The last episode of the Five Senses of Austerity deals with the rationing of food in late Romanian socialism. It tells the story of the 1987 worker’s revolt from the city of Brasov, which marked the beginning of the end of the regime, and then goes on to explore the final moments of Romanian socialism. […]
The following text appeared on OpenDemocracy, and features a review by Gabriel Levy of Ilya Budraistkis’ book ‘Dissidents Among Dissidents,’ a new collection of essays published in Russian in 2017 by Free Marxist Publishers. It was originally published on People and Nature. This new collection of essays seeks to rebalance our understanding of dissent in […]
The year 1968 marked a peak in the class struggle at the international level. Students and workers became protagonists of revolts in the West, but also in the East. The general strike and mass mobilizations of workers and students in France is one of the better known examples from that year. The uprising in Prague […]
In Turkey, the government of the nationalist-religious Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—AKP) called early presidential and parliamentary elections for the 24 June. It was aware that its electoral base is gradually eroding, particularly in the big metropolitan areas like Istanbul. Therefore, it did everything in order to enhance the chances of being […]
This article originally appeared on N+1mag and was penned by an anonymous author. SUAVE AND SYMPATHETIC, Beyazıt Öztürk is known for making even his most troublesome guests feel at home. The veteran comedian was in the middle of his call-in talk show, the most popular program on Turkish TV, when he received an unexpected call. […]
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The New Heroes of their Class
After two privatizations, massive layoffs and two worker strikes in less than a decade, the quarry and lime plant “Ravnaja AD” bears testament to the class struggle in Serbia, serving as a vivid example to the dictatorship of capital over the lives of workers who toil for their bare existence in the country. In the […]
Gramsci argued that ‘democracy, by definition, cannot mean merely that an unskilled worker can become skilled. It must mean that every ‘citizen’ can ‘govern’ and that society places them, even if only abstractly, in a general condition to achieve this’. Therefore, he argued that the task for the working class was to become intellectually autonomous, […]
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Dollars in my pockets
Money! You either have it, or you don’t. Socialist Romania did not. Therefore, it had to borrow money from abroad in order to meet its ambitious development goals. This episode explores socialist Romania’s failed crusade on the sea of global high finance starting from the late 1960s up until the 1980s, discussing the underlying reason […]
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Ahead of a Hot Italian Summer
Disenchantment with the euro had been growing in Italy for many years. After the last elections, this disenchantment proved to be the basis for the formation of a coalition between the far-right wing Lega and the diffuse Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Stars Movement). While the two parties differed on many economic and social issues, they […]
The collective around the Center Emma (Kaunas) is organizing a feminist gathering between the 24th and the 26th of August. We publish here their call for contributions, hoping that as many comrades as possible will join the event. The social center seeks to bring together a broader progressive social network, popularize anti-authoritarian ideas, cultivate mutual-support […]