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Venezuela: A Year after Chávez

Almost a year has passed since the death of Hugo Chávez on March 5, 2013. Arguably this has been the most difficult one for the Bolivarian Revolution. Many people, both on the left and the right expressed doubt that there could be Chavismo without Chávez. Perhaps a year is still too short of a period […]

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To make sense of Ukraine, we need to bring the class back in

Viktor Yanukovich started his career as a thug and he remained a thug as a political leader. His regime was corrupt, patriarchal, authoritarian, inefficient and class-biased. He definitely had to go. But whoever is cheering his departure following Saturday’s vote of the Ukrainian Rada is plainly mistaken. He was deposed not as a result of […]

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Bosnia and Herzegovina: all power to the plenums?

by Mate Kapović One of the most positive developments in the Bosnian protests has been the birth of direct democratic assemblies — but some major challenges remain.   It’s been two weeks since the start of the Bosnian rebellion. A recent poll has shown that 88% of the people in the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina […]

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A Time to Mourn, a Time to Act: an Open Letter to the Ukrainian Left

Dear Comrades, We write to express our solidarity with you in these trying times. Your country is burying a hundred or so dead, demonstrators and policemen, and hundreds more wounded are still in its hospitals. The specter of a civil war has not yet left Ukraine. While not the defeated party, most of you cannot […]

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Blood and Soil or Communal Power?

The dead of Kiev’s Maidan are not only Ukraine’s dead; they are the dead of “post-communist” Eastern Europe. It hurts everywhere, but differently. An open wound cannot be closed with words, yet one can shout in solidarity that this may be the other end of the post-communist transition, the so-called bad side of the “successful” […]

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Social revolt in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Whoever sows poverty will reap anger

by Catherine Samary Spring is in advance of the prevailing cold. Nobody knows how far the social and democratic explosion will go. But now, already, we know that it will leave deep scars and that it could spread like wildfire: the peoples of the region are beginning to see “what makes the system tick” in […]

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Sometimes a Plenum is Just a Plenum: The Role of Intellectuals in Media Coverage of Bosnian Protests (part 1)

“Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.” –Amilcar Cabral Reading the news tonight (Feb 14), you could perhaps glean […]

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Immanuel Wallerstein:The Geopolitics of Ukraine’s Schism

Source Ukraine has been suffering a profound internal schism for some time now, one that is threatening to become one of those ugly civil wars that are occurring in more and more countries. The boundaries of present-day Ukraine include an east-west cleavage that is linguistic, religious, economic, and cultural, each side being close to 50% […]

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Ukraine’s protest movement: the far-right in focus. An interview with Tetiana Bezryk

An interview of James Robertson with Tetiana Bezryk. 1.In the past few weeks we’ve seen the government make significant concessions to the protests – the repeal of the anti-protest laws and the resignation of Prime Minister Azarov. Why has the government decided to make these compromises? Does this have anything to do with the recent […]

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Bosnia presents a terrifying picture of Europe’s future

by Igor Štiks … [T]here is one big difference with the riots seen in other European cities, and this is where Bosnia speaks directly to Europe’s current predicament: this is not a rebellion of discriminated and ghettoised groups, territorially contained on the outskirts of big cities. It is a rebellion of the whole population that […]