Lefteast
When reality surpasses speculation “One day you wake up and find out that the mullahs are gone”: on social media and in public spaces, this sentence is a common joke and a dream at the same time. But what if one day the mullahs wake up and find out that the people are gone? A […]
Regular LeftEast readers will probably remember the United Miners of Bulqiza Trade Union (SMBB), who for the last couple of years have been the most militant and sustained labor movement in Eastern Europe. Earlier this year, the Albanian left united around the miners’ leader’s, Elton Debreshi’s, candidacy for parliament. Earlier this week, there was an […]
As the Ukrainian government gears up to celebrate 30 years of independence, the reality is that, for many, independence has not brought the prosperity they were promised. LeftEast would like to thank OpenDemocracy, where the article was originally published. Tomorrow, Ukraine will celebrate 30 years of independence with pomp. The government has prepared lavish celebrations, […]
Given this horrible situation, what can independent socialists, feminists and anti-war activists do? Frieda Afari’s article was originally published in Iranian Progressives. August 21, 2021 My heart goes out to the Afghan people and especially Afghan women who are being subjected to the nationwide rule of the Taliban after 20 years of U.S. imperialist occupation […]
Over the last decade the European Union has been confronted with one crisis after the other. On the national level this situation prompted the creation of new political parties, which entered the scene abruptly. Notable examples include Podemos, founded in the wake of the indignados movement and two years into the European debt crisis; the […]
Refugees, Racism, and the Turkish Ideology Villagers in the Turkish province of Konya murdered a whole family of Kurdish farmers on Friday, July 30. It was a premeditated massacre that announced itself well ahead of time to anyone willing to notice. Neighbors in the farming village of Hasanköy in central Anatolia had assaulted the Dedeoğulları family of […]
Note from LeftEast editors: This book symposium took place on 21 May 2021 as part of the online conference ‘Thirty Years of Capitalist Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe: Inequalities and Social Resistance’ organised by the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, Babes-Bolyai University from Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Four books were presented at the panel: The […]
Note of LeftEast editors: On the eve of this fall’s parliamentary elections, the room for political manoeuvre before our Russian comrades (and all other opposition forces) has shrunk to a bare minimum. In these circumstances, engagement with other opposition forces in a broad front against the party-state appears the only option. Mikhail Lobanov’s parliamentary candidacy […]
Note from LeftEast editors: The article is an excerpt from an interview that originally appeared on The Wire Science on 22nd February 2021. Read the whole text written by Sidharth Singh here. Read also LeftEast’s interview with Alexandra Elbakyan from 2017 here. On December 24, 2020, the Delhi high court conducted its first hearing for the […]
The EU recovery plan is reinforcing an idea of welfare and economic reconstruction which reproduces patriarchal and racist hierarchies and exploitation, while some EU member states like Italy and Greece are already promoting measures – like divorce regulations and child allowances laws – that materially make Istanbul Convention void of any meaning. But women have not been silent in these months and are organizing their counterattack. During the last E.A.S.T. public assembly we started to discuss the multifaceted dimensions of these patriarchal attacks and the struggles we can build together towards a big transnational mobilization. This interview with Kalina Drenska, member of E.A.S.T. and LevFem (Bulgaria) is the first of a series of texts that wants to start from Istanbul Convention to explore ongoing fights against violence against women and lgbtqi+ people, in their connections with the struggles against racist and exploitative policies. Kalina talks about the stratified political meanings attributed in Bulgaria to Istanbul Convention and shows the links between attacks on women and lgbtqi+ people and the policies of cutbacks that lead many women to find better living and working conditions abroad. Furthermore, she unveils the hard pathways that feminist struggles must take – in Bulgaria and beyond – to overturn isolation and accumulate power on the transnational level.