Lefteast
The recent price increases hit large parts of the people in Albania hard – especially because the living conditions of most people have already been difficult. On the other side, few rich people in the country have accumulated enormous wealth. In the last month, a movement has evolved that criticises the price increase and challenges […]
We repost Frieda Afary’s interview with Oksana Dutchak, who is a Ukrainian sociologist and co-editor of Commons, a Leftist journal in Ukraine. She talks about the courageous popular resistance to Putin’s brutal invasion, as well as the needed solidarity with regional and global struggles against authoritarianism, racism and misogyny. It originally appeared here on March 19, 2022.
Note from LeftEast editors: the following piece was first published by Monthly Review. We reprint with permission. In MR Conversations: Beyond Leviathan, Monthly Review’s Editor, John Bellamy Foster, and Hungarian Sociologist Attila Melegh, come together to discuss István Mészáros’ final work, Beyond Leviathan—one of the few books in the last fifty years to return to one of the deepest […]
Throughout the fall of 2021, the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (IFDT) of the University of Belgrade and the Housing Equality Movement have jointly organized a series of five reading workshops under the title “Housing Issue: the Economy of Housing Inequality”. The aim was to bring together those interested in contemporary housing issues and offer space and opportunity to read and analyze some of the most important texts enlightening the topic from the perspective of political economy. Sara Nikolić from the IFDT and Jovana Timotijević from the Housing Equality Movement, in an interview by Sonja Dragović from LeftEast, who also took part in the workshops, tell us more about this program and about critical engagement with the politics of housing in Serbia and beyond.
Note from LeftEast editors: The Italian version of the article was originally published on the Italian left-wing website Sinistra in Europa. On 17th and 31st October this year the first and second rounds of local elections were held in North Macedonia, a country which in recent times has seen the gradual growth of a left-wing party (Levica) […]
Mary Taylor: Envisioned by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as an important revolutionary institution, The National School of the Arts (la ENA, Escuelas Nationales De Arte- also known as “the City of Arts”) was founded in March 1962 in the Cubanacan neighborhood of Havana. The campus, with five buildings set on the grounds of what was once […]
Many thanks to our colleagues at Voxeurop for inviting us to republish this interview with Andreas Önnerfors, Professor in Intellectual History in Salzburg, Austria. He specializes in far-right ideology in Europe, radicalisation, and conspiracy theories. His latest book, coedited with André Krouwel, is Europe: continent of conspiracies, an overview of conspiracy theory with contributions by […]
In this fantastic interview conducted by Dmitry Sidorov for OpenDemocracy and generously shared by them with LeftEast, Mikhail Lobanov explains how United Russia can be beaten. Thirty years after the collapse of the totalitarian Soviet Union, Russian society is just beginning to get rid of its allergies to left-wing rhetoric and politics. For a new […]
To offer our readers an inside look at contemporary Afghanistan, we have conducted an interview with Ali Abdi, a researcher who has been living there since 2015 and working with a queer community in Kabul. The Taliban’s speedy takeover of Kabul last week surprised many political observers. Yet, this is exactly what many in Afghanistan […]
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.