Lefteast
On December 20 2013, state sponsored hearings on the new labor law in Serbia were cancelled just as they were supposed to begin. The first public hearings were scheduled for Novi Sad, while subsequent hearings were to take place in Kragujevac and Belgrade. However, before the day was over, all the hearings had been called […]
Interviewed by Aleksandra Markova – activist and journalist. Half of the people arrested in the Bolotnaya Case are leftist activists. Open Left spoke with one of them after he was freed in the recent amnesty. I went with Vladimir Akimenkov to a self-service restaurant. He found it difficult to distinguish the food on display and […]
Recently a number of internationally recognized scholars and public intellectuals signed a letter in full support of Euromaidan protests, backing ‘Ukrainian society’ against ‘Ukrainian government’. Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Craig Calhoun, Claus Offe, Saskia Sassen, Charles Taylor, Michel Wieviorka, Slavoj Žižek and many others celebrated the ‘legal’ and ‘peaceful’ protests embodying, as they claimed, ‘the […]
In Moscow this week Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich accepted Russia’s offer of a $15-billion bailout loan in addition to reduced gas prices, the combination of which (if managed smartly—not inevitable given Yanukovich’s track record) should be sufficient to prevent at least the direst scenarios in an already economically depressed country facing crises of credit default […]
Yesterday evening, South Korea’s 2nd largest national trade union center, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), announced a general strike, which is due to commence on December 28, 2013. This most drastic move by KCTU, a leftist organization that unites roughly 700.000 South Korean workers under its umbrella, came at the end of long […]
Our colleague Vladimir Bortun wrote a text about the situation in Romania The protest movement against the mining project at Rosia Montana scored a significant victory on Tuesday, 10 December, when the project failed to pass through the Chamber of Deputies (after also failing to pass through the Senate on 19 November). Meanwhile however, the […]
The political face of the Kiev protests causes grave pessimism. But a revolution is a revolution and the left has no right to stay on the side, says Ilya Budraitskis. Originally published in Russian in http://openleft.ru/?p=682 What is happening in Ukraine right now increasingly corresponds to the classical definition of a revolutionary situation. The mass […]
There are not many occasions on which the daily news from Croatia can be spotted in the blurred waters of Western media. Unfortunately, last week one of that occasions occurred. Croatian voters decided to prohibit marriage equality, or to be precise – to constitutionally define marriage as a union only between a man and a […]
On the 5th of December catholic priest Professor Paweł Bortkiewicz delivered a talk at the Economic University of Poznań entitled “Does gender devastate life and family?” (after an immense pressure from academic community changed from the initial affirmative “Gender – devastation of life and family”). The lecture, blaming gender (it’s never clear what exactly is […]
by Gabriel Levy Oil workers in western Kazakhstan in 2011 mounted one of the largest-scale strike movements in post-Soviet history, and then suffered one of the most brutal massacres in post-Soviet history – in Zhanaozen on 16 December 2011, when security forces killed at least 16 people and wounded at least 64. The workers’ revolt […]