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Wagnerization: How Putin Degraded the Russian State

Founded in 2014 as a private military company owned by the Russian businessman and Putin confidante Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Group first saw action in Donbas, where it helped separatist forces against the Ukrainian army. Subsequently, it had been deployed in Syria, Libya, and a number of other African countries, usually offering Russia a plausible […]

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Strengthening the Authoritarian Turn? The EU Common Agricultural Policy’s Impact on Czech and Hungarian Politics

Although the goal of the newly proposed Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is to stabilise farmers’ income and revitalise rural society, it continues to disproportionately favour large agribusinesses. Capital concentration pushes small farmers out of business, contributing to rural degradation. Especially impacted are rural communities in the Czech Republic and Hungary due to a combination of […]

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Gas on Fire: the Romanian State for Sale

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been published in collaboration with the Balkan web-portal Bilten.org. The original publication can be found here. On October 24, the Romanian Parliament voted a law that regulates the fiscal regime of the offshore gas exploitation in the Black Sea. It rules in favor of the gas companies that […]

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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 […]

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Bulgarian Lessons: Liberalism as Market Power plus Expensive Electrification of the Whole Country

This article is published in cooperation with the Serbo-Croation portal Bilten.org. The past few days, a high-voltage scandal is literally grilling the main politicians and business elites in Bulgaria: an obscure local energy company is going to buy the Bulgarian assets of the largest electricity distribution company in the country, owned by the Czech state company […]

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How Serbia was systematically destroyed – by privatization: an interview with Marija Obradović

Note from the editors: The following interview with Marija Obradović was conducted by Vladimir Sudar for the Serbian publication, Sputnik. It is published here in translation with generous permission. If remaining state-owned strategic resources are sold, it will bring about enormous economic damage. Although the oligarchs that sell them will make great material gains, the […]

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Healthcare tailored to the interests of capital

The following article was originally published by the Serbo-Croatian online platform, Bilten. It is republished here with that site’s kind permission. During the electoral campaign of 2013, the Socialist Party of Albania, then in opposition, made a stunning promise for a Third-Way party. Its chairman Edi Rama stressed that once in power the Socialists would […]

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BOOK REVIEW: “Welcome to the desert of post-socialism!”

Note from the LeftEast editors: This review of Igor Stiks and Srecko Horvath’s edited volume “Welcome to the desert of post-socialism: radical politics after Yugoslavia” (Verso, 2015)  has first appeared on LeftVoice under the title Yugoslavia after Capitalist Restoration. It has been reprinted with the permission of the author. by Philippe Alcoy Released in January 2015 […]

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It takes one to mobilize one: Polish tenants’ movement as an example of a mobilizing organizational structure

This article demonstrates how cultural dispossession preventing the Polish marginalized from collective action can be reversed by organizations, which mobilize the grassroots. Based on the case of mobilization within Warsaw tenants’ movement, Kasia Gajewska analyzes the process of mobilisation, the role of the organisations in it, and the profile of the organisers. In his ethnographic […]

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The Bio-Financialization of Irish Water: New Advances in the Neoliberalization of Vital Services

(Source: ENTITLEblog) In their recent article, “Banking Spatially on the Future: Capital Switching, Infrastructure, and the Ecological Fix” (2015), Noel Castree and Brett Christophers make an important analytic connection between the climate crisis and the financial crisis. They focus their attention on the unprecedented scale of capital-intensive infrastructure projects (from housing to road to energy […]