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Ukraine and the (Dis)integrating Empire of Capital

1989 Thirty Years Later: The combination of ill-prescribed market transition reforms and loaned funds mismanagement and misappropriation by kleptocratic ruling bloc with its rivalrous fractions have resulted in a toxic debt dependency that has become a tool for manipulation in the renewed geopolitical confrontation between Russian and the USA/EU, as I discuss at length in my recent book. These asymmetries and unevenness condition the consciousness, thinking, approach, praxis of politics in Ukraine, be they conformist, populist performers of counter-narratives, or ideologically progressive e.g. the Social Movement party-in-the-making, – they all have to present solutions to the same realities while interpret those via their ideological lens.

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Eastern Europe: revisiting the ambiguous revolutions of 1989

Those embryonic revolutions towards a third way were repressed and dismantled by the bipolar world’s dominant forces through different episodes, because the mobilised democratic forces were an alternative to the existing political order which tried to impose its own end, a reality hidden by Cold War concepts and the transformation that followed 1989.

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The political (auto)biography of a generation

Dossier 1989 Thirty Years Later: Florin Poenaru “The passage of three decades therefore presents the opportunity to bridge the gap between biography and history by introducing an intermediary level – the generation – that presents simultaneously patterned trajectories, common experiences and divergent outcomes. Moreover, by placing the emphasis on the 1980s, I want to demystify 1989 as an annus mirabilis, as some sort of definitive breaking point that neatly separates between epochs, regimes and periods.”

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We Asked on the Legacy of Corbynism

What has the Corbyn project meant – as a model, an inspiration, or otherwise – to you and people in the milieu(x) in which you organize? By 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, I had already moved out of the UK after living there for 10 years. Perhaps it would be […]

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Slovakia Since 1989: A Bastion of Mutually Constituting Liberalism and Illiberalism, Still Waiting for a Left

We are told that it was thirty years before when our era has started and that we have never escaped the questions posed by that year. The Conventional liberal moral of these thirty years is mobilized against „old-new“ threats and views which essentialize the whole region (often by pointing to the deviations from the „right […]

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We Asked on the Legacy of Corbynism – Matan Kaminer

What has the Corbyn project meant – as a model, an inspiration, or otherwise – to you and people in the milieu(x) in which you organize? The consistent left in Israel is mostly made up of Palestinian citizens, organized in the Communist Party and its front group Hadash/al-Jabhah, the liberal-nationalist Balad/Tajama’u (who both form part […]

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We Asked on the Legacy of Corbynism: Sorin Gog

What has the Corbyn project meant – as a model, an inspiration, or otherwise – to you and people in the milieu(x) in which you organise? In the Central and Eastern European region, Romania stands out as one of the countries that has adopted some of the most radical neo-liberal reforms in the past three […]

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We Asked on the Legacy of Corbynism: Mariya Ivancheva

What has the Corbyn project meant – as a model, an inspiration, or otherwise – to you and people in the milieu(x) in which you organize? What was at stake with this project was in equal measure painfully distant and painfully close to the contexts I am immersed in, and to an extent represent. In […]

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We Asked on the Legacy of Corbynism: Rossen Djagalov

What has the Corbyn project meant – as a model, an inspiration, or otherwise – to you and people in the milieu(x) in which you organize? I never thought of myself as a Corbynist/ Corbynista and found the early hype about him vaguely troubling. Don’t get me wrong: I very much like the man and […]

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We Asked on the Legacy of Corbynism: Tomislav Medak

What has the Corbyn project meant – as a model, an inspiration, or otherwise – to you and people in the milieu(x) in which you organise? My political milieu is largely defined by anti-enclosures struggles and a group of progressive and radical left political initiatives in Croatia, which have emerged out of the university occupations […]