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Was the USSR Socialist?: an Interview with Alexander Nogovishchev

Note from LeftEast: Recently, we ran across Alexander Nogovishchev’s very impressive MA thesis entitled “Political Communication in the USSR in the early 1960s: Discussing the CPSU Program,” which proposes to examine the Soviet Union of that period (and as a whole, really) as a socialist project and to take seriously its Marxism. In the process, […]

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Local Communities, a Yugoslav Take on Direct Democracy

Over the last decade, the notion of participatory democracy has become increasingly fashionable in mainstream politics. The 2008 financial crisis brought out in the open the disconnect between political elites and their constituencies that plagues contemporary representative democracies. Across Europe and the Americas, the inability to overturn neo-liberal policies and austerity measures through the electoral […]

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What Liberalism Did to Kyrgyzstan

Kyrgyzstan is a product of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, born under the auspices of self-determination and a capitalist economy, in line with post-cold war’s end-of-history expectations. Among neighboring Central Asian countries, Kyrgyzstan is the only democracy in the region. Now, 31 years later, we see in this small and mountainous region the elementary […]

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A (Personal) Tale of Two Socialisms

Note from LeftEast editors: In conjuncture with Allegralab we publish this video and transcript of LeftEast collective member Mariya Ivancheva’s talk from the annual conference “Why the World Needs Anthropologists” of the Applied Anthropology Network (AAN) of European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). WWAN took place in Prague in September 2021, under the topic “Mobilizing the Planet.” Earlier […]

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Gabriel Boric’s Turbulent and Fast-Paced Road to the Chilean Presidency

On the night of 19 December 2021, in front of tens of thousands of supporters, Gabriel Boric, the presidential candidate of a left and centre-left parties’ coalition, gave his victory speech after defeating the far-right candidate José Antonio Kast in the run-off. In his address, he pledged to guard the country’s ongoing constituent process and […]

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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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Non-capitalist Mixed Economies: What Makes a Socialist?

LeftEast was a co-sponsor of an online conference on non-capitalist mixed economies from June 23–26 2021.  Co-sponsors of the conference included the Karl Polanyi Center, Eszmélet Journal, Social Theory College in Budapest, Polanyi Institute, Geopolitical Economy Research Group, Institute of Political History Social Theory Research Group, The Study Group on Global Labour History and Social […]

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Non-capitalist Mixed Economies: What Would Labor Be Like in a Socialist Society?

LeftEast was a co-sponsor of an online conference on non-capitalist mixed economies from June 23–26 2021.  Co-sponsors of the conference included the Karl Polanyi Center, Eszmélet Journal, Social Theory College in Budapest, Polanyi Institute, Geopolitical Economy Research Group, Institute of Political History Social Theory Research Group, The Study Group on Global Labour History and Social […]

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Non-capitalist Mixed Economies: the case of (political) socialism

LeftEast was a cosponsor of an online conference on non-capitalist mixed economies from June 23–26 2021.  Co-sponsors of the conference included the Karl Polanyi Center, Eszmélet Journal, Social Theory College in Budapest, Polanyi Institute, Geopolitical Economy Research Group, Institute of Political History Social Theory Research Group, The Study Group on Global Labour History and Social […]

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[INTERVIEW] From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature & Cinema between the Second and the Third World

Note from LeftEast editors: A shortened version of Selim Nadi’s interview with Rossen Djagalov was published in Jacobin Magazine. Could there have been a Third World without the “Second”? Certainly, there could have been — but it would have looked very different. Most histories of these geopolitical blocs and their constituent societies and cultures are […]