Lefteast
Volodymyr Artiukh presented this text at the conference ‘New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Capitalism’ in Budapest 26-27 May, organized by the Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies and the Commission of Global Transformations and Marxian Anthropology-IUAES in cooperation with the Working Group for Public Sociology ‘Helyzet’, ‘Capitalism Nature Socialism’, ‘Focaal – Journal […]
Note from LeftEast editors: This discussion, moderated by Barnaby Raine from Salvage journal, was organised took place on the platform of Salvage and Haymarket Books. It started from the premise that one of the main lines of argument on the Left and among social scientists today has been about the causes of the war. Why […]
Note from LeftEast editors. This interview was originally published on May 12, 2022 at Midnight Sun. We reprint it with the permission of the original publication. Anastasia Vosstavshaya and Marie are members of the Russian Socialist Movement (RSM), a revolutionary socialist organization active in the Russian state. Midnight Sun spoke to them about what life is like for anti-war organizers […]
In 2006, Esther Cooper Jackson, the renowned Black civil rights activist, social worker, and leftist thinker, underlined at a community event in Harlem that, “more and more of us need to become internationalist” by getting involved in struggles worldwide and making ties with oppressed people.[i] As a queer feminist activist from Belarus, I reflect on […]
Note from LeftEast editors: Since the war started, the left has grappled with the questions of the extent of NATO’s responsibility for it and the call for military aid to Ukraine. In publishing this statement sent to us by our comrades from the Russian Socialist Movement, we acknowledge the left’s multiple fissures on these issues. […]
Oksana Dutchak is a researcher based in Ukraine and an activist of E.A.S.T. – Essential Autonomous Struggles Transnational. She tells about the current ever-changing situation in Ukraine and local attempts of self-organization to cope with the war. The question of how to create a transnational politics of peace has no easy answer. Continuing to mobilize […]
Cihan Tuğal on the implications of US and Russian wars of aggression since the end of the Cold War, and their meaning for the rights of nations to self-determination.
The inter-imperialist conflicts we see between NATO and Russia (or the US and China, as well as many smaller conflicts) are ultimately rooted in national economic competition, which itself is an outgrowth of the competition inherent to capitalism. To finally wipe out the drive to war means ending capitalism altogether. But that is no excuse for an abstract position that the only thing we can do now is call for revolution, as some on the far left are doing. War enflames national divisions and is most damaging to working people. It needs to be resisted and ended immediately. It is the end of wars, especially when opposed from below, that can open space for continued class conflict and the further struggle for socialism in Ukraine and beyond.
First published in French on December 30 in Révolution Permanente. Translation for LeftVoice by Scott Cooper. Moscow is amassing 100,000 troops on its border with Ukraine, whose government is seeking to lean on NATO to counter Putin. But even if Russian military intervention is central to that country’s defense, it is a very risky option. Are […]
Note from LeftEast editors. This is a reprint, the article originally appeared in Truthout on December 28, 2021. After weeks of media scare about a purported Russian military invasion of Ukraine, the conflict may get a chance to be solved in a negotiated way. The public conversation on the current escalation of the Russian-Western conflict […]