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Hungary’s war on women

By Andrew Ryder at SocialistWorker.org A PUBLIC service announcement (PSA) produced by the Hungarian government has provoked worldwide outrage by placing the blame for sexual assault on survivors. The video depicts young women dressing provocatively, drinking and dancing, with the consequence of an attack by a stranger, before ending with the words, “You are responsible. […]

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Intelligentsia as a style: social protest, organic intellectuals and the post-Soviet condition

Of all the concepts worth re-examining at the cusp between the 2000s and 2010s in Russia, it is the concept of the “intelligentsia” that likely takes one of the most important places. On its own, this boundary marks the transition from the post-Soviet state of affairs to the still very vague manifestations of the post-post-Soviet. […]

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The German Greens: Or how they learned to stop worrying and game the ‘poverty migrants’

How much are our lives worth? €1 billion, according to Germany’s Green Party. So high a pledge is reminiscent of a racket, in which a potentially dangerous situation is artificially created so as the mafioso can pretend that s/he is able to protect the victims under threat. The story that follows is that of a […]

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Austerity Russian Style

by Ilya Matveev, a researcher and teacher November 19, 2014 OpenLeft.ru Translated into English by TheRussianReader. Despite attempts to confuse and misinform the public, protests in the social sector will continue to grow. “Only the rich will survive” Reforms of the social sector in post-Soviet Russia have always had a very important feature: their course has been […]

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Romania: No Country for Poor Men

Class as Fate Nothing is more real and abstract at the same time than class interest. Class itself is a real abstraction, something which defines and conditions the social status and the economic possibilities of a person without actually being an identity. It’s the shadow you can’t jump over. In capitalism, class is fate; it […]

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Reclaiming the True Meaning of ‘Student’ on the Streets of Skopje

On Monday, the 17th of November, around three thousand students demonstrated on the streets of Skopje. Size-wise, this may appear relatively insignificant. On the same day, 700 km southwards, over 20,000 demonstrators joined a rally in Athens to mark the 41st anniversary of a student uprising against the country’s former dictatorship. The news story on […]

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New Publication: The Balkan Forum: Situations, Struggles, Strategies

Source: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe Towards Another Balkans! The first Balkan Forum took place within the Subversive Festival in Zagreb, in May 2012, and gathered up to 40 progressive organizations and movements from across the post-socialist states of the region. It was for the first time since the collapse of state socialist regimes and […]

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Monopolising Dayton or how Ivica Todorić’s empire swallowed Bosnian markets

A shorter version of the article was originally published on Bilten.Org and this is a revised and expanded version of that article. For some time now it has been been impossible to find a supermaket in the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina (and more widely in Bosnia) that does not belong to the Agrokor concern […]

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Why Kristallnacht matters to European Roma today

source: Romea.Cz We have just marked the 76th anniversary of the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht or Novemberpogrom). In different cities across Germany and Austria a series of pogroms were perpetrated against Jewish civilians, stores and synagogues on the night between the 9th and the 10th of November while German authorities did nothing to prevent them. Those […]

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Intellectuals and the “The New Cold War”: from the Tragedy to the Farce of Choice

Observers speak of the “New Cold War” as a self-evident and incontrovertible reality. Already in the spring, the new contours of international politics, demarcated by sanctions and mutual rhetorical incursions, were fully recognized by the broadest segments of the public in Russia, Europe and the United States—including those who were very far from decision-making processes—as […]