Lefteast
We publish here the second part of our interview with Dragomir Olujić (Oluja) on the “student revolt” of 1968 in Yugoslavia, in which Oluja took part as a student in Belgrade. In the first part of the interview we discussed the international situation, the struggles of the workers and the youth around the world, struggles […]
The last episode of the Five Senses of Austerity deals with the rationing of food in late Romanian socialism. It tells the story of the 1987 worker’s revolt from the city of Brasov, which marked the beginning of the end of the regime, and then goes on to explore the final moments of Romanian socialism. […]
The year 1968 marked a peak in the class struggle at the international level. Students and workers became protagonists of revolts in the West, but also in the East. The general strike and mass mobilizations of workers and students in France is one of the better known examples from that year. The uprising in Prague […]
In Turkey, the government of the nationalist-religious Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—AKP) called early presidential and parliamentary elections for the 24 June. It was aware that its electoral base is gradually eroding, particularly in the big metropolitan areas like Istanbul. Therefore, it did everything in order to enhance the chances of being […]
After two privatizations, massive layoffs and two worker strikes in less than a decade, the quarry and lime plant “Ravnaja AD” bears testament to the class struggle in Serbia, serving as a vivid example to the dictatorship of capital over the lives of workers who toil for their bare existence in the country. In the […]
Gramsci argued that ‘democracy, by definition, cannot mean merely that an unskilled worker can become skilled. It must mean that every ‘citizen’ can ‘govern’ and that society places them, even if only abstractly, in a general condition to achieve this’. Therefore, he argued that the task for the working class was to become intellectually autonomous, […]
Money! You either have it, or you don’t. Socialist Romania did not. Therefore, it had to borrow money from abroad in order to meet its ambitious development goals. This episode explores socialist Romania’s failed crusade on the sea of global high finance starting from the late 1960s up until the 1980s, discussing the underlying reason […]
Disenchantment with the euro had been growing in Italy for many years. After the last elections, this disenchantment proved to be the basis for the formation of a coalition between the far-right wing Lega and the diffuse Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Stars Movement). While the two parties differed on many economic and social issues, they […]
Alexandra Coțofană, a researcher of the significance of the occult in Romanian politics, has recently completed her PhD in anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Matan Kaminer interviewed her on her research and its implications for LeftEast. MK: So what role does the occult play in Romanian politics today? AC: I started my research by looking […]
This podcast was originally published at podcasts.ceu.edu as part of the Sound Relations Project based at Central European University, Budapest, and is done in collaboration with the Blinken Open Society Archives. What did Nicolae Ceausescu have in common with Romania’s most famous radio DJ, Cornel Chiriac? In Episode 1 of ‘Five Senses of Austerity’ we […]