Lefteast
Four men lie dead before me tonight. Their faces are pixelated on my screen. There is blood on their garments, on their skin, on the parched soil where their corpses are dumped. Their mouths open in a moment of silence, and there are boots in a corner. Twenty years ago in March 2003, our cries […]
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.
A bizarre Trumpist ceremony in the White House on September 4 saw the leaders of Serbia and Kosovo signing two separate documents with the United States involving American-funded economic agreements between the two estranged countries. Especially bizarre is Trump’s claim to have ended “hundreds of years” of “mass killings” between Serbia and Kosovo; apart from […]
Lefteast 1: Can you tell us a bit about the Global Prison Abolitionist Coalition? What are its basic demands? How did it form and how does it relate to previously existing organizations? In May 2020, the Global Prison Abolitionist Coalition emerged from dialogues between organizations such as the Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists, […]
More gutting than Bernie Sander’s ultimate defeat in the Democratic primaries is the paradoxical context in which it happened. He exited the stage just as the policies he so much advocated in the past two electoral cycles, if not his entire career, were badly needed to fight the rampant consequences of the new corona virus. […]
Bernie Sanders’ second presidential campaign brought a ray of hope to what had been a dismal political news cycle in the United States dominated by Trump’s odious figure and the Democrats’ ineffectual, “back to normal” opposition to him. To be sure, the broader resistance to Trump has also galvanized genuine movements devoted to protecting the […]
In the days following the end of Bernie’s initial 2016 campaign, I remember many of us put a lot of hope in Bernie’s plans for building a lasting organization beyond a national electoral campaign. The leftover funds and some of that grassroots energy were eventually directed into Our Revolution, an effort to elect progressive candidates […]
For a brief moment, a little over a month ago, we thought it would be easy. I had amazing conversations with genuine and thoughtful people in five states. We shook hands and smiled and I stood in doorways and chatted with people in their homes and kitchens. I was finishing my monograph and teaching two […]
I felt kicked in the gut, that morning when I heard Bernie had pulled out of the race. It was a surprising feeling, because in recent years I have been less and less passionate about electoral politics. The last electoral cycle had really sealed it for me: the Democratic Party establishment decided to represent their […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: Now, in the aftermath of the defeat of the Corbyn-led Labour party in the United Kingdom, the left’s hopes for an electoral path to power using the vehicle of some pre-existing mass, centre-left party have been reduced to just one name: Bernie Sanders. His populist, common-sense account of the problems […]