Lefteast
Note from LeftEast editors: to celebrate the 1st of Maywe publish the position of Bulgarian socialist feminist group LevFem on the occasion of International Workers Day under the current lockdown. Below you can find the audiorecording and the text of this position. The audio recording is read by LevFem member Kalina Drenska on behalf of […]
A State of Emergency Decree was issued in Romania on the 16th of March and prolonged for one month on the 16th of April as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Decree suspended a series of human rights and activated the country’s derogation from the European Convention of Human Rights. Part I. People living […]
Today’s media emphasise our personal responsibility – just they do in the case of the environmental catastrophe – and portray people who weark their masks, work from home, and support small entrepreneurs by ordering food as responsible citizens and heroes of today. In my opinion, this distracts our attention from the cause of the current […]
Bernie Sanders’ second presidential campaign brought a ray of hope to what had been a dismal political news cycle in the United States dominated by Trump’s odious figure and the Democrats’ ineffectual, “back to normal” opposition to him. To be sure, the broader resistance to Trump has also galvanized genuine movements devoted to protecting the […]
In the blink of an eye, the coronavirus epidemic revealed to the world just how vulnerable global capitalism is: the stock market is in freefall, global supply chains are coming to a grinding halt as privatized healthcare buckles in an instant. The fallout from decades of liberalisation, privatization and financialisation is immense. Even the most […]
#stayhome #notstayingaside Note from LeftEast editors: we reprint the call for housing justice, first published by the Romanian group BLOCUL pentru LOCUIRE on their website. The time has come for this political agenda to change radically: housing politics must satisfy the needs of the people and respect the right to housing as a universal right! The […]
A version of the first part of this article in Polish is available on the author’s blog, Fronesis. When the truth offends, we lie and lie, until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that […]
Picture: Israeli riot police patrol Yefet Street in Jaffa after putting down demonstrations against police violence, 1 April 2020 (source: Matan Kaminer) The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly enhanced the charisma of the strong state around the world. In the West, the early knee-jerk characterization of East Asian responses as authoritarian and illiberal has been completely […]
The pieces in the dossier 1989 Thirty Years Later were developed around the workshop “Eastern Europe after 30 years of transition: New emancipatory perspectives from the region,” held in Prague on 25-26 October 2019, organised by the Transnational Institute (Amsterdam) and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (Prague), coordinated by Agnes Gagyi and Ondrej Slacalek. In addition to […]
The current situation in Russia has reached “a perfect storm”: the pandemic here coincided with the collapse of the national currency, as well as the political crisis caused by Vladimir Putin’s proposals to change the Constitution. At a time when every world political leader seeks to show himself as a sovereign capable of declaring a […]