Lefteast
In 1989, the post-communist elites in the four Central European states of Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia had a supposedly innocent ambition. They wanted to escape from the captivity of the Russian ‘East’ back to the civilized ‘West’, where they sought political and economic equality. Milan Kundera put it best in his 1983 essay on […]
US poster of Jess Franco’s Count Dracula (1970). Public domain. “We’re fighting against barbarians who want to demolish our liberty and our traditions and everything we hold dear.” These are some of the words that Donald Trump addressed to a group of “freedom-loving patriots” in a prerecorded message on May 5th. These patriots, who, according […]
Note from LeftEast editors: Problems stemming from deteriorating working conditions and low salaries for teachers in Hungarian public education have been accumulating over the years, a process which intensified further during the Covid-19 crisis. Such a development resulted in an acute shortage of teachers as well as an alarming situation in public education, and occurred […]
Denys Gorbach 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 […]
While the defeat of Prime Minister Andrej Babiš at the hands of a right-wing coalition surprised everyone, the electoral results can hardly be heralded as the end of populism. They do mark the demise of the billionaire oligarch Babiš, but they also show how far the political scene has shifted towards xenophobic and authoritarian tendencies, […]
Many thanks to our colleagues at Voxeurop for inviting us to republish this interview with Andreas Önnerfors, Professor in Intellectual History in Salzburg, Austria. He specializes in far-right ideology in Europe, radicalisation, and conspiracy theories. His latest book, coedited with André Krouwel, is Europe: continent of conspiracies, an overview of conspiracy theory with contributions by […]
Note from LeftEast editors: This book symposium took place on 21 May 2021 as part of the online conference ‘Thirty Years of Capitalist Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe: Inequalities and Social Resistance’ organised by the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, Babes-Bolyai University from Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Four books were presented at the panel: The […]
A century ago a change began in Ireland but some radical change can take centuries. An Irish Countess (married to an undocumented polish immigrant) was elected Minister for Labour for Sinn Féin. This was a first as women had yet to gain the right to vote. The US-based Irish Republican Brotherhood had pushed through an […]
LeftEast shares this podcast with the permission of its producers from Contrasens. “Contrasens” is a podcast which explores current themes in the field of the social sciences. The project aims to bring to the forefront and make as accessible as possible research conducted by sociologists, anthropologists and other specialists from related fields. Content hosts and […]
We are publishing this article in cooperation with the Serbo-Croatian web portal Bilten. Recently, relatively new political actors in Romania announced their intention to run for the upcoming elections of a new European Parliament. Their profiles could not be more different but they share nonetheless a common feature that neatly expresses the systemic and terminal […]