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“You Don’t Destroy Political Thought by Weapons”

Note from LeftEast editors. With the permission of  Lithuanian left portal Chat GPB we reprint this interview of GPB’s Tadas Janusauskas with Palestinian journalist Quassem Ali. The interview deals with subjects we rarely get to hear about: the daily lives and choices for those inside and those who left the hell of the war and […]

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Decolonising Eastern Europe? Empire, nation and capital in the post-socialist space

In early September, two Zoom panels on the topic of decolonising Eastern Europe were organised as part of the seminar programme of the Institute of Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. We are happy to share the recordings of these conversations, hosted and curated by Tsvetelina Hristova. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has (re)produced a […]

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Solidarity and Inequality: European Socialist Women’s International Organizing in the Interwar Period

“In the Women’s Conference we are trying to get something which is new in the history of the world; we are trying to formulate a body of doctrine with regard to women’s problems seen through the eyes of the women themselves.”
[…]
Significantly, the emphasis on deep differences within Europe as well as the greater visibility of participants from countries not belonging to the Western and Central European (social democratic) core visibly shaped the final stances adopted at the 1931 Conference.

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Strategies of resistance among queer people in the USSR

Note from LeftEast Editors: This article was originally published in Russian by the DOXA Journal. It was translated from the Russian by Michael Baker and edited by Arina Gundyreva. Today, queer people in Russia are forced to oppose systematic discrimination, occasionally even forcing them into emigration. In the USSR however, with closed borders and absolutely […]

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LeftEast in the Dialectics of the Region’s Left

LeftEast has been around for just over eight years. It was preceded by two summer schools in Budapest, where some of its future editors—leftist East European(ist)s—met in a moment of happy recognition. One of them, Florin Poenaru, also happened to be the editor of the Romanian site CriticAtac, which hosted another meeting of East European […]

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In the name of the communist ideal

One of the received ideas that became a ‘truth’ after the fall of the Berlin Wall was that the Soviet bloc’s populations cursed communism, yet obeyed it slavishly. In fact, many social movements within the Eastern bloc had long aspired to genuine socialism. This article was first published in the French edition of Le Monde […]

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A Utopian in the Balkans

This book review was originally published by New Left Review. Darko Suvin, Splendour, Misery and Possibilities: An X-Ray of Socialist Yugoslavia. Haymarket Books: Chicago 2018. How is it, asks Darko Suvin, with Brechtian directness, that socialist Yugoslavia started out so well, yet ended up so very badly? In answering that question he has produced an extraordinary work […]

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May Day in the Making

Click on the triangular “play” button above to hear this segment. In this audeo clip, first broadcast by Public Radio International/WNYC in New York, historian Peter Linebaugh discusses the history and future of International Workers Day–or, to use the title of his latest book, “the incomplete, true, authentic and wonderful history of May Day.” Many […]

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„When is it time to act if not now?!” Participatory action research about housing movements in Hungary

Ilona Csécsei – Andrea Csengei – Mariann Dósa – Imre Kleiner – Magdolna Palotai – Ibolya Tünde Szakmáry – Zoltán Sziráki – Károly Szombathy – István Tompa – Éva Tessza Udvarhelyi – Nándor Wittmann (as known as “When is it time to act if not now?!” research group) “Something should be done, but I don’t […]

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Hungary: The Destruction of Reason and the Semi-Destruction of an Archive

Editors’ note:The legacy of Marxist Philosopher György Lukács has been under attack in Budapest. In 2016, protests began against the closure of the Lukács Archive, located in the philospher’s former home. In March 2017,  Lukács’ statue was removed from Szent Istvan Park, after a proposal from the Jobbik party was accepted by the Fidesz-dominated Budapest […]