Lefteast
I felt kicked in the gut, that morning when I heard Bernie had pulled out of the race. It was a surprising feeling, because in recent years I have been less and less passionate about electoral politics. The last electoral cycle had really sealed it for me: the Democratic Party establishment decided to represent their […]
In the blink of an eye, the coronavirus epidemic revealed to the world just how vulnerable global capitalism is: the stock market is in freefall, global supply chains are coming to a grinding halt as privatized healthcare buckles in an instant. The fallout from decades of liberalisation, privatization and financialisation is immense. Even the most […]
#stayhome #notstayingaside Note from LeftEast editors: we reprint the call for housing justice, first published by the Romanian group BLOCUL pentru LOCUIRE on their website. The time has come for this political agenda to change radically: housing politics must satisfy the needs of the people and respect the right to housing as a universal right! The […]
A version of the first part of this article in Polish is available on the author’s blog, Fronesis. When the truth offends, we lie and lie, until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that […]
Picture: Israeli riot police patrol Yefet Street in Jaffa after putting down demonstrations against police violence, 1 April 2020 (source: Matan Kaminer) The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly enhanced the charisma of the strong state around the world. In the West, the early knee-jerk characterization of East Asian responses as authoritarian and illiberal has been completely […]
The pieces in the dossier 1989 Thirty Years Later were developed around the workshop “Eastern Europe after 30 years of transition: New emancipatory perspectives from the region,” held in Prague on 25-26 October 2019, organised by the Transnational Institute (Amsterdam) and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (Prague), coordinated by Agnes Gagyi and Ondrej Slacalek. In addition to […]
A note from LeftEast editors: we reprint this statement of the Alliance of MENA socialist, with the kind permission of the organisation. The statement was originally published in Spectre Journal. The COVID-19 pandemic has given new urgency to the need to abolish prisons, refugee camps and the inhuman capitalist carceral system. Prisoner and refugee populations […]
The current situation in Russia has reached “a perfect storm”: the pandemic here coincided with the collapse of the national currency, as well as the political crisis caused by Vladimir Putin’s proposals to change the Constitution. At a time when every world political leader seeks to show himself as a sovereign capable of declaring a […]
Coronavirus has revealed yet another contradiction of capitalism: the capitalist tendency to globalize as a solution for the profitability crisis has undermined the capitalist capacity to profit. The virus has exacerbated an already deepening capitalist crisis into a catastrophe and illustrated how vulnerable global capitalism is to any external risk. Globalization, which emerged as a […]
In moments of heightened crisis, such as today’s, one of the first strategies of a state is to defer its pretense of universal social solidarity, directing its energies towards the social groups it prioritizes but normally cannot single out. This same tendency often leads to postponing of its efforts to negotiate difficult social, economic, and […]