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Normality or Solidarity – The Worrying Undertones of Eastern European (Post)pandemic Governance

It is no surprise that this region was one of the first to discuss travel corridors in otherwise unstable global conditions. Unthinkable in this moment is the notion of solidarity and resource-sharing. In short, there are multiple realities we have to reckon with: one is that these countries who are pioneering certain politics of exclusion and normalcy are loaded with emergency health infrastructure; and the second, is the fact that there are other countries who have been inflicted with the unfortunate scenario of high infection rates and extremely low emergency infrastructures.

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All posts FeminEasts Interviews

Fighting Back against Hungary’s Ban on Legal Gender Recognition: An Interview with Tina Kolos Orban (Transvanilla Transgender Association)

Hungary’s new law “seems to be part of the broader war of the government on gender. Defining sex at birth as an unchangeable characteristic is part of that discourse and is an obvious attack on the right of trans and intersex people in Hungary. The situation for trans people was getting worse in the past years but we did not experienced targeted attacks before this law proposal.”

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All posts Interviews

Whiteness: “Race,” Capitalism, US, Eastern Europe

MINNEAPOLIS, MN - MAY 29: A fire burns at a gas station on Lake Street on May 29, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Protests have been ongoing in the state and around the country since George Floyd's death while in police custody on Monday. Stephen Maturen/Getty Images/AFP

Interview excerpt: “For us, in our part of the world, one of the most breathtaking aspects of the history of the Haitian Revolution is that the Polish battalion sent there by the French switched sides and supported the uprising. Mind you, some of the Polish survivors ended up settling there, and there are even today proud Haitians who claim, partly, Polish family heritage.

There are many intricacies to this story. My point is that, in the late-18th, early-19th century, it was still possible for east European subjects to experience a political, moral and emotional identification with Black people and the objectives of the latters’ armed struggles against colonial rule and slavery. This, by the way, was not unique to Poles—there is ample evidence of similar positions in Hungarian history as well.

By today, this political, moral and emotional identification has become almost impossible.”

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All posts Theory

“Your Security Terrorizes”: An Interview with Ana Ivasiuc

That is an alternative political project worth thinking about: how to replace security with solidarity? In this light, I am profoundly against using the word ‘security’ in progressive political activism. To claim that the security of the subaltern is important, too, is to be blind to the fact that the powerful and propertied can never take that claim seriously in a system built on the primacy of property and of capital.

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All posts Protests

Mass protest in Serbia and an attempt of state-led demobilisation

Note from LeftEast editors: This article originally appeared in Dversia on 07.10.2020. “Tear gas, rubber bullets, and batons against bare-handed youth! Dad, this is for you who died and there was no respirator! (..) This is for you and for my newborn son! There were no respirators in the Zemun hospital while they (the National […]

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Elections in Croatia see the emergence of the first left pole since the country’s independence from Yugoslavia

Note from LeftEast editors: We post this article in cooperation with Counterfire. Despite left gains, early elections paid off for the ruling centre-right party, writes Vladimir Unkovski-Korica On Sunday 5 July, Croatia held early parliamentary elections. Turnout was only 46 percent, reflecting low levels of engagement with official politics. Despite this, the ruling conservative party […]

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All posts Video

Hegemonic Turbulence and the End of the Global Project of the EU

Note from LeftEast editors: This talk was recorded at the workshop on After US Hegemony: Geopolitical Economy in the 21st Century, held at the Karl Polányi Center for Global Social Analysis at Corvinus University, Budapest, on February 11, 2020.

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All posts Interviews

[INTERVIEW] Kimberlé Crenshaw: Liberty. Equality. Intersectionality. An antidote against fascism.

I met Kimberlé Crenshaw at the Sorbonne University in Paris in January 2019, at a conference organized by Marta Dell’Aquila and Eraldo Souza dos Santos to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of intersectionality. Kimberly Crenshaw developed the notion of intersectionality in 1989 in her paper “De-marginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-discrimination […]

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All posts Protests

Broken Windows and Broken People: the Cost of Class Order

Engels once said that the way a capitalist city is organized tends to hide production’s ugliest and most dangerous surplus: poverty. And where it cannot be hidden, it has to be attacked. Could this help explain why the state often seems to be at its most violent when the smallest sums are at stake? In […]

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Cartographies of Baltic labour resistance

Note from LeftEast editors: This article originally appeared on Andreas Bieler’s blog: Trade unions and global restructuring . The conjuncture between the thirtieth anniversaries of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the USSR is an apt occasion to revisit the trajectories of change in the post-Soviet space. In their article ‘Baltic […]