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Call for Updates and Insight from Italian and US collectives

Dear Readers, As we try to care for ourselves, our loved ones, and our comrades, we are also struggling to find ways to engage in mutual aid that make sense under conditions of “invisible” contagion. We repost below two recent pieces that inspired us, and some links to resource pages. The LeftEast collective has been […]

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How “love what you do” went wrong in an ‘academic sweatshop’ in Siberia

LeftEast reprints Natalia Savelyeva’s article with the permission of OpenDemocracy-Russia. We’re told that we should “do what we love” when it comes to our jobs. But what if loving what you do leads – slowly, imperceptibly – to abuse? In social sciences, a lot of work is dedicated to why people become committed to organisations. […]

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Leviathan of Fear: the EU-Turkish border crisis spills over into Serbia

Racist patrols and protests are spreading in Serbia, as the far right seeks to exploit the migrant crisis for political gain, write Anja Ilić and Vladimir Unkovski-Korica. This is a significantly expanded version of an article first published on Counterfire. When news broke that Turkish–EU tensions in Syria had led to Ankara’s cynical decision to stop preventing […]

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What Can We Learn from Vampires and Idiots?

In what follows, we have republished a chapter from Ilya Budraitskis’s new book, Мир, который построил Хантингтон и в котором живем все мы (The World Invented by Huntington in which We All Live. Moscow: Tsiolkovsky, 2020), following a review of the book by Vasily Kuzmin (translated from the Russian by Rossen Djagalov). Many thanks to […]

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A Seller’s Market? On buying and selling labor power these days in Slovenia

We are publishing this article in cooperation with the internal portal Bilten, in which it first appeared in Serbo-Croatian. It’s a seller’s market! I speak of the Slovenian Labour Force Market, “sellers” being workers selling their labour power. Statistically speaking, the country’s unemployment rate is at a record low level: 7,2 percent as of September. […]

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There is power in a union: Reflections on the Albanian miners’ struggle

Wealth concentrates while poverty spreads. While gravitational forces cause objects to fall toward the earth, market forces cause value to fall by the same place with orthodox rigorosity, year after year. The pattern is however cyclically interrupted. Social movements, financial crisis and technical advancements trigger systemic changes that open the way toward the reconstruction and […]

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Socialism and development: seven theses on global integration

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 […]

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Their day has come: Sinn Féin’s success in the Irish General election

A political earthquake has taken place in Ireland and surprisingly it was almost completely unexpected up until a few weeks ago when all commentators agreed that the election would be a contest between the two centre right parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael who have dominated Irish politics since the foundation of the state in […]

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Don’t Mistake the Finger for the Moon: Bernie Sanders and the Movement

Note from the LeftEast editors: Now, in the aftermath of the defeat of the Corbyn-led Labour party in the United Kingdom, the left’s hopes for an electoral path to power using the vehicle of some pre-existing mass, centre-left party have been reduced to just one name: Bernie Sanders. His populist, common-sense account of the problems […]

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Irish voters reject the Right: a new opportunity for the Left?

Sinn Féin, a nationalist party that sits with the left/far-left group in the European parliament and from the 1970s to ’90s was attached to an armed insurgency in Northern Ireland, won the most first-preference votes in this month’s general election in the Republic of Ireland. It now has about the same number of parliamentary seats […]