16 December 2011, when security forces killed at least 16 people and wounded at least 64. The workers’ revolt […]
A year and a half has passed since the beginning of the political case that has become synonymous with the police arbitrariness of citizen rightlessness of contemporary Russia. Dozens of people have been or may soon be imprisoned in a country that is now preparing to showcase its prosperity and power against the decorations of […]
A large group of aggressive young men smash windows and fiercely throw bottles and stones. Behind them there’s a huge crowd shouting ‘We want in the EU’. The picture should apparently frighten people in the EU countries. Some comments in the western media suggest, as a joke, that the picture resembles barbarians amassing near the […]
by József Böröcz [ the text was originally published in the authors’s blog Global Social Change, dedicated to his book The European Union and Global Social Change: A Critical Geopolitical-Economic Analysis, Routhledge 2009 , and was reprinted on Lefteast with the kind agreement of the author] The main provisions of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement are […]
The facts. A few weeks into the rehearsal period – and three weeks before the opening, scheduled on December 7th –, a new production of the renowned Narodowy (National) Stary Teatr (NST) in Krakow was attacked by Polish nationalists. The show, called the Undivine Comedy. Remains, explicitly addressed the anti-Semitism of a piece by Zygmunt […]