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FROM ACADEMIC TO ACTIVIST KNOWLEDGES: “Why invest in Romania?” Investment strategies and state interventions advancing real estate development in semi-peripheries

We share the video of a talk by Enikő Vincze, housing justice activist at Căși sociale ACUM!/Social housing NOW! and professor at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania, given as part of the seminar series organized by the Torino-based Beyond Inhabitation Lab. The talk presented results of the academic research “Class formation and re-urbanization through real […]

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Kolašin’s Construction Boom: Another Cautionary Tale of Mistaking Luxury Condos for Urban Development

Seemingly overnight, Kolašin has turned into a large construction site. After decades of aggressively promoted and poorly regulated real estate construction on the Montenegrin coast, which consumed the coastal space and its chances for sustainable future development, the same wave has reached Kolašin. Here, in this town of about 3,000 in the mountains of northern […]

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The 11th March for Housing Will Make the Housing Crisis an Issue for Local Elections in Budapest

Note from LeftEast Editors: The English translation of this interview, which first appeared in Hungarian, is published on LeftEast thanks to our cooperation with Hungarian portal Mérce within the framework of the East European Left Media Outlet (ELMO). You can read the original article at: https://merce.hu/2023/10/15/mindenkinek-laknia-kell-valahol-elindult-a-11- The Budapest Housing March (Lakásmenet) was held for the 11th […]

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“The roots of the reactionary bloc lie in the supposed ‘democratic’ camp”: Interview with the Slovak collective Karmína

Can you tell us a bit more about Karmína? What is your origin story? What do you do? How do you define yourself as a platform/collective? Karmína was established in 2017 as an informal group that runs a collective blog. Some of us have previously worked together, since the mid-2000s, in other initiatives on the […]

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Armenia in Crisis: How Did We Get Here and What’s Next

I first started working on this article on September 17. I was supposed to turn in a draft article about the high risk of Azerbaijan launching an offensive at Nagorno-Karabakh and next invading Armenia within a week. I told my editor we needed to publish the article as soon as possible because war could break […]

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Ruins and Ruined, the Victory of Capitalism in Georgia

I went to Georgia to take part in the annual meeting organized by LeftEast, and this gave me the opportunity to visit the small town of Tskaltubo for a few days with some comrades. Here I share a few thoughts, feelings, impressions and a photo essay of what I observed there. We arrive in front […]

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Making Sense of the Turkish Elections through a Marxist Lens: an Interview with Cihan Tuğal

LeftEast is grateful to Eylem Taylan and H. Deniz Sert who conducted this interview and to its subject, Cihan Tuğal for letting us translate the original Turkish text that they published at İlerihaber.org. The May 14 and 28 elections in Turkey resulted in the continuation of the Erdoğan regime even though almost half of the […]

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Interview On Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle

Ahead of our upcoming labor convergence this August in Tbilisi, Georgia, we print a slightly abridged version of an interview originally published by our comrades at Partisan Magazine. Partisan co-editor-in-chief Spencer A. talks to Robert Ovetz and Shawn Hattingh about their contributions to the book Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle (Pluto Press, 2020) and […]

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Russian capitalism is both political and normal: On expropriation and social reproduction

Note from LeftEast editors: In this mini-series we reprint two essays first published in Alameda Institute’s Dossier, The War in Ukraine and the Question of Internationalism. We provide the table of contents for reference and further reading. In 2006, in his book The Development of Capitalism in Russia, the late sociologist Simon Clarke wrote that, “a […]

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BOYCOTT UBB’S “ACTIVISM” CONFERENCE

The conference “Activism” is organized by the Centre for Comparative Migration Studies, the Centre for the Study of Democracy and the Department of Political Science of Babeș-Bolyai University and will take place on 4 and 5 May 2023. A call for contributions for presentations and panels was circulated in March. The signatories here organized ourselves […]