Lefteast“What’s abnormal is not the worst. What’s normal, for example, is world war.” (Franz Kafka) The 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War takes place in a growing atmosphere of global conflict. The world seems to be once again teetering on the verge of catastrophe. A wave of violence is spreading around […]
With special thanks to MC, a LeftEast reader For a rounded view of the Kosovo Question It might be valuable, at this juncture, to go back to another key issue where there is a significant measure of agreement between my view and Hamza’s, even if Hamza is, much to my disappointment, so set on […]
Michael A. Lebowitz, The Contradictions of Real Socialism. The Conductor and the Conducted. Monthly Review Press, New York, 2012, 222 pp., $ 11.62 Rather than a historical or dialectical analysis of “actually existing socialism”, ‘The Contradictions of Real Socialism. The Conductor and the Conducted’ should be read more as an exercise in the moral […]
by Vijay Prashad Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the anti-Assad powers, refuse to join a united front with Iran, Iraq and Syria to tackle the IS threat. With absent coordination, the Islamic State will continue to thrive. IS has slipped through the cracks of regional disunity. Comfortable in its bastions along the Euphrates […]
Why is there no anti-war movement in Russia? Because today there are so few who are ready to go into the streets in order to publicly throw in the face of the state accusations of prolonging the war in Eastern Ukraine? Such are the questions that we continue to pose to each other, those […]
The political map does not show corruption schemes, diagrams of wealth, transactions to the offshore zones, structures of the world economy, hidden political agreements, maps of domination and alienation. When I listen to the conversations about “United Ukraine”, I get a feeling that translators of this message do not really understand what they are […]
Russian anti-fascist Alexei Gaskarov’s statement in court translated into English by the Russian Reader with an afterward by Gabriel Levy. The verdicts on the second group of defendants in the Bolotnaya Square case – brought against participants in the Russian protest movement of 2011-12 – will be announced on 18 August in Zamoskvoretsky Court in […]
“Not every recession-hit country in Europe is like wayward Greece, Portugal and Spain, amazingly Lithuanian unions went along with the government’s policies. There were no street riots a la Greece” -Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 2010 caption on a Mayday poster in Lithuania (on the left): “He who saws hunger, reaps anger.” In the wake […]
On July 24 the speaker of the Ukrainian parliament Oleksandr Turchynov announced the disbanding of the parliamentary group of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) over a ridiculous technicality. The court trial over CPU’s ban as a political party started the same day with the next session of the court scheduled for mid-August. The CPU […]
by Ian Rintoul solidarity.net.au 29.07.2014 The shooting down of the Malaysian Airlines MH17 over rebel held territory in eastern Ukraine is a terrible tragedy. It has cost 289 lives, including 37 Australian citizens and permanent residents. Sadly, six researchers and advocates attending the International AIDS conference in Melbourne were among the dead. The dead are […]