Lefteast
In the following open letter, George Souvlis and Samuele Mazzolini respond to the recent DiEM launch in Rome. Dear Yanis, We decided to write you this letter after following closely the launch of DiEM 25 in Rome on 23 March. The missive aims to discuss a series of issues regarding your initiative that we found […]
Our friends at #TalkReal have uploaded footage from the official launch of the Democracy in Europe Movement held at the Acquario Romano in Rome last week. Check back here in the weeks ahead for discussions of some of the ideas and strategies presented by DiEM and their relevance for the (East) European Left.
The informal sector in the economy has been rising recently from a concept that designated marginal forms of labor occurring in Third World cities – that grew in the 1970s without formal growth and created a from Western perspective atypical ‘Third World unemployment’ (cf. Hart 2009) – to one designating flexibilized, temporary or quasi-self-employed work […]
This piece by Gavin Rae originally appeared at Beyond the Transition. As the news spread around the world about the discovery of new documents, concerning Lech Wałęsa’s alleged collaboration with the Communist authorities, the man himself was addressing the new right-wing parliament in Venezuela. This former trade union leader and avowed champion of democracy and […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: The following interview was originally published in Serbian at Mašina.rs Dario Azzelini is a theoretician and political activist splitting time between Berlin and Caracas. He recently stayed in Belgrade to participate in the conference “Let’s bring socialism back into the game“. That gave us an opportunity to talk about different […]
The UK’s #EUreferendum coming up on June 23 is a momentous historic occasion, not only for British citizens but for Europe itself. TalkReal discussed the international implications of #Brexit and Europe’s ‘referendum fever’ with Ulrike Guérot (founder and director of the European Democracy Lab Democracy Lab), Federico Campagna (writer, philosopher and Rights Manager at Verso […]
A specific type of autocracy has been gradually installed in the so-called Western Balkans, the group of countries in southeast Europe that has yet to join the European Union (EU). The rise of autocracies is noticeable after the failure of the relatively short experiment with pluralism, which for some time carried the mask of democracy, […]
After the Second World War, the textile industry in Macedonia greatly expanded, eventually reaching a point where it represented over 30% of the country’s total manufacturing. The largest portion of this industry was situated within Shtip, a small city located in Eastern Macedonia. Today, the city has a population of less than 50,000 people, the […]
Note from LeftEast editors: We publish here a demand for removal of the fence on the Macedonian-Greek border as requested by a list of Macedonian grassroots movements and NGOs. At the beginning of March 2016, Slovenia announced the re-establishing of the Schengen zone and the visa regime- only people with valid documents and visas were allowed entry on […]
Note from LeftEast editors: This article originally appeared at Systemic Disorder on 9 March, 2016. At the time of the [August 1968] Soviet invasion [of Czechoslovakia], two months after the first workers’ councils were formed, there were perhaps fewer than two dozen of them, although these were concentrated in the largest enterprises and therefore represented […]